Trump Administration Sanctions Five Iranian Companies Over Missile Work
Image by Getty Images
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Trump administration sanctioned five Iranian entities for facilitating the country’s ballistic missile program.
All five are “owned or controlled by Iran’s Shahid Bakeri Industrial Group,” said a statement Thursday by the Treasury Department, which, the statement said, is already sanctioned because it “is responsible for the development and production of Iran’s solid-propellant ballistic missiles.”
President Trump, who is reconsidering the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which traded sanction relief for a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program, has said he would ratchet up non-nuclear sanctions, with a special focus on missile delivery systems. The nuclear deal did not encompass missiles, which Trump has said is a serious flaw.
The sanctions make it difficult for the companies to conduct business in international markets.
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, in the statement also linked the sanctions to the current uprising against Iran’s theocracy, which in part owes to public discontent that suspended sanctions haven’t led to economic progress.
“The United States will continue to decisively counter the Iranian regime’s malign activity, including additional sanctions targeting human rights abuses,” he said. “We will not hesitate to call out the regime’s economic mismanagement, and diversion of significant resources to fund threatening missile systems at the expense of its citizenry.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
