Answer the question from the given passage. Your answer should be directly extracted from the passage, and it should be a single entity, name, or number, not a sentence.

Example input: Passage: Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, one of 12 nuns he had helped escape from the Nimbschen Cistercian convent in April 1523, when he arranged for them to be smuggled out in herring barrels. Suddenly, and while I was occupied with far different thoughts, he wrote to Wenceslaus Link, “the Lord has plunged me into marriage. At the time of their marriage, Katharina was 26 years old and Luther was 41 years old. Question: In a letter who did Luther credit for his union with Katharina?
Example output: the Lord
Example explanation: The paragraph clearly states that, Luther has credited the Lord for his union with Katharina, hence the Lord is correct answer.
Q: Passage: On October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt, with support from other Arab nations, launched a surprise attack on Israel, on Yom Kippur. This renewal of hostilities in the Arab–Israeli conflict released the underlying economic pressure on oil prices. At the time, Iran was the world's second-largest oil exporter and a close US ally. Weeks later, the Shah of Iran said in an interview: 'Of course [the price of oil] is going to rise... Certainly! And how!... You've [Western nations] increased the price of the wheat you sell us by 300 percent, and the same for sugar and cement... You buy our crude oil and sell it back to us, refined as petrochemicals, at a hundred times the price you've paid us... It's only fair that, from now on, you should pay more for oil. Let's say ten times more.' Question: Which oil producer is a close ally of the United States?
A:
Iran