Category Archives: al Qaida al Nusra Boko Haram

The Next Border Fence

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Apparently, they do work and have some significant value, in Europe that is. With the constant flow of migrants, several major problems have literally cracked the security of countries.  Further, there are no signs that migrants flowing into Europe will wane or stop at all, so the true costs in 2016 or beyond. The immigration flood in Europe is a clarion call to the United States as the issues are virtually the same. Not only is the United States taking in Middle Eastern refugees, but we have been taking in Cubans, Mexicans, as well as Central and South Americans. For America is goes much further that a trifecta and costs and security.

Anti-migrant force builds in Europe, hurting Merkel’s quest

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — So where should the next impenetrable razor-wire border fence in Europe be built?

Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban thinks he knows the best place – on Macedonia’s and Bulgaria’s borders with Greece – smack along the main immigration route from the Middle East to Western Europe. He says it’s necessary because “Greece can’t defend Europe from the south” against the large numbers of Muslim refugees pouring in, mainly from Syria and Iraq.

The plan is especially controversial because it effectively means eliminating Greece from the Schengen zone, Europe’s 26-nation passport-free travel region that is considered one of the European Union’s most cherished achievements.

Orban’s plan will feature prominently Monday at a meeting in Prague of leaders from four nations in an informal gathering known as the Visegrad group: Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Visegrad group, formed 25 years ago to further the nations’ European integration, is marking that anniversary Monday. Still, it has only recently found a common purpose in its unified opposition to accepting any significant number of migrants.

This determination has emboldened the group, one of the new mini-blocs emerging lately in Europe due to the continent’s chaotic, inadequate response to its largest migration crisis since World War II. The Visegrad group is also becoming a force that threatens the plans of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who wants to resettle newcomers across the continent while also slowing down the influx.

“The plan to build a new “European defense line” along the border of Bulgaria and Macedonia with Greece is a major foreign policy initiative for the Visegrad Four and an attempt to re-establish itself as a notable political force within the EU,” said Vit Dostal, an analyst with the Association for International Affairs, a Prague based think tank.

At Monday’s meeting, leaders from the four nations will be joined by Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov and Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov so they can push for the reinforcements along Greece’s northern border. Macedonia began putting up a first fence in November, and is now constructing a second, parallel, fence.

“If it were up only to us Central Europeans, that region would have been closed off long ago,” Orban said at a press conference recently with Poland’s prime minister. “Not for the first time in history we see that Europe is defenseless from the south … that is where we must ensure the safety of the continent.”

Poland has indicated a willingness to send dozens of police to Macedonia to secure the border, something to be decided at Monday’s meeting.

“If the EU is not active, the Visegrad Four have to be,” Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said recently. “We have to find effective ways of protecting the border.”

The leaders will try to hash out a unified position ahead of an important EU meeting Thursday and Friday in Brussels that will take up both migration and Britain’s efforts to renegotiate a looser union with the EU. The Visegrad countries have also recently united against British attempts to limit the welfare rights of European workers, something that would affect the hundreds of thousands of their citizens who now live and work in Britain.

The anti-migrant message resonates with the ex-communist EU member states, countries that have benefited greatly from EU subsidies and freedom of movement for their own citizens but which now balk at requests to accept even small numbers of refugees. The Visegrad nations maintain it is impossible to integrate Muslims into their societies, often describing them as security threats. So far the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks have only accepted small numbers, primarily Christians from Syria.

Many officials in the West are frustrated with what they see as xenophobia and hypocrisy, given that huge numbers of Poles, Hungarians and other Eastern Europeans have received refuge and economic opportunity in the West for decades.

Indeed there are plenty of signs that the countries are squandering a lot of the good will that they once enjoyed in the West for their sacrifices in throwing off communism and establishing democracies.

Orban’s ambitions for Europe got a big boost with the rise to power last year in Poland of the right-wing Law and Justice party, which is deeply anti-migrant and sees greater regional cooperation as one of its foreign policy priorities. Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo’s government says it wants to do more to help Syrian refugees at camps in Turkey and elsewhere while blocking their entry into Europe.

Although Orban is alienating Greek authorities, who are staggering under the sheer numbers of asylum-seekers crossing the sea from Turkey in smugglers’ boars, he insists he must act as a counterweight to Western leaders, whom he accuses of creating the crisis with their welcoming attitude to refugees.

“The very serious phenomenon endangering the security of everyday life which we call migration did not break into Western Europe violently,” he said. “The doors were opened. And what is more, in certain periods, they deliberately invited and even transported these people into Western Europe without control, filtering or security screening.”

Dariusz Kalan, an analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs, said he doesn’t believe that the Visegrad group on its own can destroy European unity but says Orban’s vision is winning adherents across the continent in far-right movements and even among mainstream political parties.

“It’s hard to ignore Orban,” Kalan said. “People in Western Europe are starting to adopt the language of Orban. None are equally tough and yet the language is still quite similar.”

The First Refugee Resettlement Program, Medina

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Medina—The First Muslim Refugee Resettlement Program

Kilpatrick ~CrisisMagazine: With all the talk about the Syrian refugees, one point is often overlooked. Much of the debate focuses on the question of whether or not the refugees can be reliably vetted. If they can be certified as one hundred percent terrorist-free, then, presumably, the resettlement can safely proceed.

But even if every terrorist could be excluded from the ranks of the refugees, a problem would remain. Many analysts are concerned that the resettlement program might facilitate the growth of terrorist-tolerant communities in America. By “terrorist-tolerant” I don’t mean that its members are thinking every minute about what they can do to support jihad, but rather that they have come to take for granted things that aren’t assumed in other societies.

Terror, for instance. Nonie Darwish, a former Muslim who grew up in Egypt, puts it this way:

One of the reasons that the so-called moderate Muslims have become irrelevant … is that over the centuries they have become tolerant of Islamic terrorism and considered it as part of normal life.

“Life under Sharia itself is a life under terror,” observes Darwish. And that daily low-level terrorism accustoms Muslims to view it as something “like a natural disaster or part of life that must be tolerated.”

So, although a Syrian refugee may have no personal taste for terror, he can be surprisingly tolerant of it. A 2007 public opinion poll of Syrians revealed that 75 percent of those polled supported financial aid for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and “Iraqi fighters” (at that time, mostly al-Qaeda). Need it be mentioned that all these groups are designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government? A more recent poll of 1,365 Syrians found that one out of five considered ISIS to be a positive influence on the country. And living in the West doesn’t seem to change these attitudes. A 2014 opinion poll showed that 27 percent of the French population in the 18-24-year-old demographic supported ISIS. Assuming a random sample, and assuming that the majority of pro-ISIS respondents were Muslim, that would mean that the vast majority of young French Muslims support ISIS.

That kind of supportive environment is a factor that’s often overlooked in the debate over Syrian refugees. As defenders of the resettlement program like to point out, terrorists can get into the U.S. by other means than by mingling with refugees. But once here, they need a network to support them and give them cover. And the network itself can only function if the larger community is willing to look the other way.

Europe is now dotted with such networks—in the Paris suburbs, in the Brussels borough of Molenbeek, in the Neukölln district of Berlin, and in numerous other places. There is evidence that similar networks already exist in nascent form in the U.S. Beyond the question of whether terrorists will mix in with refugees lies a larger question about the refugee resettlement program. Will it contribute to a strengthening of our society, or will it lead instead to the strengthening and expansion of terror-supportive networks?

Whether or not a particular group of refugees has been infiltrated by ISIS, there remains the fact that many refugees subscribe to the same general worldview held by members of the Islamic State. After all, they’ve been steeped in the same cultural-religious milieu that produced the terrorists. Many of them will take it for granted that Islam is the supreme religion, that Muhammad was the perfect man, and that Jews and Christians are unclean. They may be averse to committing violence, but they may find it perfectly understandable if other Muslims resort to violence in order to avenge a real or perceived insult to Islam. Although that mindset is alien to us, it shouldn’t be incomprehensible. At the time that a death fatwa was issued against the author Salman Rushdie, I remember talking with several Catholics who felt quite sympathetic to the Ayatollah Khomeini (who issued the fatwa), and rather unsympathetic to Rushdie and his “blasphemous” attitude toward religion.

Given their cultural background, it’s reasonable to expect that Sunni Muslim refugees will bring with them a set of beliefs and attitudes conducive to the incubation of terrorism. Even if there were a foolproof method for excluding active terrorists from their midst, there is no way of vetting for future terrorists—young Muslims who at some point in their development decide that ISIS or some similar movement is the logical conclusion of all they have been taught.

This “conversion” to radical Islam can come quite suddenly. Mohamed Abdelslam, the brother of two of the Paris terrorists, told reporters that his brothers began to change roughly six months before the attack, when they, “stopped drinking and started praying.” Likewise, the radicalization of Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, the Chattanooga jihadist who killed five servicemen, could not easily have been forecast. To his classmates and teachers, he seemed like a normal American boy, and if he had problems, they were of the normal young American male variety—pot-smoking, heavy drinking, and fast driving. Unlike other young Americans, however, he would have been exposed—either at home or on Islamist websites—to the belief that one can wipe out one’s sins by an act of martyrdom.

This “sudden conversion syndrome” to more radical forms of Islam is increasingly common among Muslim youth. But, as I said, it’s not easy to predict. If you’re a government official whose job it is to vet refugees, how can you know if the smiling fourteen-year-old boy standing in front of you and surrounded by his polite and pleasant family is going to go radical three years down the line?

Absent other information and unfair as it may seem, his family’s culture has to be taken into account. To some extent, we are all creatures of our culture, and Islamic cultures seem to produce a disproportionate number of terrorists. Contemporary Western culture, on the other hand, seems to produce a disproportionate number of naïve egocentrics who are incapable of imagining that other cultures may be radically different from their own. Their tendency is to automatically project their own values and attitudes on to all they see.

But, as should now be clear to anyone willing to look, Islamic culture is not simply a colorful variation of our own. In those places where traditional Islam is the governing principle—whether in the Islamic State, or in parts of Pakistan, Indonesia, or Nigeria—the same disdain for non-Muslims and their religions can be found. This attitude is common not just among terrorists, but also among ordinary Muslims. By all accounts, the fifteen Muslim migrants who threw twelve Christians overboard during a Mediterranean crossing were not terrorists, they were simply Muslims who took offense when some of the Christians began to pray. Some of the Muslims who attacked Christians in European refugee camps appear to have been members of ISIS, but others were not. Blind to the differences in culture, European officials initially put Christian and Muslim migrants together in the same camps. With a bit more cultural awareness under their belts, they came to the politically incorrect conclusion that the two groups had to be housed separately. A less violent example of Islamic contempt for other cultures was provided by the Turkish soccer fans who booed and chanted when, during a Turkish-Greek soccer match, a moment of silence was requested for the victims of the Paris massacre.

As concerns the Syrian refugee crisis, Christians are regularly reminded that the Holy Family were once refugees in Egypt. Yes, but the culture brought into the world by the Holy Family is worlds apart from the one introduced six centuries later by Muhammad.

Let’s not forget that the Holy Family were once refugees. But in regard to the present crisis there’s another and perhaps more appropriate analogy to consider: Muhammad and his followers were also once refugees. He and his group of about 100 men, women, and children had long overstayed their welcome in Mecca. According to Muslim chroniclers, they had to flee in order to avoid persecution. Fortunately for Muhammad, the more “enlightened” citizens of Medina extended an invitation to the Muslims to come and live in their city. It is not recorded whether or not they held up large “welcome refugees” banners as is now the custom at European train stations, but they soon enough experienced the kind of regrets that Europeans are now having. Muhammad gradually acquired wealth and converts, and within a half-dozen years he was the master of Medina. Those Medinans who were not exiled or slaughtered were thoroughly subjugated. Muhammad then used Medina as the launching pad for his conquest of all Arabia. Within a century of his death, his followers had conquered nearly half of the civilized world.

The relevant analogy for our society is not the flight to Egypt, but the flight to Medina and the subsequent colonization of that city by the Muslims. A similar process of cultural conquest by migration is now underway in Europe. Citizens of the United States would be well-advised to monitor the situation over there before embarking on their own ill-considered experiment in welcoming the stranger.

Syria: Cessation of Hostilities? Huh?

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Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and U.S. State Department Secretary John Kerry announce an accelerated and expanded delivery of humanitarian relief in Syria and also a nationwide cessation of hostilities within a week.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov attend a news conference after the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) meeting in Munich, Germany, Feb. 12, 2016.

It is complicated…..

The working group of 17 countries meeting in Munich agreed “to implement a nationwide cessation of hostilities to begin in a target of one week’s time,” he said.

They also agreed to immediately “accelerate and expand” humanitarian aid to the war-torn country.

“Sustained delivery will begin this week, first to the areas where it is most urgently needed… and then to all the people in need throughout the country, particularly in the besieged and hard to reach areas,” Kerry said.

He also said peace talks between rebels and the Syrian government would resume in Geneva “as soon as possible”.

VOA: Kerry told reporters early Friday in Munich that the cessation of hostilities will not apply to terrorist groups, including Islamic State, al-Nusra and others. He said the 17-nation International Syria Support Group has agreed that a task force co-chaired by the U.S. and Russia will work to “determine the modalities of a long-term reduction in violence.”

The top U.S. diplomat added on a cautionary note that the ISSG meeting has produced commitments on paper, but that the real test will be if all the parties honor their commitments.

The support group also agreed to “accelerate and expand” delivery of humanitarian assistance, starting with key troubled areas and then widening to provide increased humanitarian aid to the entire country. Read the full summary here.

 

Meanwhile, Assad has won and so has Islamic State….

If Assad Wins, Islamic State Wins

Bloomberg: The civilians fleeing Aleppo don’t prove definitively that, with Russian backing, President Bashar al-Assad will win the Syrian civil war. But it’s certainly time to game out that scenario and ask: What would victory look like to Assad? And what will happen to the other regional actors engaged in this fight?

The decisive element to consider is whether Assad needs to defeat Islamic State to be a winner. If the answer is yes — and if Assad could do it — the world would probably breathe a sigh of relief, and accept Assad’s victory, despite its extraordinary human costs and egregious violations of human rights.

But Assad will probably calculate that he doesn’t need to beat Islamic State, just contain it so that it doesn’t constitute an existential threat to his regime. That would put Islamic State well on its way to becoming a statelet, accepted by its neighbors for lack of will to defeat it. The long-term consequences for the world would be high, but Assad’s regime would be substantially better off.

For now, Assad appears to be moving toward at least a limited victory over the ill-organized Free Syrian Army forces around Aleppo. It isn’t rocket science. He’s combining intense air support from Russian planes with ground forces drawn from what remains of the Syrian army.

The Battle of Aleppo has been going on since 2012. What’s changed in this round is the intensity of Russian airstrikes. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz may have said that he wants to carpet bomb Islamic State to find out if sand can glow in the dark, but it’s Russian President Vladimir Putin who’s following a version of that strategy against the Syrian opposition.

It’s still conceivable that the Free Syrian Army could rally, but it doesn’t look likely. That would mean Assad could consolidate control over Aleppo and whatever number of people remains there. The population was some 2.5 million before the war, and it’s certainly much smaller now.

Over time, opposition fighters could in theory infiltrate back and attempt an insurgency. If Assad can’t spare sufficient troops to hold Aleppo, the Free Syrian Army might stage a comeback. But it would be doing so from a much reduced position, and the war-weary public might very well be unwilling to support  it.

Once the formula of intense Russian bombing plus Syrian ground troops has been shown to be a success, Assad and Putin will repeat it over whatever Syrian territory remains in Free Syrian Army or Syrian Kurdish hands. It is entirely reasonable to think it would succeed again.

That will lead to a major strategic crossroads. Assad and Putin will at least be tempted to try their winning formula against Islamic State.

Putin would love to show the world that he can succeed where the West has failed. Beating the Sunni militant group would significantly improve Russia’s global military prestige. Added to his taking of Crimea, it would make Putin the first Russian leader in more than a generation to win wars, which will also burnish his domestic reputation. It might be possible to achieve all this without Russian ground troops. And if airstrikes aren’t enough, Putin can simply blame the Syrian ground forces for being inadequate.

The upside for Assad would be a return to something not unlike the status quo before the Sunni uprising against him — but with a smaller national population with fewer Sunni Arabs, because many will remain in Turkey and Europe as refugees.

At one time, it seemed unimaginable that the Assad regime could return to national control. But that doesn’t seem quite as unrealistic now. Iran would favor and support Assad, as it always has. Now that Iran’s regional position has improved as a result of the nuclear deal with the U.S. and the lifting of economic sanctions, Iran would be better placed than ever to support Assad.

The Israelis have looked Islamic State in the face and concluded they’d rather have Assad than total chaos. Turkey had warm relations with Assad and was establishing open borders with Syria until the uprising broke those ties. As a geostrategic matter, Turkey would eventually take Assad back into the fold, whatever its continuing anger about the massacres he’s perpetrated. Even Saudi Arabia, which sees the Assad regime as the cat’s-paw of its rival Iran, would be prepared to live with Assad if it meant a return to regional stability.

The great risk for Assad in taking on Islamic State is the possibility of overreach. Even if he has enough troops to beat the militants, he might not be able to hold down the rest of the country. And if Islamic State forces flee Syria into Iraq, which would be the rational thing for them to do, they could come back and harass whatever forces Assad left behind. Unlike the Free Syrian Army, Islamic State would have a base from which to pursue an insurgency. It also has ideologically motivated troops with some combat experience. What’s more, Assad simply may not want to govern Sunnis area in Syria that have either sided with Islamic State or accepted its rule as a practical matter.

Assad therefore might decide that he’d be better off with a de facto border that Islamic State respects out of self-interest. If he leaves the group alone and is left alone in exchange, he can re-establish some semblance of sovereignty in much of Syria, surely his No. 1 priority. Essentially, Islamic State becomes everyone else’s problem, not Assad’s.

This scenario seems to me more likely than a serious Syrian countermilitant push. It would leave Islamic State as a threat to Iraq, to regional security and the rest of the world. The possibility of Islamic State as a long-term, de facto state looms.

ISIS, Islamic State has a Help Desk

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The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) uses a 34-page manual to instruct its followers on how to stay invisible on the Internet.

The Arabic document was translated and released this week by analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center, an independent research group at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. It includes warnings to avoid Instagram because it is owned by Facebook, and Dropbox because former secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sits on its board of investors. Famous government leaker Edward Snowden has also criticized Dropbox over its privacy, the document notes.

Users are also directed to use Apple’s encrypted FaceTime and iMessage features over regular unencrypted text and chat features. More here.

New ISIS ‘help desk’ to aid hiding from authorities

TheHill: The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has opened up a new technical “help desk” that instructs terrorists on how to hide from Western authorities, according to researchers.

The Electronic Horizon Foundation (EHF) was launched on Jan. 30 as a joint effort of several of the top ISIS cybersecurity experts, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) said in a new report.

While researchers have previously uncovered an ISIS “help desk” and 34-page manual that help extremists encrypt their communications, MEMRI said the EHF takes these services to an “alarming” new level.

“Jihadis have long sought technical information, which has been confined in the past to various password-protected jihadi forums,” said the MEMRI report, shared exclusively with The Hill. “However, the freedom and ease by which they can now obtain that information is alarming, especially when such information is shared over private and secure channels.”

The EHF operates on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram but also maintains a Twitter account that disseminates information and directs followers to its secure Telegram channel.

The group’s self-stated goal is clear: “Spreading security and technical awareness among the monotheists.”

According to an announcement celebrating the EHF launch, ISIS has spent a year establishing the group with the goal of “unifying the technical and security efforts, and uniting the ranks of the mujahideen’s supporters.”

It brings together several technical support entities, such as the Information Security channel on Telegram and the “Islamic State Technician,” an ISIS security specialist thought to be behind a leading password-protected technical forum.

The announcement, which the MEMRI translated, was also direct that the EHF had been formed “due to the electronic war and tight surveillance imposed by the Western intelligence apparatuses over Internet users, and their tracking and following of the mujahideen and their supporters, and targeting them based on their data and information, which they share over the Internet.”

EHF pledged to provide resources to help combat this surveillance.

“It is time to face the electronic surveillance, educate the mujahideen about the dangers of the Internet, and support them with the tools, directives and security explanations to protect their electronic security, so that they don’t commit security mistakes that can lead to their bombardment and killing,” the announcement said.

As of early this week, the EHF Telegram account had over 2,200 members.

MEMRI said EHF has not posted much yet, “but it is expected to take the lead nonetheless in content posted as time goes by.”

If the group follows in the footsteps of its creators, its content will be “defensively-oriented,” such as tutorials on mobile phone security, instead of “offensively-oriented,” such as instructions on launching cyberattacks, MEMRI said.

In the wake of the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., law enforcement officials have cautioned that potential terrorists are increasingly using encryption to hide from investigators, a phenomenon they call “going dark.”

The warnings have led to some calling for legislation that would guarantee government access to encrypted data, although momentum on Capitol Hill for such a bill has cooled in recent months.

“I don’t think we’re any closer to a consensus on that than we were, I think, six months ago,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, said last week. “Or if there is a consensus, it is that a legislative solution, I think, is very unlikely.”

 

IS Encryption Guide by AlyssaBereznak

Iran’s Windfall From Nuclear Deal Cut in Half by Debts

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NYT’s -WASHINGTON — Iran gained access to about $100 billion in frozen assets when an international nuclear agreement was implemented last month, but $50 billion of it already was tied up because of debts and other commitments, a U.S. official said on Thursday.

Stephen Mull, the State Department’s lead coordinator for implementing the international nuclear agreement with Tehran, also told the House Foreign Affairs Committee there was no evidence Iran had cheated in the first few weeks since the deal was implemented.

Mull and John Smith, acting director of the Treasury Department office that oversees sanctions, faced heated questioning from some members of the committee, where several Democrats had joined Republican lawmakers in opposing the nuclear pact that was reached in July.

Many have worried that Iran would cheat on the deal and use unfrozen funds for action against Israel or to support Islamist militants elsewhere in the region.

“Of that amount, a significant portion of it, more than $50 billion, is already tied up,” Mull said.

It was the first top-level congressional hearing on the nuclear pact since Jan. 16, when world powers lifted crippling sanctions against Iran in return for it compliance with the agreement to curb its nuclear ambitions.

“We seem to be in many instances talking tough about Iran,” said U.S. Representative Eliot Engel, the panel’s top Democrat, a deal opponent. “In reality our actions are far away from our rhetoric and that’s a worrisome thing. We want to make sure that Iran’s feet are held to the fire.”

Many members of the U.S. Congress, where every Republican and a few dozen Democrats opposed the agreement, have been calling for legislation to impose new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile program and human rights record.

House Republicans have been pushing legislation to restrict the ability of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, to lift sanctions under the nuclear pact. One measure passed the House on Feb. 2 almost entirely along party lines but it has not yet been taken up in the Senate and Obama has promised a veto.

*** Not so fast, all is still not kosher….

WASHINGTON (AP) — A State Department official says the U.S. does not know the precise location of tons of low-enriched uranium shipped out of Iran on a Russian vessel under the landmark nuclear agreement.

Testifying Thursday, Ambassador Stephen Mull tells the House Foreign Affairs Committee the stockpile is a Russian custody issue.

Critics of the nuclear deal seized on the shipment’s status to show the agreement’s flaws. New Jersey GOP congressman Chris Smith says it’s “outrageous and unbelievable” that Russia is being trusted to be the repository for such sensitive material. Russia is a close ally of Iran.

The low-enriched uranium is suitable mainly for generating nuclear power and needs substantial further enrichment for use in the core of a nuclear warhead. Mull says he’s confident the material will be controlled properly.

***

Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have banned Iranian-flagged vessels from entering their waters and imposed other shipping restrictions, according to ship insurers citing local reports, potentially escalating tensions between Tehran and Riyadh.

Iran has been struggling to ramp up oil exports and still faces insurance and financing hurdles despite the lifting of international curbs on its banking, insurance and shipping sectors last month as part of a nuclear deal with world powers.

A ban on Iranian ships in those ports is unlikely to affect international trade, although the uncertainty will add to trade hiccups for Iran.

Some ship insurers in recent days, citing reports from local agents and correspondents, said in notes to members that Saudi Arabia and Bahrain had banned all Iranian-flagged ships from entering their waters.

Norwegian ship insurer Gard said Bahrain had imposed a ban on any vessel that has visited Iran as one of its last three port calls.

“There is currently no such restriction in Saudi Arabia,” Gard wrote, citing information from a logistics provider. Saudi Arabian and Bahraini authorities did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ship insurer West of England said separately: “An entered vessel has since been denied entry to Bahrain after visiting an Iranian port two port calls earlier, resulting in the fixture being cancelled.”

Other ship insurers had yet to issue any guidance or confirm there were new regulations in place.

 

While oil companies such as Italy’s Eni and France’s Total have been looking to book cargoes from Iran, international insurers are no nearer to resolving concerns over US sanctions that remain in place.

Last month, Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia cut ties with Shi’ite Iran after its Tehran embassy was attacked following Riyadh’s execution of a Shi’ite cleric.

In solidarity with Riyadh, Kuwait and Qatar subsequently pulled out their ambassadors from Tehran, and the United Arab Emirates downgraded its ties. Bahrain and two non-Gulf states, Djibouti and Sudan, severed relations completely.

Saudi Arabia and Iran – leading members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries – continue to grapple with weak oil prices.