Iranian press review: IRGC papers hail US military plane crash in Afghanistan
IRGC media hails US military plane crash in Afghanistan
Iranian pro-conservative outlets have suggested the US is hiding the truth about the military aircraft crash in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province on Monday.
US officials said that there were only two service members aboard the US Bombardier E-11A, and that there was no indication that the surveillance aircraft was downed by enemy fire.
However, Iranian dailies close to the IRGC suggested that the US is not telling the truth about the incident, and the Pentagon is following the same strategy it had in releasing the number of injured US soldiers in the IRGC’s attack on Ain al-Asad air base earlier this month.
The day after the Ain al-Asad attack, Donald Trump said that the attack had not killed or injured any US soldiers. A week later, US officials announced that 16 US military forces were diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. On Tuesday, the US Defense Department put the number at 50.
“The advanced American plane’s downing is a very important development, [demonstrating] Taliban’s greatest achievement in carrying out military operations,” the Khorasan daily wrote.
The Javan daily, with links to the IRGC, also hailed the crash on its front page under the headline: “US presence in the region, left more corpses for Trump.”
Iranian politicians condemn Trump’s Palestine plan
Iranian politicians from all backgrounds condemned US President Donald Trump’s Palestine-Israel plan announced on Tuesday.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif compared Trump’s plan to South Africa’s apartheid policy of Bantustan.
“Could Mandela ever have imagined re-emergence of BANTUSTANS, decades after liberation of South Africa?” Zarif wrote on Twitter.
“We Muslims need to wake up: the US never was - and can never be - anything resembling an honest broker,” he added.
Ali Shirazi, the supreme leader's representative to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, slammed the plan in a statement published by Tasnim news agency.
“The death of Israel is close,” the statement read. “These [plans] are the last floundering of the world bullies and the international looters.”
Flood damage reaches $275m
Two weeks after the mid-January floods in Iran’s poorest province of Sistan and Baluchestan, the country’s official news agency IRNA has reported that the damage caused by the floods has exceeded $275m.
The initial reports by Iran’s Roads and Urban Development Ministry and Agriculture Ministry had put the cost of flooding damage in Sistan and Baluchestan at about $108m.
According to IRNA, the damage suffered by critical infrastructure in the province was worse than last year’s floods in Golestan province that killed eight people.
Borna semi-official news has also reported that the current flood has demolished 56 schools in Sistan and Baluchestan and caused severe damage to 286 other schools.
'Teen fight club'
The Hamshahri daily has revealed that in a poor southern neighbourhood of Tehran, street fights are being organised between children aged eight to 13, for as little as $2.
Heravi is one of Tehran’s poorest suburbs, infamous for addiction and prostitution. Although addiction is officially considered a crime in Iran, groups of people addicted to crystal meth gather in the streets of the Heravi quarter to consume the drug.
"Teen fight club" is a new practice spreading in the neighbourhood, where addicted parents push their children into the fights organised by thugs and drug dealers, reported the Hamshahri daily.
The people betting on the fight are drug addicts, some of them watch the fight with closed eyes, half unconscious, as an impact of the low-quality drugs they consume, the daily’s reporter wrote.
According to the report, the fighters are also addicted to crystal meth and morphine, and are given a small amount of home-cooked drugs and moonshine before each fight.
The daily reported that in some cases, the only share that the fighters receive from each fight is the drug and moonshine they consume before entering the ring.
“It’s not gambling; I’m winning bread like this,” a 13-year old street fighter told the daily. “I need money to buy drugs for my father and myself. I have to steal money, if I don’t make it in this way. Would it be better if I steal the money?” asked the child fighter.
* Iranian press review is a digest of reports that are not independently verified as accurate by Middle East Eye.
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