Iran's Deadly Ambition (20 page)

Yet Iran’s president was still thinking big. And on one of his last foreign trips as the Islamic Republic’s political head of state, Ahmadinejad went to a very particular place. Ahmadinejad’s three-country tour of Africa in January 2013, during which he visited Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso, was “not a surprising choice of destination,” observers noted.
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It was, rather, a reflection of the Islamic Republic’s major political and economic investment in forging new bonds with regimes throughout the continent. Those ties are extensive, and encompass a significant portion of the continent’s fifty-four countries.

As Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute noted, Iran’s approach to Africa is rooted in multiple objectives.
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Foremost among them is diplomatic outreach. Iran’s foreign policy has focused heavily on the African continent in recent years, with Iranian officials identifying sympathetic regional regimes as particular targets of opportunity. Iran today boasts official embassies in nearly 24 of Africa’s 54 nations—significantly more than it did just a few years ago, and no mean feat for a country that the West has systematically attempted to isolate over the better part of the past two decades.
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Tellingly, Iran has prioritized engagement with a number of regional states that occupy strategic positions in multilateral fora, such as the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. That list includes Gabon and Togo, as well as Rwanda and Uganda—all of which have occupied rotating slots as nonpermanent members of the Security Council in recent years. Iran’s outreach has also extended to Kenya, Niger, and Tanzania, all countries that sit on the board of the IAEA. In this way, notes Rubin, Iran seeks to undermine
Western strategy “by paralyzing international organizations.”
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Through its engagement with these nations, Iran has attempted to fracture the international consensus surrounding its international isolation in the very venue where it matters the most: the United Nations.

Of all the targets of Iranian outreach, no country has received a greater share of attention than South Africa. Tehran reestablished ties to Pretoria in the early 1990s, after fifteen years of diplomatic silence to protest South Africa’s apartheid policies. Since then, political and economic ties have ballooned. During the 1990s, bilateral trade hit $4 billion annually, as the two countries signed a series of energy and commercial agreements.
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By the late 2000s, that figure topped $21 billion, fueled by South Africa’s extensive energy purchases from the Islamic Republic. As of 2010, Iran was estimated to account for fully a quarter of South Africa’s energy imports.
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And while energy ties between the two countries have dwindled since as South Africa has fallen into line behind Western prohibitions and cut its oil imports from Iran, other aspects of their economic relationship remain strong. In October 2013, for example, Iranian and South African officials negotiated a new agreement facilitating “greater trade, skills transfer, technology research and development.”
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All this has bred no small amount of sympathy on the part of South Africa for Iran’s international outlook. In February 2012, for example, Pretoria used its position at the IAEA to run interference for the Islamic Republic when the body was poised to condemn Iran for irregularities in its nuclear activities.
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Moreover, the country’s telecom giant, MTN, was implicated in coordinating clandestine arms deals between Tehran and Pretoria and helping the Iranian regime to bust Western sanctions.
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In fact, according to counterterrorism expert Avi Jorisch, MTN—which derives fully a fifth of its multi-billion-dollar annual business from Iran—is so deeply
involved in commercial activities within the Islamic Republic that it has waded into the country’s internal politics and “played a critical role in helping the Iranian regime to hunt down its opposition.”
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Amid Iran’s ongoing negotiations with the West, the regime’s diplomatic fortunes in Africa have brightened still further. A case in point is Tehran’s ties to the Kingdom of Morocco. That North African nation has long had an acrimonious relationship with the Islamic Republic, with King Mohammed VI publicly denouncing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial and even going so far as to formally cut off diplomatic contacts in 2009.
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Yet, as Iran’s interaction with the West has begun to rehabilitate the Islamic Republic in the eyes of the world, Rabat has softened its stance toward Tehran, so much so that as of this writing, the two countries are poised to fully normalize their diplomatic relations.
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Simultaneously, Iran is beginning to exploit Africa as a strategic base of operations. This consideration has informed Iran’s systematic outreach to Sudan over the past two decades. It is also in evidence in the Horn of Africa, where Iran has taken advantage of Eritrea’s political vulnerability and its ongoing conflict with neighboring Ethiopia to establish a strategic foothold in the country.
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This includes a significant naval presence off of Eritrea’s southern coast, where Iranian warships have docked since at least 2008. This activity is logical: “Eritrea offers the Iranian navy a friendly port of call to support extended deployments in the Gulf of Aden/Red Sea,” notes Jeffrey Lefebvre of the University of Connecticut. “Eritrea also provides a maritime link between Iran and Syria by supporting Iranian naval forces moving from the Indian Ocean through the Red Sea and Suez Canal to the Mediterranean.”
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This is significant in and of itself as an indicator of Iran’s widening strategic horizons. Indeed, it makes up part of a
larger Iranian effort to extend the power projection and reach of its naval forces, in keeping with the Islamic Republic’s vision of itself as a global power.
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But it is also supremely pragmatic; for Iran, a military presence in Africa is part of a flanking strategy by which it can outmaneuver the United States and its regional allies on the continent.
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Yet it is the final area of Iran’s regional involvement that is perhaps the most significant. In recent years, the Islamic Republic has homed in on the African continent as a critical source of fuel for its nuclear program—and, by extension, its global ambitions.

A RESOURCE QUEST

Since the start of the international crisis over Iran’s nuclear program more than a decade ago, the international community has steadily gravitated toward the notion that Iran’s atomic program is by now largely self-sufficient and that, as a result, its progress toward nuclear status is now largely unstoppable. Indeed, that perception has permeated the ongoing nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West, during which the United States and the other P5+1 powers have progressively rolled back their demands for “zero enrichment” from the Islamic Republic and, in doing so, have implicitly accepted the permanence of Iran’s nuclear program. This view has been encouraged by Iran’s leaders, who have intoned time and again the Islamic Republic’s “inalienable” right to nuclear status. And yet, Iran’s nuclear program suffers from a major—perhaps fatal—deficiency: a significant deficit of uranium ore, the critical raw material needed to fuel its atomic effort. That shortage, moreover, has grown parallel to the maturity and sophistication of Iran’s nuclear effort.

According to nonproliferation experts, Iran’s indigenous uranium ore reserves are known to be both “limited and mostly of poor quality.”
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Thus, when Iran’s shah mapped out
an ambitious national plan for nuclear power in the 1970s, his government was forced to procure significant quantities of the mineral from South Africa. Four decades later, this aging stockpile has been mostly depleted.
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Indeed, according to a 2013 analysis by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Iran is compelled by “the scarcity, and low quality, of its domestic uranium resources . . . to rely on external sources of natural or processed uranium.”
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Accordingly, Iran embarked in recent years on a widening quest to acquire supplies of uranium ore from abroad. In 2009, for example, it attempted to purchase more than 1,000 tons of uranium ore from the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan at a cost of nearly half-a-billion dollars.
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In that particular case, deft diplomacy on the part of the United States and its European allies helped stymie Iranian efforts—at least temporarily. But Iran’s quest has continued. In February 2011, the Associated Press obtained an intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear program compiled by a member state of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which highlighted that the Islamic Republic is engaged in an extensive worldwide search for new and stable sources of uranium to fuel its nuclear program.
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This quest naturally brought Iran to Africa. A significant percentage of Africa’s fifty-four nations either contain major uranium deposits or already serve as exporters of the strategic mineral. All told, Africa is estimated to be home to more than a tenth of the world’s proven uranium reserves.
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And the World Nuclear Association estimated that as of 2010, just four African nations—Namibia, Niger, Malawi, and South Africa—accounted for nearly a fifth of all uranium produced globally.
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All of which makes the continent a major strategic prize for the Islamic Republic, spurring Iranian efforts to enlist African nations as suppliers for its nuclear effort.

Most conspicuously, this includes the regime of Robert
Mugabe in Zimbabwe, which has emerged as a key enabler of Iran’s quest for the bomb. Back in March 2012, as part of meetings between the Iranian defense minister, Ahmad Vahidi, and his Zimbabwean counterpart, Emmerson Mnangagwa, Iran formally pledged to modernize and reinforce Zimbabwe’s military as part of the “consolidating and deepening” political ties between the two countries.
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The news fueled speculation that Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, short on cash but flush with uranium ore, could become a significant source of nuclear assistance for the Islamic Republic. That speculation was borne out the following year, when the two countries are believed to have signed a memorandum of understanding paving the way for the eventual exportation of uranium to the Islamic Republic.
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The U.S. government took the news seriously enough to issue a warning to Harare to refrain from uranium sales that might benefit the Iranian nuclear effort.
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The Democratic People’s Republic of Congo has been another target of opportunity. A 2006 United Nations report noted that at least one significant shipment of uranium left the Congo en route to Iran.
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In 2009, in a diplomatic cable later published by WikiLeaks, the U.S. embassy in Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, warned Washington that lax security at Congolese mines and nuclear sites made them attractive sources of uranium for Iran and that Tanzania could become a significant transshipment point for nuclear-related materials headed to Iran.
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Niger’s resource wealth, too, has received its share of attention from Iran. In April 2013, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad embarked upon a very public, three-country tour of the region, stopping in both Niger—the world’s fifth-largest producer of uranium—and neighboring Benin.
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The destinations were not coincidental; given Niger’s landlocked status in West Africa, any export of its resources requires ports and transshipment facilities, which Benin has in abundance.

Similarly, contacts between Iran and Guinea have surged over the past decade, in parallel with the development and maturation of Guinea’s uranium deposits. In 2010, for example, Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki announced a 140-percent increase in trade ties between the two countries, underpinned by a number of new mining agreements giving Tehran greater access to Guinea’s extractive industries.
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In much the same way, Iran has attempted to build bonds to other resource-rich nations on the continent. “Recent Iranian outreach to Gambia, Malawi, Namibia, and Uganda coincides with the discovery of uranium in those countries,” notes Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute.
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Iran is also believed to have attempted to procure yellowcake from the Central African Republic.
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The objectives of this outreach are clear. Iran, according to observers, sees Africa “as a critical market for uranium” to fuel its nuclear ambitions—as well as a key political and economic partner in support of its will to nuclear power.
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Yet they also represent just one part of a larger effort on the part of the Islamic Republic to establish a beachhead on the African continent.

Iran, however, isn’t the only one reaching out to Africa. Hezbollah, too, has prioritized its contacts with the continent.

TELLTALE SIGNS OF TERRORIST INFILTRATION

In May 2013, agents of Nigeria’s State Security Service (SSS) and elements of the Nigerian military jointly raided a house on the outskirts of Bompai, in the country’s northern Kano State. What they found there was frightening: a large underground bunker containing a massive military stash, including antitank weapons, rocket-propelled guns, and land mines.
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Authorities would later tell reporters that the quantity of weapons seized in the bust was large enough “to sustain a civil war.”
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Three men were subsequently arrested
in connection to the raid, all of them Lebanese-Nigerian nationals.