Women sit in front of a mosque around the traditional grand bazaar of Tehran, Iran, Mar. 29. AP-Yonhap
CAIRO — In the heartland of Iran’s famed carpet-making industry, manufacturing has ground to a near halt. Dairies struggle to find packages for milk and butter. Giant steel mills that once drove Iran’s economy have gone silent. Hundreds of thousands have lost jobs, and millions more are at risk.
Over more than five weeks of bombardment, U.S. and Israeli strikes hit thousands of factories. The damage is reverberating across Iran’s economy, threatening increasing waves of layoffs, even as Iranians face skyrocketing prices. The cost of chicken is up 75 percent the past month, and beef and lamb jumped 68 percent. Many dairy products have increased by half.
It could get worse as the United States blockades Iranian ports, choking off many imports and oil exports that bring in billions of dollars. Economic woes sparked the mass protests that were crushed before the war and could again push Iranians into the streets.
Still, Iran has its own weapon pointed at the global economy, with its grip on the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s leaders say they will only reopen the key waterway for global energy if the blockade is lifted and the war ends. They are betting that an economy built to be self-reliant under decades of international sanctions can endure the pain longer than U.S. President Donald Trump.
Iran has lost at least 1 million jobs directly because of the war, Deputy Labor Minister Gholamhossein Mohammadi said, according to state media.
But the ripple effects put some 10 million to 12 million jobs at risk — half of Iran’s labor force — warns Hadi Kahalzadeh, an Iranian economist.
Steel and petrochemical production is crippled
Israel claimed to have struck the industrial base of Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. But the strikes went well beyond, hitting facilities not owned by the force.
Airstrikes damaged 20,000 factories, some 20 percent of the country’s production units, according to Kahalzadeh, a research fellow at Brandeis University. The stricken facilities included Tofigh Daru, Iran’s largest pharmaceutical holding, producing anticancer drugs among other things. Optics and chemical developers, and aluminum and cement factories, were also hit.
Source: Korea Times News
