|
Trending Topics
|
Source: http://www.newsweekparentsguide.com/2010/07/10/smugglers-for-the-state.html?from=rss
Sanctions Can't Touch the Revolutionary Guards' Black-Market Empire
(Newsweek) Babak Dehghanpisheh - Thanks to the dwindling traffic of big container ships from Dubai to Iran, business is booming for a whole fleet of smugglers in smaller wooden ships, as well as for the group that dominates Iran's black market: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The latest UN sanctions were designed to punish the Revolutionary Guards for running Tehran's covert nuclear program. But the IRGC has spent decades mastering the art of sanctions-busting. "You're using pinpoint sanctions against the very entity that's best positioned to evade those sanctions," says Matthew Levitt, a counterterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.