Elon Musk Wants To Remove Iran Sanctions for Starlink

US sanctions have been in place (again) against Iran since 2018. Elon Musk would like to receive exceptions for his Starlink satellites, the background is a current wave of protests in the country after a woman died in police custody. Iran is and will remain a regime in which protests are usually brutally suppressed.

Currently, however, there are the largest demonstrations in Iran for a long time. The trigger is the death of a 22-year-old woman who was arrested by the moral and religious police because of inappropriate clothing and died in custody. How this came about is unclear, but the fact is that the leadership of the Islamic theocracy has been in great need of explanation ever since.

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Information is of course a strictly controlled topic in Iran and it is anything but easy for the residents of the country to get news that passes strict censorship. That’s why SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is now calling for an exemption from sanctions for the satellite internet provider.

According to a news agency report Reuters Starlink wants to be allowed to offer broadband internet in Iran. Musk had previously been asked on Twitter to bring Starlink or receiving stations based on it to Iran.

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However, Musk’s accompanying tweet raises more questions than it answers. On the one hand, the 51-year-old did not say which country would like to obtain such exceptions, but of course the United States is likely. On the other hand, the question arises as to how he intends to get the Starlink receivers into the country.

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Because it is unlikely that Iran will simply let Starlink into the country. It can be assumed that the hardware would be smuggled, presumably via Kurdish areas in Iran. Because there, too, access to the Internet was and is almost completely deactivated in the course of the protests.