Iranian ships and submarines have deployed an undisclosed number of Iranian troops and weapons at the Eritrean port town of Assab, according to opposition groups, foreign diplomats, and NGOs in the area. The city of Assab sits at the Horn of Africa in the Arabian Sea just below the Strait of Hormuz.
As such, Assab commands a strategic position as the world nervously eyes the precarious routes through which some 40 percent of seaborne oil traverses daily.
Local sources have reported that Iran recently sent soldiers and a large number of long-range and ballistic missiles.
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I did make an attempt to run this down. I found only one other reference to the story and, as Dan notes, it is from an exile group. They make they peculiar claim that the Iranians brought their men and weapons in on submarines, which gives an idea of its credibility.
ReplyDeleteSince the US hasn't gone berserk we can conclude that the Iranians are not about to close the Red Sea.
The only plausible, even likely, part of the tale is that Iran is taking over the operation of Eritrea's refinery. This is a natural investment for the Iranians to make, since they are refined fuel importers and the US is threatening sanctions. If I were them I would be putting together a sanctions-busting network, too.
http://www.infolive.tv/en/infolive.tv-34598-israelnews-iran-takes-command-strategic-straits-hormuz-shipping-route-triples-r
ReplyDeletehttp://www.energypublisher.com/article.asp?id=17027
Still not buying it. The second reference is simply a reprint of the first on a different website, with the same author, etc. The first does not cite its source, but the phrases it uses are similar to the original story.
ReplyDeleteInternet websites do not have mastheads that indicate who owns or publishes them, nor do they feel obligated to name another website as the source for their story. Not to be stuffy about it, but it's pretty easy these days to make a professional-looking web page. It's almost impossible to sue a webpage for defamation because you can't find the buggers.
In this case, the original source appears to be eritreadaily.net, an opposition newspaper, which at least cites its sources: two of them, both opposition groups with websites. The first, which was up last night but now appears to be down, is asena-online.com, which didn't have its story posted in English. The second, selfi-democracy.com, doesn't make any claim about missiles. They package it with a racy headline to the effect that Iran will control the port of Assab, but the story sticks close to the more reasonable assertion that Iran will take over the refinery. As I noted above, eritreadaily is claiming, on the strength of the asena report, that the Iranians used submarines to evade the enormous Western naval buildup in the Gulf of Aden. The Cutting Edge at least drops this preposterous claim.
It's important to run down the source now because the story is propagating throughout the internet. I got a lot more hits today than I did last night, mostly from websites linked to the American Religious Right. They all are recitations of The Cutting Edge, mostly without proper attribution. It really is amazing how fast it spreads.
The bottom line is that this story is thinly sourced from exile groups who, as Machiavelli noted, are unreliable sources of information because they always have an ax to grind. Without a scrap of outside confirmation from the Western intelligence services that watch Iran obsessively I'm inclined to call it nonsense. Assab is within artillery range of Djibouti, which has five thousand NATO troops and air assets. It's not even a good place to attempt such a thing.
Yep, it's spreading allright
ReplyDeletehttp://www.afrol.com/articles/23333
http://www.thememriblog.org/iran/blog_personal/en/11759.htm
2008-11-29
http://www.eritreadaily.net/News0208/article0811291.htm
2008-11-25
http://selfi-democracy.com/?read=articles/articles/1227571403News-Iran-Assab1_PDF_e.pdf
Mind you, I'm not criticizing your work. You're just hunting up the stories and a lot of them are from obscure sources. I'm a big fan. But the Comments section is a good place to debate what it all means and debunk what seems unlikely.
ReplyDeleteThis tale was wild enough that I went looking for the source, which is as good a reason as any to post it in the first place. After a few days the original source becomes hard to find in the echo chamber.
Thanks!
I'm not offended, the articles are a starting point to me to get more info.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments.