TEHRAN: Iran’s currency plunged on Wednesday to a record low of 850,000 rials to $1 after US President Donald Trump ordered a restart to the “maximum pressure” campaign targeting Tehran.
Trump’s order calls for halting Iran’s oil exports and pursuing a “snapback” of UN sanctions on Iran. However, he also suggested he didn’t want to impose those sanctions and wanted to reach a deal with Iran.
The move comes as Trump’s moves to freeze spending on foreign aid and overhaul, or even end, the US Agency for International Development have been lauded in Iranian state media.
Meanwhile, ordinary Iranians worry what all this could mean for them.
“It encourages hard-liners inside Iran to continue repressions because they feel the US would have less capability in supporting Iranian people who seek freedom,” said Maryam Faraji, a 27-year-old waitress in a coffee shop in northern Tehran.
Iranian media say Trump’s cuts could stop the opposition in Iran
The state-run IRNA news agency said that “cutting the budget of foreign-based opposition” could “affect the sphere of relations” between Tehran and Washington.
Newspapers, like the conservative Hamshhari daily, described Iran’s opposition as “counterrevolutionaries” who had been “celebrating” Trump’s election as heralding the “last days of life of the Islamic Republic.”
They then “suddenly faced the surprise of cut funding from their employer,” the newspaper crowed.
Even the reformist newspaper Hammihan compared it to a “cold shower” for opponents of Iran’s theocracy abroad, an idea also expressed by the Foreign Ministry.
“Those financial resources are not charity donations,” Esmail Bagahei, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, said during a briefing with reporters. “They are wages paid in exchange for services.”
It remains unclear how funding for Iranian activists and opposition figures would be affected by the USAID decision.
The lion’s share of money for civil society in Iran has come through the US State Department’s Near East Regional Democracy fund, known by the acronym NERD, which grew as an American response to the Green Movement protests in 2009.
