The Trump administration took sweeping actions against Iran’s airline industry on Tuesday as part of its pressure campaign on Tehran.
The latest sanctions hit 27 Iranian airlines and nine service providers and sales agents accused of providing services to Mahan Air, which has been sanctioned since 2011. Mahan Air is a private Iranian airline accused of providing key support to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The service providers and sales agents sanctioned Tuesday are in Turkey, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and the United Arab Emirates.
“These jurisdictions have been on notice for some time, and now we’re moving quite directly to essentially cut off those operators from the Western financial system,” a Treasury official said Tuesday. It is not the first time the administration has targeted operators in other countries for allegedly supporting Mahan Air.
In addition, the US Treasury Department is “effectively today terminating all licenses that related to aviation,” the official said, including “payments for overflights of Iranian airspace, authorizations that have allowed non-US airlines that were flying US export-controlled airplanes into Iran.”
