The Middle East Eye: US Sanctions Have Caused Iranians Untold Misery – And Achieved Nothing

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By Negar Mortazavi and Sina Toossi, Middle East Eye, 12/7/20

“My young cousin passed away last week,” an Iranian Twitter user recently lamented. “She needed medication for her cancer that doctors said can’t be found.”

The tweet tragically went on: “Maybe she’d be alongside her little daughter now if she had this medicine and not under a pile of cold dirt.”

These heartbreaking words are from journalist Katayoon Lamezadeh, one of thousands of Iranians who have taken to social media to speak of how sanctions have upended their lives. Their stories reflect the devastating human costs of US economic sanctions that are often ignored by Washington’s foreign policy elite and largely unknown to the American public.

The assassination of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is the latest in a long-running pressure campaign against Iran by the US and its allies such as Israel. However, in the case of sanctions, it is ordinary Iranians who are paying the biggest price. 

The onslaught of sanctions and covert actions on Iran during the Trump era has not elicited concessions from the Iranian government, but it has caused immense pain inside Iran. Today, Iran’s population is being crushed by the twofold blows of US sanctions and the Covid-19 crisis, all while under the yoke of an increasingly repressive government.

Read the full article here.

2 thoughts on “The Middle East Eye: US Sanctions Have Caused Iranians Untold Misery – And Achieved Nothing”

  1. This is an unworthy post by a usually trustworthy blogger, N. Baldwin. Here she is acting like all anticommunist and “state department” socialists and liberals who purport to oppose US government criminal imperialism while supporting the empire’s propaganda memes. This sentence is typical of such liberals:

    “Today, Iran’s population is being crushed by the twofold blows of US sanctions and the Covid-19 crisis, all while under the yoke of an increasingly repressive government…”

    “…an increasingly repressive government”?? Says who?
    Anyone who knows Iranian reality knows this is a tendentious statement that negates the way the masses—the core anti-imperialist in Iran—feel about the sanctions.

    1. It is possible for an article to make an important point – in this case, about how the sanctions are hurting ordinary Iranians – without every point being agreed upon. I noted that remark by the authors and didn’t totally agree with it. But I thought the over-arching point about the human effect of the sanctions gave the article some value and was an important one to share.

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