Russia and Iran Are Helping Break Wheat and Fuel Blockade of Syria, Says Report

April 21 , 2021 (EIRNS)—Various Southwest Asia media reported yesterday that Iran, Russia and Syria have set up an operations room to ensure Syria is supplied with enough wheat and fuel oil for its people to survive in the immediate period ahead. U.S. and European Union economic sanctions, combined with U.S. seizure of Syrian oil fields and stealing Syrian wheat from its northeast breadbasket region, have reduced 90% of the Syrian people to poverty and sparked widespread hunger.

EIR does not have independent knowledge of this report at this time. The source of the story is cited as Sputnik news agency, which in turn cited unnamed sources in Damascus. Russian ships are reported to be transporting large quantities of wheat to Syria and will continue to do so until the end of June, under previously-existing contracts. That should secure Syria’s flour needs until the middle of 2022, putting an end to the current horrendous bread crisis, according to this report.

Asharq Al-Awsat—the largest pan-Arab publication, based out of London, but Saudi owned—wrote that “according to the Sputnik sources, the new mechanism has ensured safe access to the Syrian estuaries for four Iranian tankers transporting crude oil and natural gas and escorted by Russian warships over the recent days.” The idea is to coordinate a supply of oil during the coming period by sending groups of Iranian ships to Syria “in a single batch, provided that the Russian naval fleet in the Mediterranean would take over the safety of their access to the Syrian ports continuously until the end of this year.”

Without military escorts, oil tankers have not been getting through. Syrian Prime Minister Hussein Arnous told the parliament recently that seven oil tankers heading to Syria with cargos of crude oil, some of them coming from Iran, had been intercepted in the Red Sea, and two others intentionally attacked, an op-ed by Yanis Iqbal in Eurasia Review on April 19 reported. Israel was reportedly involved in those actions to enforce the U.S. brutal Caesar sanctions.

Iqbal reminded readers that George W. Bush had imposed the first U.S. sanctions on the nation of Syria in December 2003 under the Syria Accountability Act, allegedly to stop its “development of weapons of mass destruction”—the same now-admitted lie used as the pretext for the invasion of Iraq. The only change in the sanctions since has been to periodically tighten them, culminating with the brutal 2020 Caesar Sanctions Act which cuts any company or individual, of any nation which assists the economic reconstruction of Syria off from access to the U.S. banking system—i.e. to using the U.S. dollar.