US backs Iran protests, after calling for end to all Iranian oil exports

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) – As demonstrations in Tehran continued on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement, expressing US support for the protestors.

“The Iranian government is squandering its citizens’ resources,” Pompeo said, whether through “its adventurism in Syria, its support for Hizbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, or its ambitions for wastefully expanding its nuclear program.”

The most recent protests began on Sunday, as Tehran shopkeepers shut their stores to protest Iran’s falling currency. Since May 8, when the US withdrew from the Iranian nuclear deal, the value of the rial has dropped by over 40%.

On Tuesday, a senior State Department official explained to reporters the Trump administration’s plans for re-imposing sanctions, following the US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iranian nuclear deal is formally known.

Above all, the objective of the Trump administration is to cut off completely all Iranian oil exports and to have other countries—as many as possible— do so by November 4, the senior official explained.

Iran currently exports 2.4 million barrels of oil per day. The State Department’s announcement precipitated a slight (two percent) increase in the price of oil.

That increase would have been a lot higher, but Saudi Arabia is stepping into the breach. It will soon be producing a record 11 million barrels per day (bpd), Reuters reported on Thursday.

“To ensure that the global supply of oil is not adversely affected,” by the Iranian oil cut-off, the senior US official explained, we are encouraging our “Middle East partners” to increase their oil production.

Two weeks ago, shortly before a major OPEC conference, Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, visited Moscow and met President Vladimir Putin. Although Russia is not a member of OPEC, it is a major oil producer.

Bin Salman sealed an understanding in which Moscow would back a significant rise in OPEC production quotas—one million bpd, as it turned out—with Moscow using its influence over its Iranian ally to secure Tehran’s agreement to the increase.

Turkey is among the countries that the US expects to end their import of Iranian oil, the senior US official affirmed to reporters.

That will likely add significantly to the already considerable strains in Washington’s relations with Ankara, Dr. Gonul Tol, an expert on Turkish affairs at The Middle East Institute, predicted.

“Given the hawkish approach of the current US administration” toward Iran, and its stated intention to ask US allies to stop purchasing Iranian oil, Tol explained to a Capitol Hill audience on Wednesday, “it will be a major flashpoint, because Turkey depends on Iran for its energy needs.”

Kurdistan 24 subsequently asked the State Department whether the US-mandated cut-off of all Iranian oil exports included the “oil swaps” between Iraq and Iran. A spokesman declined to answer, however, saying he had nothing to add, beyond what had already been said.

Baghdad maintains that the US demand to end the import of all Iranian oil does not apply in this case.

Two months after Iraq’s attack on Kurdish-controlled Kirkuk last October, in an operation engineered by Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Baghdad and Tehran reached an understanding on trading oil.

In December, they agreed that Iraq would ship up to 60,000 bpd of crude oil from the Kirkuk oil fields in the north, which it now controlled, and Tehran would ship an equivalent amount of crude back to Iraq in the south.