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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The removal of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the US list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) would be “wildly misguided” and would send a wrong message to the world that the US terrorist designations are “political tools” that can be traded whenever it suits US political goals, 14 Republican senators warned President Joe Biden in a letter published on Monday.
The delisting of the IRGC has become a sticking point in the year-long negotiations between Iran and world powers over the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal. The talks have stalled in recent weeks with Iranian officials insisting that they would not make any compromises on the IRGC matter, while many in the US believe that the recent attacks on the country’s positions in Syria, Iraq, and the Kurdistan region prove that the IRGC has not changed its behavior.
The senators, led by John Kennedy of Louisiana, stated that the IRGC “has shown no meaningful change in its conduct, and is actively engaging in terrorist activities.” They also expressed their “grave concerns” about reports indicating that the Biden administration is close to finalizing the restoration of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actions (JCPOA) also known as Iran Nuclear Deal.
Under former US President Donald Trump’s administration, the US withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, re-imposed previously lifted sanctions, and introduced new ones including the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization in 2019. The economic sanctions have devastated the Iranian economy and reduced Tehran’s oil exports to a few hundred thousand barrels per day.
Israel and US regional allies including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have expressed concern about the possibility of a nuclear deal at a time of continued IRGC attacks in the region, threatening further instability. The IRGC fired 12 ballistic missiles last month towards the outskirts of Erbil and provided contradictory statements for its motivations, including the existence of an Israeli base which the Kurds vehemently denied.
“The enactment of such a deal would provide the Iranian regime access to funds that it would use to destabilize the region through terrorist proxies,” the Senators wrote. “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is actively trying to kill U.S. politicians and public servants on U.S. soil.”
Removing the IRGC off the FTO list may facilitate Iran’s financing of its regional proxies but this “would allow for more visibility to observers such as the US government on the [proxy] networks that develop once the sanctions are removed,” Francesco Calzoni, a geopolitical analyst at Intelyse, a UAE-based risk consultancy, told Rudaw English via WhatsApp on Tuesday. He added that after years of sanctions Iran “knows all the tricks, so removing the sanctions would actually help all these covert networks to emerge."
The senators called on President Biden to “publicly and categorically rejecting any discussion of delisting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.”
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