BRUSSELS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th January, 2020) RUSSELS, January 3 (Sputnik), Luc Rivet � The spiraling escalation of tensions in the middle East has peaked on the early hours of Friday as the United States carried out airstrikes in BRUSSELS (Pakistan Point news / Sputnik - 04th January, 2020) aghdad to kill Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force.
The past week marked an acute escalation that began with an attack on a US military base in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, followed by Washington's retaliatory "defensive strikes" this past Sunday against facilities of the Kata'ib Hezbollah Iranian-backed paramilitary forces in Iraq � it left 25 Shia fighters killed. On Tuesday, Shia protesters attempted storming the front gate of the US Embassy in Baghdad and set part of the fence on fire.
While Friday's attack has sparked fears within the international community that the situation will escalated even more, experts told Sputnik that a full-scale war was still off the horizon most likely.
"The presence of the most important Iranian military leader in Baghdad, [who came there] from Syria, is a sign of the increased intervention of Iran in the region. For the Americans, it was necessary to respond since they have been directly targeted in recent weeks," Pierre Vercauteren, a political science professor at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, told Sputnik.
Additionally, the siege of the US embassy in Baghdad brought back painful memories to the US citizens who once already saw their diplomatic premises and personnel taken hostage in Tehran, the expert reminded.
In November 1979, several hundred Iranian students stormed the US embassy building in Tehran in the wake of the Islamic revolution that toppled the US-backed monarchy rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. They held 52 US diplomats hostage for 444 days, subjecting them to physical assault, harassment and confinement in dark isolated slots. The hostage crisis is largely viewed as the watershed moment in deteriorating the relations between Iran and the United States.
The US airstrikes against the IRGC also make sense from the point of view of the military group's antagonism against Israel, Beatrix von Storch, a member of the German parliament and former deputy leader of the Alternative for Germany party, said in a conversation with Sputnik.
"The Iranian government and its terrorist organizations � IRGC or Hezbollah � want the destruction of Israel. This in itself is a political scandal. We understand the American strike," von Storch said.
Whether or not the recent airstrikes and the buildup of US troops in the Middle East will grow into a full-scale war is a matter of debate among Sputnik's interlocutors.
French opposition politician Florian Philippot, who used to be Marine Le Pen's number 2 in the National Front before creating and heading his own right-wing party The Patriots, has called the attack counterproductive, saying that "unwelcome interference by a superpower abroad often ends in catastrophe."
Professor Vercauteren of the Louvain Catholic University, on the other hand, believes that a full-scale war will not follow, even though it is hard to predict how far the current escalation will go.
"The signal sent by Washington is very strong. It is no longer just a confrontation on interposed territories and the risk of military escalation is real. But it is unlikely that a total war will start. Everyone's response is gradual, but we do not know how many steps this escalation involves," he told Sputnik.
A response from Iran has already been vowed by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, presidential aide Hesamodin Ashna, and other senior officials.
The US airstrikes can have such an unexpected consequence as making the Iranian people put aside their fatigue over endlessly weakening economy and consolidate around the current government as it gets a live proof of its long-cultivated thesis of US threat.
"It is true that Iran's economic strangulation strategy seems to be working and that the Iranian population is increasingly massively opposed to the regime, but this war with the declared enemy, the 'great Satan' that is the USA, can lead to a narrowing of the ranks in Iran in a climate of national pride. The regime's emphasis on 'American aggression' makes it possible to compensate for the internal difficulties," Professor Vercauteren said.
Ultimately, however, the airstrikes was just another stone that the US threw to weaken the Iranian government's capacities, according to Samuele Furfari, former adviser to the deputy director-general for energy in the European Commission and presently a professor of energy geopolitics at the Free University of Brussels.
"[US President Donald] Trump's strategy, with the help of the Saudis, is to suffocate the Iranian economy. He seems to succeed. The regime has run out of money and is very fragile," Professor Furfari told Sputnik.
"What will happen now on the oil markets? Nothing much... the Iranian regime is in dire straits," he continued.
According to the expert, Iran's oil exports have dropped almost 8 times from their daily volume before Trump became president, from 4 million barrels per day to 400,000 - 500,000 barrels per day, but it was no shock for the world energy market as the growing energy demand meets constant supply by other exporters, in addition to the growing popularity of gas and renewable as an alternative source.
"Iran's absence from the market is no longer a problem for anybody, except the Iranian regime," Professor Furfari said.
