July 29, 2022
In a complete shift, President Raisi has now accused the West of causing the sandstorms currently plaguing the Middle East, although for years Iran has chiefly singled out Turkiye for its dam building program and other countries like Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia for not taking action to stop desertification.
Raisi was addressing a regional summit in Tehran that brought together environment chiefs from 11 countries, including Iraq, Syria and Turkiye. The conference is focused on organizing solutions for regional environmental crises, particularly severe sandstorms.
Raisi said, “The excessive greed of the hegemonic system” as well as a policy of “keeping the governments and nations of the region deprived of science and technology … have led to the emergence of irreparable environmental crises.”
He criticized Western states for having compromised the environment in countries they have exploited for the purpose of their own economic development, asserting that those powers are “the ones who should take more responsibility.”
He said nothing about the sands whipped into the atmosphere from Iran itself. It has long been state policy to ignore the part of the problem originating in Iran and just blame foreigners. However, where a few years ago, the regime chiefly blamed Saudi Arabia, since Raisi became president, it has stopped citing Saudi Arabia, perhaps because it seeks to improve relations with the Saudis.
Once limited to Iran’s western areas, sandstorms have in the past two years spread to the country’s central regions, including Tehran, and even Mashhad in the far northeast.
Raisi told the Tehran conference that his country welcomes “cooperation and convergence” on solutions to shared environmental problems and proposed a joint regional fund to address them.
So far this year, two huge sandstorms have struck much of the country, including Tehran, with many other storms hitting regionally. In the most recent one, summer schools and government offices were closed in Tehran July 4. That morning, the air quality index hit 465 on a scale of 500, where 500 indicates the maximum possible pollution. An index of 465 indicates the air is unsafe for everyone, even the healthiest. In a departure from the past, Tehran’s Meteorological Organization announced that the source of the sand and dust that descended on the capital July 5 was the deserts of Qazvin and Alborz provinces, not foreign deserts.
Iran is by no means the sole country battered by sandstorms. Iraq appears to be the country suffering the worst with 10 major sandstorms—some lasting up to a week—hitting the country in May and June.