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meanwhile, have been forced into emergency shelters.
“The recent floods are unprecedented... 25 provinces and more than 4,400 villages have been affected,” Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli was quoted as saying in parliament by state news agency IRNA.
Minister of Roads and Urban Development Mohammad Eslami said 14,000 kilometres (8,700 miles) of road had been damaged. Additionally, more than 700 bridges were entirely wrecked by landslides and flood water, he said. The government has said it will pay compensation to all those who have incurred losses, especially farmers. However, Iran’s state budget is already under strain given the US sanctions aimed at strangling the Iranian economy. Morteza Shahidzadeh, head of Iran’s sovereign wealth fund, said President Hassan Rouhani had asked permission from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to withdraw $2bn from the fund for reconstruction in flood-hit areas, Reuters reported. He added that Khamenei has in principle agreed to the request.
Iran has signed a contract with conflict-devastated Syria to construct 200,000 new dwellings, Tasnim News Agency reported on February 25. The deal between the government of Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic Republic is the latest in a string of post-civil war contracts signed between the allies following the Syrian army’s success, backed by forces including Russian and Iranian military, in defeating more than 90% of the opposition it has faced in the country. It is clear Damascus is quite prepared to give Iran something of a post-war dividend for its backing, though where the financing will come from for the wider, and massive, reconstruction that Syria needs is not yet at all worked out.
The deputy chief of the Mass Construction Association of Tehran province, Iraj Rahbar, said Iran and Syria have recently signed a number of agreements on civil construction, tourism and agriculture industry projects.
The deal states that Iran will build 200,000 dwellings in Syria in the form of “multifamily residential complexes”, mainly in Damascus, he added.
Iranian state construction firms have become adept at building apartment blocks in recent years at home and abroad, with several thousand projects sprouting up across Iran as well as Iraq.
9.1.5 TMT sector news
Iran is set to use Turkish internet connections following an agreement between ministers, Mehr News Agency reported on April 30.
Turkish Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Mehmet Cahit Turhan met with Iran’s Information and Communication Technology Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi following calls from Iran for a boosting of its connectivity in the region and the thwarting of attempts by the US to disconnect the country from internet access bandwidth.
“Today, our talks were mostly focused on an agreement signed earlier by Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan and Turkey on the expansion of ICT ties. We made headway on how to implement the agreement,” Jahromi said.
Talking to reporters on the sidelines of his meeting, the Iranian minister said that establishing a direct internet connection with a neighbouring country, namely with Turkey, would be helpful in neutralising threats to Iran's internet network.
He said that unilateral sanctions imposed on Tehran by the US would not affect internet links between Iran and Turkey.
During previous rounds of sanctions on Iran, the US used its weight to force
36 IRAN Country Report May 2019 www.intellinews.com