US responsible for Raisi’s death
By Hakkı Öcal
Award-winning journalist
As Aristotle said, we must explain the phenomena using the simplest possible hypothesis. When people have been sanctioned since 1979, almost 200 times against government entities, their treasury, financiers, banking institutions, technical facilities, and their facilitators and transportation companies, by the United States — in cooperation with several members of the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada — mostly for lame excuses, then you need no explanations beyond this to cast light on Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s helicopter disaster.
It was reported that the Bell 412 helicopter that crashed near Varzaqan, Iran, while traveling from the Khoda Afarin Dam to Tabriz, killing Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, other officials, and three crew members, had not been serviced for the last 30 years. It was a four-blade utility helicopter manufactured by Bell Helicopter in 1994; it was flying in bad weather conditions and heavy fog.
The Iranian president was part of the authority that decided not to escalate the Israeli provocation to spread its war on Gaza to the region. On April 1, conducting an airstrike on the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, Syria, destroying the building housing its consular section, Israel killed 16 people, including eight officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and two Syrian civilians. Iran had the right to retaliate against this barbarous attack that spilled into open war between the two countries, long fought through backed groups and Israeli assassinations and strikes.
Iranian Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei publicly stated that Israel must be punished. Raisi’s response clearly sent Israeli leadership a clear cease-and-desist message, keeping the reciprocity as harmless to the civilians as possible. Iran sent a long-range ballistic missile, for the first time in history, from Iran to Israel.
Debunking speculation
on incident
We have to dismiss all the speculation asserted without evidence. Neither the US nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “the Butcher of Gaza,” needed to teach Iran yet another lesson by killing its president. It would not be a lesson but an open invitation to a war that would engulf the entire region, including those nations that had already elected to normalize their relations with Israel. Despite US President Joe Biden and Netanyahu’s recent theatrical squabble about the arsenal, the war cabinet in Israel would not dare to set ablaze the Middle East just six months before the US presidential elections.
Since the renewal of the sanctions in 1995, then-US president Bill Clinton “found the actions and policies of Iran constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the US”. By prohibiting transactions with respect to the Iranian oil resources, the US denied the Iranian people the option to buy and sell merchandise, produce or retrieve spare parts, and contract services for not only the president’s but health and human services’ helicopters, too. Raisi’s crash is the sixth fatal helicopter accident this month.
Most of those recent sanctions were declared on flimsy arguments and excuses that are weak and difficult to believe; they actually serve to punish the innocent Iranian people.
The US should wake up and understand that it is the biggest loser in the Middle East. The blood of Raisi, Amir-Abdollahian, other officials, and the three crew members is on the hands of the US presidents and secretaries of state and treasury who signed those sanction documents.
That seems to be the simplest and the most reasonable explanation for the distressing helicopter accident and Iran’s aviation crisis.
The full article first appeared on
Daily Sabah.