When you dine with terrorists, don’t be surprised if your credit card gets declined when trying to pay.
About a week after the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions against the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, the U.S. has decided to place sanctions against the governor of Iran’s central bank, Valiollah Seif.
According to the Associated Press (AP):
The Treasury Department accuses Valiollah Seif of helping transfer millions of dollars to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group. Seif is the governor of the Iranian central bank. He’s being named a “specially designated global terrorist.”
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (mih-NOO’-shin) says Seif “covertly funneled” money from the Iran’s Revolutionary Guards through al-Bilad Islamic Bank in Iraq to help Hezbollah. The Iraqi bank and its chairman is also being punished with sanctions.
For those saying that the U.S. will only embolden Iran by leaving the nuclear deal, it certainly seems as though Iran wasn’t and still isn’t holding up their end of the deal.
The U.S. also imposed an additional sanction on Seif that basically means that anyone doing business with Seif “could be cut off from the U.S. financial system,” according to the AP.
The fact that Iraq is in on these bank transactions that essentially fund a terrorist organization is troubling at best. Will there ever be a country in the Middle East region — besides maybe Israel — that the U.S. can trust? It looks as though the decades of unrest in the region won’t be ending any time soon.