Iran's President Hassan Rouhani gives a press conference on the second anniversary of his election, in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, June 13, 2015. Rouhani said a final nuclear deal is "within reach" as Iran and world powers face a June 30 deadline for an agreement. Rouhani said Iran will allow inspections of its nuclear facilities but vowed that the Islamic republic won't allow its state "secrets" to be jeopardized under the cover of international inspections.Ebrahim Noroozi/The Associated Press
Iran's support for international terrorist groups remained undiminished last year and even expanded in some respects, the Obama administration said Friday, less than two weeks before the deadline for completing a nuclear deal that could provide Tehran with billions of dollars in relief from economic sanctions.
The assessment offered a worrying sign of even worse terror-related violence to come after a year in which extremists in the Middle East, Africa and Asia committed 35 per cent more terrorist acts, killed nearly twice as many people and almost tripled the number of kidnappings worldwide. Statistics released by the State Department on Friday also pointed to a tenfold surge in the most lethal kinds of attacks.
Yet even as the Islamic State and the Taliban were blamed for most of the death and destruction in 2014, the department's annual terrorism report underscored the ongoing threat posed by Iran and its proxies across the Islamic world and beyond.
Tehran increased its assistance to Shia militias fighting in Iraq and continued its long-standing military, intelligence and financial aid to Lebanon's Hezbollah, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's embattled government, and Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. While the study said Iran has lived up to interim nuclear deals with world powers thus far, it gave no prediction about how an Iran flush with cash from a final agreement would behave.
World powers and Iran are trying to conclude an accord by the end of the month, setting 15 years of restrictions on Iran's nuclear program in exchange for significant relief from the international sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy.
The negotiations don't involve Iran's support for militant groups beyond its border. But Israel and the Sunni monarchies of the Persian Gulf, Iran's regional rivals, fear a fresh wave of terrorism as a result of any pact. President Barack Obama, hoping to ease their fears, has said most of the money would go to Iran's economic development.
The United States's "grave concern about Iran's support for terrorism remains unabated," White House spokesman Eric Shultz said. "That is all the more reason that we need to make sure they don't obtain a nuclear weapon."
In total past year, nearly 33,000 people were killed in almost 13,500 terrorist attacks around the world, up from just over 18,000 deaths in nearly 10,000 attacks in 2013. Twenty-four Americans were killed by extremists in 2014, and abductions soared to 9,428 in the calendar year from 3,137 in 2013. The report attributes the rise in attacks to increased terror activity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria and the sharp spike in deaths to a growth in lethal attacks in those countries and elsewhere.