Assured by the mainstream media coverage declaring Democratic candidate Joe Biden winner of the U.S. presidential race, Iran-backed terrorist groups in Iraq feel emboldened.
The prospect of President Donald Trump leaving the White House, as portrayed by the U.S. and world media, comes as a relief to Iraq-based pro-Iranian terror militias.
“Trump’s era was a very negative one, a period of demolition,” a spokesman for the leading Iran-sponsored Iraqi terrorist group Kataeb Hezbollah said.
The Iranian regime is equally upbeat in its statements about a possible Biden-Harris administration, hoping to revive the Obama-era appeasement policies.
If the mainstream media and the Biden-Harris camp have their way, the Tehran and pro-Iran terrorist groups may have a good reason to rejoice. A Democrat-led administration will likely undo President Donald Trump’s legacy on Iran, lifting economic sanctions and ending the campaign of maximum pressure against the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism and its Islamist proxies across the Middle East.
The Times of Israel news website reported the reaction of pro-Iran terrorist groups:
Iraq’s pro-Tehran factions have welcomed Joe Biden’s election as US president, alarming officials and activists in Baghdad who fear a US-Iran de-escalation could empower hardliners in their own country. (…)
Iraqi factions supported by Tehran are hoping Biden could roll back Trump’s policies, which included bombing hardline groups and slapping sanctions on pro-Iran figures.
“Trump’s era was a very negative one, a period of demolition,” said Mohammad Mohyi, spokesman for Kataeb Hezbollah, a hardline pro-Iran faction in Iraq.
“We hope the new administration will resolve this, by ending the crisis and withdrawing its troops,” he told AFP.
He slammed Trump for “the greatest crime” in January: killing Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani and top Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who had a key role in founding Kataeb Hezbollah, in a drone strike in Baghdad.
Under President Trump’s orders, U.S. forces have retaliated against Iran-funded Kataeb Hezbollah responsible for targeting American military bases and diplomatic missions in Iraq. The terrorist group’s top operative, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in early January along with Iran’s top terror mastermind, Qasem Soleimani. Al-Muhandis was a wanted terrorist who orchestrated several high-profile terrorist attacks, including the bombings of the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in the 80s.
The hopes of the Biden-Harris administration reentering the Obama-Kerry Iran nuclear deal could mean a new lease of life for Kataeb Hezbollah and allied Iraqi terror groups. Reviving the nuclear deal was “high on his agenda,” a former senior aide Biden recently declared.
“I believe that in the first months [of the Biden presidency], we’ll either see him rejoin the deal fully, or what I would call ‘JCPOA-minus,’ meaning lifting sanctions in exchange for suspending some of the Iranian nuclear programs [developed] in the past three years,” Biden confidant and senior Obama-era official, Amos Hochstein, told Israel’s Channel 12 news network.
Much like the Harris-Biden camp, Tehran, too, is eager to reenter the nuclear deal, which awarded billions of dollars to the terror-sponsoring regime during the Obama days. On Sunday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called on Biden to “compensate” for President Trump’s “mistakes” and return to the nuclear deal.
“Now, an opportunity has come up for the next U.S. administration to compensate for past mistakes and return to the path of complying with international agreements,” he said.
Sky News Australia: The world can ‘look forward to a nuclear Iran’ under Joe Biden
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