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WASHINGTON The Trump administration is pushing for inspections of suspicious Iranian military sites in a bid to test the strength of the nuclear deal that President Donald Trump desperately wants to cancel, senior U.S. officials said.

The inspections are one element of what is designed to be a more aggressive approach to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. While the Trump administration seeks to police the existing deal more strictly, it is also working to fix what Trumps aides have called serious flaws in the landmark deal that if not resolved quickly will likely lead Trump to pull out.

That effort also includes discussions with European countries to negotiate a follow-up agreement to prevent Iran from resuming nuclear development after the deals restrictions expire in about a decade, the officials said. The officials werent authorized to discuss the efforts publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The inspections requests, which Iran would likely resist, could play heavily into Trumps much-anticipated decision about whether to stick with the deal hes long derided.

If Iran refuses inspections, the argument goes, Trump will have a solid basis to say Iran is breaching the deal, setting up Tehran to take most of the blame if the agreement collapses. If Iran agrees to inspections, those in Trumps administration who want to preserve the deal will be emboldened to argue its advancing U.S. national security effectively.

The campaign gained fresh urgency this month following a dramatic clash within the administration about whether to certify Irans compliance, as is required every 90 days.

Trump was eager to declare Tehran in violation, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency that monitors compliance says its infractions are minor. At the urging of top Cabinet members, Trump agreed at the last minute to avoid a showdown for another three months but only with assurances the U.S. would increase pressure on Iran to test whether the deal is truly capable of addressing its nuclear ambitions and other troublesome activities.

Trump faces another certification deadline in three months, and its unclear whether new inspections or any fixes to address his concerns will be in place by then. Trump told The Wall Street Journal this week he expects to say Iran isnt complying, setting a high bar for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and other aides to persuade him otherwise.

If it was up to me, I would have had them noncompliant 180 days ago, Trump said.

To that end, the administration is seeking to force Iran to let in IAEA inspectors to military sites where the U.S. intelligence community believes the Islamic Republic may be cheating on the deal, several officials said. Access to Irans military sites was one of the most contentious issues in the 2015 deal, in which Tehran agreed to roll back its nuclear program in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief.

Last week in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, Under Secretary of State Thomas Shannon floated the proposal to the European members of the Joint Commission that oversees the deal, one official said. Britain, France and Germany joined the U.S., Russia, China and the European Union two years ago in brokering the deal with Iran.

To force inspections of new sites in Iran, the U.S. would need to enlist the support of the IAEA and a majority of the countries in the deal. But the U.S. has run into early resistance over concerns it has yet to produce a smoking gun compelling evidence of illicit activity at a military site that the IAEA could use to justify inspections, officials said.

Among the concerns about a rush toward inspections is that if they fail to uncover evidence of violations, it would undermine the IAEAs credibility and its ability to demand future inspections. So the U.S. is working to produce foolproof intelligence about illicit activity, officials said. The officials declined to describe the intelligence activities or the Iranian sites the U.S. believes are involved.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, alluded to the strategy during an event hosted Wednesday by The Washington Post. Corker said the U.S. was trying to radically enforce the deal by asking for access to various facilities in Iran.

If they dont let us in, boom, Corker said. You want the breakup of this deal to be about Iran. You dont want it to be about the U.S. because we want our allies with us.

As a candidate, Trump threatened to rip up the deal that President Barack Obama brokered. As president, Trump has yet to take that step, as his administration finishes a broader Iran policy review expected to conclude in August.

The other major step to try to address what Trump has deemed flaws in the deal involves ensuring that Iran cant revert to old behavior once the limitations on its program sunset over the next decade-plus. The U.S. State Department said Trump has directed his administration to work with allies to explore options for dealing with that and other shortcomings. Talks are underway with the European countries about a supplemental deal, though its unclear how Iran could be persuaded to sign on.

The deals provisions for inspections of military facilities, or undeclared sites, involve a complex process with plenty of opportunities for Iran to stall. Tehran can propose alternatives to on-site inspections, or reject the request, which would trigger a 24-day process for the Joint Commission countries to override the rejection.

That could drag on for months. And under ambiguities built into the deal, its unclear whether Iran must allow IAEA inspectors into military sites, or whether the Iranians can take their own environmental samples and send them to the IAEA for testing, as was allowed under a 2015 side agreement that let Iran use its own experts to inspect the Parchin military site.

Even if Trump declares Iran in violation of the deal a move that would invigorate his conservative base he could still leave Irans sanctions relief in place.

American businesses are eager for the deal to survive so they can pursue lucrative opportunities in Iran. The aviation industry recently signed billions of dollars of contracts to sell passenger plans to Iranian airlines, including a $16.6 billion deal for Boeing.

Associated Press writer George Jahn in Vienna contributed to this report.

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US reportedly seeks to test Iran deal with more inspections - NavyTimes.com

The Islamic State group has issued a short new video in which it threatens the Islamic Republic of Iran and vows to destabilize the country with terrorist attacks.

The video, released Tuesday, depicts a teenage boy in military uniform who directly looks at the camera and speaks Persian with a bold voice, threatening the regime.

The teenager is introduced as the "Persian Qattadah" in the video, which is the name of a close disciple of Prophet Muhammad.

"We will destroy your land and your home, we will disrupt your security and we will shed your blood into rivers," the teenager is heard saying in the video.

Iran has not yet reacted to the video. It was produced in similar fashion to other videos released by the terror group in the past.

In late March, IS released a 36-minute, Persian-language video aimed at Iran's Sunni Muslim minority in which several adults spoke in Persian, but with heavy Baloch and Arabic accents.

The new video portrays a child soldier who speaks fluent Persian with no accent at all, which suggests that the terror group may have made inroads in parts of the country to recruit.

Mixed reaction

Analysts' views on the content and purpose of the video were mixed.

Some said IS wanted to exploit Iranian Sunnis, who have long been deprived of their rights.

"Islamic State's propaganda is falling on fertile ground as Sunnis in Iran are deeply underprivileged and deprived of many of their rights," Ali Alfoneh, a nonresident senior fellow at Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at The Atlantic Council, told VOA.

"It is hardly surprising that the Islamic State is trying to target Iran's Sunni minority," Alfoneh added.

Others downplayed the video and viewed it as a desperate move by IS to show that it remains relevant. The terror group has faced numerous defeats on the battlefield in recent months in Iraq and Syria.

"This is an isolated case and depicts a desperate effort by IS to show it is still capable of conducting new attacks," said Alex Vatanka, a senior analyst at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

"With less territory under control and shrinking sources of revenue, recruiting new members from Iran, where people, even dissident Sunnis, see less common ground with IS, seems to be shooting in the dark and bears no fruit at all," Vatanka added.

Marginalization of Sunnis

Alfoneh of the Atlantic Council said he thought that some of Iran's policies were purposefully marginalizing the country's Sunni minority from the mainstream, which could drive them closer to extremist groups like IS.

"Iran's Sunnis are being oppressed, and the Iranian government policy of relating Sunnis to IS and Saudis has not given the desired fruit expected," he said. "Twin attacks on June 7 committed by Iranian members of IS prove that fact."

IS militants carried out twin terrorist attacks in early June targeting Iran's parliament and the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic.

The attacks, which IS claimed responsibility for, killed at least 17 people and injured dozens more.

Iran's mainly Baloch and Kurd Sunni minorities have long accused Tehran of discriminating against them because of their religious views.

Human rights organizations also have talked of mass executions of Sunnis and have urged Iran to lift restrictions on Sunnis, who make up about 9 percent of the country's population.

Tehran has acknowledged it executed at least 977 people in 2015, which it says was mainly for drug-related crimes.

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Islamic State Threatens Iran in New Video - Voice of America

During a week in which all signs point to Republicans enshrining President Obama's top domestic achievement into law, it's now looking like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has tricked President Trump into keeping the main pillar of Obama's foreign policy legacy in place indefinitely: the disastrous Iran deal.

On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that as part of Trump's move to certify Iran's compliance with the deal, the administration is pushing to "test" the deal with more inspections. On the surface, this may seem like a move to step up enforcement and lay the groundwork to unwind the deal theoretically consistent with Trump's vow to "get tough" on Iran. But in practice, it looks like a stalling tactic designed by Tillerson and Obama holdovers in the State Department to handcuff Trump, with endless bureaucratic delays, from ever being able to pull out of the deal.

Last week, Iran deal supporters in the administration, led by Tillerson, talked Trump into sticking with the deal and certifying Iran compliance for the second time of his presidency, even as he told the Wall Street Journal, "If it was up to me, I would have had them noncompliant 180 days ago."

Under the agreement that secured his decision recertify the deal, the United States will push for more inspections of Iranian military sites. As the AP puts it, "If Iran refuses inspections, the argument goes, Trump finally will have a solid basis to say Iran is breaching the deal, setting up Tehran to take most of the blame if the agreement collapses. If Iran agrees to inspections, those in Trump's administration who want to preserve the deal will be emboldened to argue it's advancing U.S. national security effectively."

The problem is twofold one logistical, and one more fundamental.

Logistically, the process of requesting inspections of Iranian sites is long and arduous, with plenty of opportunities for international institutions and foreign governments to gum up the works, delaying any firm resolution indefinitely, and thus putting pressure on Trump to constantly renew the deal to let the process play out. The prospect of this has not been lost on opponents of the Iran deal, who have been furiously emailing and texting with each other in despair as they contemplate the implications.

In an email to reporters, Omri Ceren, managing director of the Israel Project and one of the most dogged and informed opponents of the deal, observed that, "The push [for inspections] can drag on literally indefinitely: It requires the State Department to persuade the Europeans to persuade the [International Atomic Energy Agency] to persuade the Iranians to allow inspections, and in between there need to be bilateral and multilateral intelligence exchanges, and anyway the [Iran deal] allows Iran to engage in dialogue with the IAEA indefinitely without ever violating the deal."

There are a number of scenarios in which this convoluted process can be exploited by Tillerson and his band of Iran deal proponents at the State Department to maneuver Trump into holding off on his desire to escape the Iran deal.

"One scenario: In 3 months, Iran deal advocates will tell the president he has to certify because the deal is still being tested,'" Ceren wrote. "Another scenario: In 3 months, the Europeans (or Iran deal advocates channeling them) will tell the president he has to certify because they've bought into the testing,' and would backlash against decertification while it's ongoing. These are a half-dozen of these scenarios getting bounced around this morning."

As I noted, these are the logistical problems with substituting the "more inspections" approach in the place of a more focused strategy specifically unwinding the deal. But there's also a more fundamental problem: Regardless of whether it's enforced, the Iran deal is still a really crappy deal.

That is, even if Iran completely complies with the deal, it will still be given space to become a much more dangerous conventional threat while putting it on a glide path to nuclear weapons over time.

One of the main conservative cases for an unconventional outsider like Trump was that at least he was willing to burn things down that needed to be burnt down. But he's been consistently outplayed by swamp creatures. He vowed to reverse eight years of damaging Obama policies, yet more than six months into the Trump presidency, Obama's legacy at home and abroad looks increasingly secure.

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Looks like Rex Tillerson tricked Trump into keeping the Iran deal forever - Washington Examiner

Heres a prediction by yours truly that you can take to the bank: In just a few years Iran will have intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, that can attack targets all over the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

And it might all be thanks to the rogue state the Trump administration has labelled the biggest national security threat of our time: North Korea.

Oh, and to twist the knife in a little deeper, those missiles could be armed with nuclear weaponsonce the Iran deal expires. That is, unless America puts a stop to this threat once and for all.

Now wait a second. Youre shocked? You really shouldnt be.

Before we get to all that, maybe we should take a step back for a moment.

You see, making such predictions isnt always popular, but they spur action. Foreign policy analysts here in Washington love to hedge their bets with words like possibly, perhaps, likely and so on when trying to predict the next big threat. However, there is always certain trends that are easy to seeand even easier to run away from because they arent super solvable.

The American people didnt vote for such dithering last cycle. To be frank, they voted for the opposite of Barack Obama.

When it comes to matters abroad voters wanted an America that would seek out the challenges of the future and take them on before they were aimed at our collective heads. And that is what President Trump has done by taking on North Koreas nuclear and missile programs as well as calling out Iran for its own menacing missile plans.

While all of this is great news, the Trump administration is now facing a much bigger problem: the potential for North Korea and Iran to collaborate on long-range missile technology that can be used to strike our allies and the homeland.

In many respects, the evidence is right out in the open of past collaboration, according to some experts.

In an interview with Fox News, Jeffrey Lewis, an expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey explained that the very first missiles we saw in Iran were simply copies of North Korean missiles. He also noted that over the years, we've seen photographs of North Korean and Iranian officials in each other's countries, and we've seen all kinds of common hardware.

Many experts have been warning for years now that Tehran and Pyongyang have been trading missile technology. If the Trump administration doesnt act fast it wont be just the hermit kingdom that has nukes that can strike at targets thousands of miles awaybut it will also be the only nation on planet Earth that has turned chanting death to America into a national pastime.

Now, to be fair, there are those who downplay the linkages between Iran and North Korea. But if history tells us one thing it is that to never, ever, dismiss the power of a common threat. And both of these countries seek to offset U.S. military mightat any price. Clearly long-range missiles armed with nuclear payloads do that quite nicely.

One could easily imagine a scenario in a decade or so when the Iran nuclear deal has lapsedsomething many on the left seem to forgetand Tehran decides that it no longer needs to hide its intentions.

Iran instead takes what it feels is its rightful place as the dominant power of the Middle East and hold on to its arsenal of nuclear weapons and the missiles to carry them into battle. With the nuclear research it already has done in the past, along with careful cooperation with Pyongyang on missile technology the nuclear deal currently in place never restricted such cooperationit decides to push ahead unabated.

So what should the Trump administration do about this threat? Thankfully, Washington has considerable options to explore.

First, we should name and shame any North Korean, Iranian or outside partners that are helping these rogue regimes collaborate on missile technologies.

Pentagon and intelligence officials have told me on several occasions they have strong leads on who is helping facilitate these exchanges. Its time to shine a light on these groups or individualsnow. They need to be outed for the whole world to see and publicly shamed.

The Trump administration should declare that if you help Pyongyang or Tehran build long-range missiles you are an enemy of the international community and will be treated accordingly. Such shaming should include those providing material or technical assistance or any banks, financial institutions or front companies passing along funds for such assistance between both nations.

Second, with such entities out in the open, Team Trump should impose sanctions on such groups as soon as possible. The goal should be to drive up the costs for both sides and make them feel the financial pinch as much as possible.

Third, we should get creative in how we try to stamp out such cooperation. In a 2012 report by the National Bureau of Asian Research, author John S. Park offers the idea of using a a monetary reward program to interdict components or technicians central to ballistic missile development. He notes that:

Hiding in the open is a particularly effective tactic employed by North Korea. Contracting private Chinese companies to serve as middlemen to facilitate cargo launderinga creative process of disassembling components and moving them through different logistics routesenables North Korean state trading companies to utilize commercial shipping containers. Monetary rewards would offer a double payday for some Chinese companies, who could collect the commission fee from a North Korean client as well as the reward for anonymously providing a copy of the freight insurance to local authorities in busy Southeast Asian ports.

And finally, all of this is the clearest argument yet for Washington to lead a much more robust effort at ensuring more missile defense platforms are brought into the Middle East, Asia and also upgraded for the defense of our homeland.

Stopping an Iranian ICBM armed with a nuclear weapon by way of North Korea is one of the greatest challenges America faces today. The Trump administration must act now before its too late.

Harry J. Kazianis (@grecianformula) is director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, founded by former President Richard M. Nixon. Click here, for more on Mr. Kazianis.

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Iran will soon have ICBMs armed with nukes by way of North ...

The strikes are the first time Iran has fired missiles at another country in three decades and represent a major escalation of Iran's role in the war in Syria.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on its official news website, Sepah News, that several "ground-to-ground, mid-range missiles" were fired from bases in Kermanshah province, western Iran.

The operation "targeted Takfiri forces in the Deir Ezzor region in Eastern Syria."

Iran's Revolutionary Guard uses the term Takfiri to describe ISIS.

Iran backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his fight against anti-government rebel groups and ISIS, which is primarily based in the Syrian city of Raqqa.

Lt Col (ret) Rick Francona, CNN military analyst, described Iran's move as a "real escalation."

"The selection of targets is interesting. They say they are firing at the same people who planned the attacks in Tehran but it also bolsters the Syrian army effort right now."

Amir Daftari, a CNN producer in Tehran, said that Iran hadn't hidden its support for Assad "but up until now they've led us to believe that they've provided things like military advisers, volunteers and money."

Shiite-majority Iran and Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia have long been embroiled in a sectarian feud.

CNN's Nadeem Muaddi, Shirzad Bozorgmehr and Angela Dewan contributed to this report.

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Iran launches missiles into Syria - CNN.com