By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

The Islamic Republic of Iran, to the horror of the terrorist regimes in the US, is today a leading transit transportation hub for neighbouring and world countries in search of not just cutting time and cost of trade routes, but also ensuring safety of their cargoes from both pirates infesting the international shipping lanes and the illegal presence of American state corsairs on the high seas.
Recently, the Secretary General Umberto de Pretto of the International Road Transport Union (IRU) met senior officials of the Iranian public and private sectors to discuss further expansion of transit ties and new routes on the south-south corridor via the Islamic Republic.
Iran’s role in trade and transit has increased considerably over recent years. In 2021, the country’s overall transit traffic rose by 68%, while transit traffic by road doubled. Transit is expected to grow by another 25% by the end of this year.
As a result, revenues have dramatically increased and so has the international prestige of the Islamic Republic in view of the country’s stability and security which no scattered riots instigated by the US can disturb.
Umberto de Pretto, who was in Iran this week saw the ground realities and the falsity of the intense US propaganda, expressing satisfaction over the situation and discussing further cooperation for implementation of joint projects with the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and customs authorities.
He said Iran is now the number one issuer of TIR permits.
He was referring to the Transports Internationaux Routiers that was established in the late 1940s, to help war-torn Europe to rebuild trade and commercial links, and which today has membership of some 70 contracting parties, including nations and multinational bodies on four continents, overseen by the United Nations Economic Commission.
Today, Iran is the major transit route for not just the landlocked Central Asia countries of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kirghizstan, but also for the Caucasus republics, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, the Persian Gulf states, and some European and African states.
As a matter of fact, the road and rail link between Iran and Central Asian states has now increased cost-effective trade between China and Turkey, as well as between India and European countries.
It is also worth noting that last year a few trucks from the UAE sheikhdom of Ras al Khaimah made their way to the port at Sharjah, and were eased onto a specialized “roll-on, roll-off” ferry that crossed the Persian Gulf to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, where they disembarked at the Martyr Bahonar terminal and made a beeline for Iran’s relatively good multi-lane highways. Then they headed northwest across the expanse of Iran to the mountainous frontier with Turkey, and after crossing the Bazargan-Gürbulak border, the drivers drove southwest to the Turkish Mediterranean Sea port of Mersin.
Thus, a new trade route was established, one that regional actors are jumping on and which has now increased seven hundred-fold with many Persian Gulf states joining it, noting that the Iran route makes a lot of sense, since now the trip from the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean Sea takes a mere six days, that is, a fraction of the twenty-one days it would take to get a shipment from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through the bottleneck at the Suez Canal and onto Turkey.
Poor Washington is wringing its hands in frustration but it cannot do anything as its plots of the past 43 years continue to end in failure – the latest being the riots in some localities of Tehran and a few other cities by thugs, terrorists, and traitors bent upon pillage, who along with the handful of characterless bareheaded and scarf-burning women, numbered not even a hundred in their raucous gatherings that soon petered out at the start of the multimillion rallies of the faithful, including Hijab-clad ladies vowing to weed out lawless elements from the country.