01/16/2012 Iran has starkly warned Gulf states not to make up for any shortfall in its oil exports under new US and EU sanctions, adding yet another layer of peril to the international showdown over its nuclear programme.

If Arab neighbours compensate for a looming EU ban on Iranian imports, "we would not consider these actions to be friendly," Iran's representative to OPEC, Mohammad Ali Khatibi, was quoted as saying by the Sharq newspaper on Sunday.

"They will be held responsible for what happens" in that case, he said, adding ominously: "One cannot predict the consequences."

The warning comes as Iran is being hammered on several fronts over its nuclear programme, which it is defiantly expanding.

Western sanctions are being ratcheted up, shaking Iran's oil-dependent economy.

Military pressure is building, with the United States and Britain deploying warships to the Gulf, and reports suggesting Israel could be poised to launch air strikes against Iranian nuclear sites.

A covert campaign has also been stepped up, as evidenced last Wednesday by the murder of a deputy director of Iran's main uranium enrichment plant -- the fifth scientist to be targeted in Tehran by motorbike-mounted assassins in two years.

Furious Iranian officials say they are looking at ways of hitting back against those they see responsible for the attacks: arch-foes the United States, Israel and Britain.

They are also threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf if extra sanctions bite, cutting off the transport of 20 percent of the world's oil.

The United States has said that would cross a "red line," prompting likely military action.

Iran's foreign ministry on Sunday revealed that Washington had sent Tehran a letter concerning its threatened closure of the strategic strait, but gave no details of the contents.

"We are in the process of studying the letter and if necessary we will respond," the official IRNA news agency quoted Ramin Mehmanparast as saying.

The head of Iran's navy, Admiral Habibollah Sayari, reiterated to Sunday's Tehran Emrouz daily that closing the strait would be easy, "like drinking water."

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has also said his country would forge on with its nuclear activities "with determination."

A new nuclear site, one that can produce 20-percent enriched uranium, has started operations in a heavily defended bunker sunk into a mountain southwest of Tehran, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Senior IAEA officials are to visit Iran on January 28 to discuss suspicions over Iran's activities that were crystallised in an IAEA report two months ago.

But just before that, on January 23, EU foreign ministers are expected to announce additional sanctions on Iran targeting its oil exports and possibly also its central bank.

They would add to US sanctions signed into law last month by President Barack Obama that bar foreign companies from doing business in America if they have dealings with Iran's central bank.

A sudden slide in Iran's currency, the rial, suggested an anticipatory impact of those sanctions.

Although officials in Tehran said other factors were the cause, they have taken extraordinary steps to try to shore up the rial.

Media at the weekend reported they ordered a prohibition on currency transactions outside of banks and authorised exchange shops.

Going after Iran's oil exports is striking at the heart of the Islamic republic's economy.

Iran exports around 2.5 million barrels of oil per day, bringing in up to $100 billion last year.

Saudi Arabia, which currently exports some 10 million barrels a day, has reportedly reassured US and EU officials that it can help make up for any production gap caused by sanctions on Iranian oil.

Iran-Saudi ties are poor, especially after US allegations last October that a thwarted plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington was hatched in Tehran.

The Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, said in Sunday's Al-Watan newspaper that "Saudi Arabia is able to produce 12.5 million barrels per day to meet the needs of the world market and satisfy any increase in demand from consumer countries."

Later on Sunday, China signed energy deals with Saudi Arabia as Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited Riyadh.

The two countries inked several economic and cultural agreements including a Memorandum of Understanding between Saudi petrochemical giant SABIC and China's Sinopec to build a petrochemical plant in Tianjin, Saudi state news agency SPA said.

01/06/2012 President Barack Obama unveiled a strategy on Thursday for a leaner US military focused on countering China's rising power and signaling a shift away from large ground wars against insurgents.
The plan calls for preparing for possible challenges from Iran and China, requiring air and naval assets, while downplaying any future massive counter-insurgency campaigns such as those conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The "defense strategic review" sets out an approach for the US military in a looming era of austerity, as Obama's administration prepares for $487 billion in defense cuts over the next 10 years.

But the US president, anticipating attacks from his Republican rivals in an election year, said reductions would be limited and not come at the expense of America's military might.

"So yes, our military will be leaner, but the world must know -- the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats," Obama told reporters at a rare appearance at the Pentagon.

White House officials stressed Obama was deeply involved in the strategy review and sought to portray the president as taking a careful approach to defense spending having acted on the advice of leading commanders.

Saying the country was "turning the page on a decade of war," Obama said the new strategy would increasingly focus on Asia, where commanders worry about China's growing military capabilities.

"We'll be strengthening our presence in the Asia Pacific, and budget reductions will not come at the expense of this critical region," he said.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, appearing with Obama along with top officers, said the strategy envisages a "smaller and leaner" force that will expand the military's role in Asia while maintaining a strong presence in the Middle East.

According to the eight-page strategy document, the military will work with allies in the Middle East to ensure security in the Gulf and counter Iran's "destabilizing policies."

However, counter-insurgency operations receive a lower priority under the plan, enabling the administration to scale back ground forces.

Panetta said "with the end of US military commitments in Iraq, and the drawdown already under way in Afghanistan, the Army and Marine Corps will no longer need to be sized to support the large scale, long-term stability operations that dominated military priorities and force generation over the past decade."

But the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon, hit out at the strategy and accused Obama of gutting defense.

"The President has packaged our retreat from the world in the guise of a new strategy to mask his divestment of our military and national defense," McKeon, a Republican, said in a statement.

The review reinforces what defense officials have already signaled -- that funds will flow to aircraft, ships, missile defense and high-tech weaponry while the US Army and Marine Corps will be downsized.

Washington's focus on Asia is fueled by concerns over China's growing navy and arsenal of anti-ship missiles that could jeopardize America's military power in the Pacific.

In keeping with plans for a smaller force, the strategy discards the doctrine that the military must be prepared to fight two wars at the same time, an idea long debated inside the Pentagon.

Instead, the United States would be ready to fight one war while waging a holding action elsewhere to stave off a second threat.

The strategy review suggests reducing the atomic arsenal without saying how, amid calls from some lawmakers to reduce the number of nuclear-armed submarines.

The review also hints at scaling back the military's footprint in Europe but offered no details, saying "our posture in Europe must also evolve."

Britain's defense minister cautioned Thursday the US pivot to Asia should not neglect Russia, which he called an unpredictable force on the global stage.

"If the US is going to see its focus drawn increasingly to the Asia Pacific region, how does it secure the backyard?" said British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond during a visit to the US capital.

The new strategy comes ahead of the proposed defense budget for 2013 due to be released next month, which is expected to call for delays in some weapons programs, including the troubled F-35 fighter.

Despite talk of belt-tightening, the defense budget for 2012 came to $530 billion, not counting the cost of the war in Afghanistan.

Obama said future military spending will still remain high and "larger than roughly the next 10 countries combined."

© Copyright AFP Agence France-Presse GmbH - All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or distributed. All reproduction or redistribution is expressly forbidden without the prior written agreement of AFP.

12/11/2011 Republican US presidential candidates have redoubled their public calls for "covert" operations against Iran and Syria, including sabotage, assassination and aid to opposition forces.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who has led the calls for secret war, told a gathering of party activists on Wednesday he would use "covert capability" to bring about "regime replacement" in Tehran.

"They only have one very, very large refinery. I would be focused on how to covertly sabotage it every day," he told the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group highly critical of President Barack Obama's handling of ties to Israel.

Gingrich said US policy towards Syria must be to "replace" President Bashar al-Assad and "do everything we can, indirectly and covertly -- but without American forces -- to help" the opposition topple his government.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who recently lost to Gingrich the mantle of front-runner for the party's nomination to take on Obama in November 2012, called for Washington to secretly help dissidents in Iran.

"We should also have covert and overt activities to encourage voices of dissent within the country. Ultimately regime change is what's going to be necessary in that setting," he told the group.

One of their long-shot rivals, former senator Rick Santorum, told the same audience he hoped US assets were behind a recent deadly explosion at a missile base in Iran and vowed to put the world on notice of secret US operations.

"We need to say very clearly that we will be conducting covert activity to do everything we can to stop their nuclear program. And that means using covert activity like may have occurred at the missile site," he said.

"We need to be very clear: Any foreign scientists working in Iran on this nuclear program will be termed an enemy combatant and will be subject -- like any other enemy combatant, like Osama bin Laden -- to being taken out by the United States government as a threat to this country," he said.

In the same breath, Santorum pointed to the May raid in Pakistan in which US commandos killed bin Laden to accuse Obama of "not being able to keep a secret of anything good that he did for even more than 24 hours."

Gingrich proposed at a November 12 debate that Washington kill Iranian scientists and disrupt Tehran's suspect nuclear program -- "all of it covertly, all of it deniable."

In that same forum, Santorum said the United States must do "whatever it takes to make sure" Iran does not develop a nuclear program -- then wondered whether Washington may already be heavily involved in doing just that.

"There have been scientists turning up dead in Russia and in Iran. There have been computer viruses. There have been problems at their facility. I hope that the United States has been involved with that," he said.

"I hope that we have been doing everything we can, covertly, to make sure that that program doesn't proceed," he said.

Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested at a November 22 debate that Washington had many ways to put pressure on Assad's regime -- "overt, covert, economic sanctions."

"This is the time for us to use not only sanctions, but covert actions within Syria, to get regime change there," said Romney.

"There are people in the military that are shifting over, that are becoming part of the rebel effort. We should support those efforts," he added.

The pronouncements of the Republican presidential hopefuls have raised eyebrows among some career national security officials.

"The chances of success go down dramatically when you tell the world that is the major tool in your foreign policy bag of tricks," one former senior official in Republican president George W. Bush's White House told AFP.

The official said Bush's team "took a lot of heat for keeping secrets."

The official praised Obama's "very strong national security team," and urged Republicans not to view covert operations as "some kind of magic elixir that will cure all of the problems."

"Yes, the Obama victory dance after the Bin Laden raid cost us the opportunity to take full advantage of the information gathered; but do you think it would have been different with a GOP administration? Please," said the official, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.

© Copyright AFP Agence France-Presse GmbH - All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or distributed. All reproduction or redistribution is expressly forbidden without the prior written agreement of AFP.

12/06/2011 A wave of bomb attacks targeting Shiite pilgrims in Iraq killed 28 people and wounded 78 Monday, a day before the peak of the Ashura religious commemorations, security officials and medics said.

It was the bloodiest day in Iraq since October 27, when at least 32 people were killed and 71 wounded in twin blasts in Baghdad.

In Monday's deadliest attack, a car bomb blasted pilgrims in the Neel area north of Hilla south of Baghdad, in central Iraq, security officials said.

"We received 16 bodies and 45 wounded," Dr Mohammed Ali of Hilla hospital told AFP, and a Hilla police first lieutenant confirmed that toll.

The police officer also said that a car bomb exploded in the centre of Hilla near Shiite pilgrims, killing one person and wounding three.

A medical source in another hospital in Hilla said that it had received one body and 20 wounded.

Baghdad was also hit by bomb attacks against Shiite pilgrims, with at least 10 people killed and 30 wounded.

"Eight people were killed and 18 wounded by a roadside bomb targeting a convoy of pilgrims in the Urr neighbourhood," a police source said.

That toll was confirmed by a medical source at the Imam Ali hospital in Sadr City, who said that "we received eight bodies and 18 wounded from an explosion in the Urr neighbourhood."

A medical source at Al-Kindi hospital said the hospital had "received two bodies and eight wounded from an explosion in Mashtal" in eastern Baghdad.

An interior ministry official said that attack was also aimed at Shiite pilgrims, but gave a toll of three dead and eight wounded.

The official also said that four people were wounded by another roadside bomb targeting pilgrims in Zafraniyah in central Baghdad.

And a roadside bomb against Shiite pilgrims in Latifiyah, 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Baghdad, killed another person, a police source said.

The interior ministry official also said that two roadside bombs in the Qahira area of northern Baghdad wounded four civilians, while another bomb in the north of the capital wounded two others.

Those attacks did not target Shiite pilgrims.

The Ashura commemoration ceremonies, which peak on Tuesday this year, mark the killing of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, by armies of the caliph Yazid in 680 AD.

Tradition holds that the revered imam was decapitated and his body mutilated. His death was a formative event in Shiite Islam.

During the Ashura commemorations, mourners demonstrate their ritual guilt and remorse at not defending Hussein by beating their chests, flaying themselves with chains or cutting their scalps during processions.

Shiites also gather at night during the commemorations to listen to stories about Hussein's family and other companions who were killed prior to his death on the 10th day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic Hijra calendar year.

Eighteen pilgrims were killed during the Ashura rituals last year, according to police.

Some two million Shiite pilgrims completed rituals in the holy city of Karbala in 2010, amid heavy security for fear of attacks.

Last year was the first in which Iraqi forces were in sole charge of security during Ashura.

In previous years, Ashura has been a target for Sunni Arab extremists, who see the ceremonies as symbolically highlighting the split between Islam's two main branches.

Iraq's Sunni minority and Shiite majority engaged in a bloody sectarian conflict beginning in 2006 that left tens of thousands of people dead.

Now-executed dictator Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime barred the vast majority of Ashura commemorations throughout his rule until his overthrow in the 2003 US-led invasion.

Shiites make up around 15 percent of Muslims worldwide. They represent the majority populations in Iraq, Iran and Bahrain and form significant communities in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Monday's attack comes with less than a month to go before US troops are to have completed withdrawing from Iraq. Fewer than 10,000 US military personnel now remain in the country.

Violence has declined in Iraq since its peak in 2006 and 2007, but attacks remain common. A total of 187 people were killed in November, according to official figures.

© Copyright AFP Agence France-Presse GmbH - All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or distributed. All reproduction or redistribution is expressly forbidden without the prior written agreement of AFP.