Iranian, Pakistani and Turkish direct flights to China: the transnational "Railway Silk Road" train only takes two weeks.

According to Japanese reports, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan plan to resume the railway linking Istanbul to Tehran and Islamabad, and eventually extend it to China. These three countries started the container train service in 2009, but only carried out trial operation and never put it into full operation. Iran, Turkey and Pakistan have always planned to continue to provide passenger services for the initial freight trains, and are now willing to launch ITI transnational railway lines to strengthen connectivity with China's "Belt and Road Initiative".

The 6540 km railway service will shorten the sea voyage between Pakistan and Turkey from 2 1 day to1day. According to the Japanese side, this train line means the restart of the "Ancient Silk Road". Stanislaw, a West Asia analyst at the Asian Studies Center of the Warsaw Institute of War Studies, said that the ITI Railway will further promote the economic value of the Middle East, which is a multi-trillion-dollar plan aimed at connecting the infrastructure and economies of Asian, African and European countries.

Stanislaw believes that China especially regards Iranian transportation infrastructure as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. He said that the ITI railway will help Iran get rid of US sanctions. For Iran, this is an attractive alternative trade route, because OECD member countries trade in their own currencies. ECO Economic Cooperation Organization is a political and economic intergovernmental organization with 10 members established by Iran, Pakistan and Turkey in 1985. Under the leadership of President Donald Trump, the United States has been implementing the policy of "extreme pressure" on Iran, isolating Iran by cutting off all international trade with Islamic countries.

However, Stanislaw believes that "it is practically impossible for the United States to isolate and prevent Iran from trading with its neighbors". The Polish expert said that infrastructure projects such as ITI Railway will stimulate the Iranian economy, and the new railway connection will provide greater flexibility for the future.

Last year, China took a major step and promised to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of Islamic investment to Iran, which made the United States uneasy about its efforts to isolate Iran economically. China first signed a 25-year agreement with Iran in 20 16, which predicted that China would invest 400 billion US dollars in resource-rich Middle East countries. Japanese strategic analysts believe that this transaction represents "a potentially significant shift in the balance of the global oil and gas industry" and may mark "a huge shift in the global oil and gas industry". In this transaction, payment in US dollars is not involved.

The core content of the new agreement is that China will invest 280 billion US dollars to develop Iranian oil, gas and petrochemical industries. There will also be an investment of $654.38+02 billion to upgrade Iran's transportation and manufacturing infrastructure. China's close participation in Iranian manufacturing infrastructure construction will fully conform to its huge Belt and Road Initiative. China intends to use the existing cheap Iranian labor force to build factories in China designed and supervised by large manufacturing companies, whose specifications and operations are the same as those in China.

And use Iranian transportation infrastructure to transport China products to western markets. China's largest transportation project in Iran is worth $1500 million, upgrading the 926-kilometer railway line from Teheran to Mashhad to electrification. It also plans to build a Teheran-Qom-Isfahan high-speed railway line and expand the upgraded network to the northwest through Tabrizi.

The railway is part of the 2,300-kilometer-long New Silk Road, which will connect China with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and extend to Europe through Turkey. Tabrizi has many important oil, natural gas, petrochemical and other industrial bases, and the starting point of the Tabrizi-Ankara natural gas pipeline will be the key point of this route.