How the US can ground Iran’s ‘terrorist airlines’

Excerpt

The Biden administration has a unique opportunity to step up its campaign against anti-American regimes in Venezuela, Iran and Nicaragua. Recent actions demonstrate that serious application of tough sanctions can work. Biden should take note and act accordingly.

Earlier this week, U.S. authorities flew a seized Boeing 747-300 cargo plane from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a military airfield in South Florida. The plane had once belonged to Mahan Airlines, an Iranian carrier controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and frequently used to support the IRGC’s terror activities — actions for which the U.S. had previously sanctioned Mahan Air.

Mahan had transferred the plane to Emtrasur, a subsidiary of Conviasa, the U.S.-sanctioned, state-owned Venezuelan airline in 2021, as part of a broader deal between Iran and Venezuela.

Emanuele Ottolenghi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-partisan research institute based in Washington.