Iran

The Iranian province of Khuzestan is oil-rich but water-poor. At the best of times, the southwestern region is a problem for Tehran. On the border with Iraq, it’s home to an Arab minority that has long been targeted. The province has separatist inclinations, which led to a failed uprising in 1979 and sees the occasional attack continue to this day. Unsurprisingly, it is not favoured by central government. It’s impoverished and lacks many basic services; quality of life is poor. Khuzestan is now in its sixth straight day of protests after water shortages in its major cities. Video footage filmed from protests reportedly shows tanks on fire after protestors set

‘Each vote counts…come and vote and choose your president. This is important for the future of your country.’ These were the words of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this morning as he urged people to make their voices heard in today’s presidential election. Each vote doesn’t count, of course. The regime makes sure of that. Iran ‘manages’ its elections. This year, 600 people registered as candidates, now only seven remain. The unelected Guardian Council, which consists of 12 ‘jurists’ (clerics), is responsible for ensuring all candidates are compatible with ‘Islamic values’.  What this means is that it can disqualify pretty much anyone it doesn’t like, and the real reasons

Beirut We can’t say yet if the latest fighting between Israel and Hamas is the start of ‘the big one’, a new Palestinian intifada, or uprising. That possibility was raised by the grandest of Middle East commentators, Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times. Friedman is sometimes mocked for his prognostications. A ‘Friedman’ is defined as six months because of his repeated statements that the ‘next six months’ would be critical for the US in Iraq, the light at the end of the tunnel visible only then. He also praised the ‘new ideas’ of Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, before it turned out that one of those new ideas

In January 2016, $400m (£290m) was flown by the United States to Tehran in the dead of night. Loaded on to wooden pallets on an unmarked plane, it was the first in a series of instalments to satisfy an unfulfilled American-Iranian arms deal signed in 1979, before the Shah was replaced in the revolution. On the morning after the payment, four American prisoners were released, boarding planes back to their homeland. The White House insisted the payment and the release were coincidental. But General Mohammad Reza Naghdi, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), took to Iranian state media to proclaim:  ‘Taking this much money back was in

Benjamin Netanyahu has a problem: he doesn’t have sufficient support to form a coalition. With 20 days left to complete this near impossible task, he is desperate; and, when backed into a corner, Netanyahu looks to Iran as his saviour. The timing of the recent explosion in Iran’s Natanz’s nuclear facility – and particularly the fact that Israel has done little to dispel the notion that it was to blame – suggests that the motivation was at least partially political.  This isn’t to say the attacks on Iran aren’t normally motivated by interests of national security. The threat of a nuclear-capable Iran is substantial: according to Iran, the Natanz nuclear site holds

The decades since the Islamic revolution have weighed heavy on the people of Iran. Living in fear, under extreme levels of surveillance and oppression, ordinary citizens have seen their quality of life plummet and their horizons shrink, as their country became an international pariah. Those who dared to protest have been brutally repressed by regime goons with knives, axes and heavy weaponry. And while forced to suffer the deprivation of draconian sanctions, hardworking families could only look on as their despotic leaders splurged billions of dollars on military meddling overseas. When the senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar boasted in December that the regime had given him £15.8 million of government

It’s a time for delivering messages in the Middle East, where messages rarely come without their near constant attendant: violence. On Monday night a volley of rockets struck a base hosting US troops in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. International media reported that one rocket landed in the base and another on residential areas nearby; one civilian contractor was reportedly killed, and six others were wounded, including a US service member. At least five Iraqi civilians were also injured, with one in a critical condition. The militia group Saraya Awliyah al-Dam has claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack. The group remains, superficially at least, a mystery. It proclaims no overt

The Mossad is not known for its touchy-feely approach. Whether it was the kidnap of Adolf Eichmann in the sixties, hunting down and executing the Black September terrorists in the seventies and eighties, or dispatching a Hamas chief while disguised as tennis players in a Dubai hotel in 2010, the agency has built a reputation as the most feared secret service in the world. Yet its underlying moral imperative in this most morally difficult of professions must not be overlooked. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan used to show spies about to embark on a mission a photograph of his grandfather kneeling in front of Nazi soldiers before they shot him.

What does the world’s foremost Shia power and the most notorious Sunni terror group have in common? Given that the two great branches of Islam rarely see eye to eye, the layman would be forgiven for thinking that the answer is ‘not much’.  It isn’t just the layman who has concluded that Iran and Al Qaeda are oil and water either. When reporting on the assassination of an Al Qaeda chief in Tehran last year, the New York Times remarked: ‘That he had been living in Iran was surprising, given that Iran and al-Qaeda are bitter enemies.’ Surprising to the New York Times, perhaps. But not surprising to the intelligence

The Middle East is changing. Israelis now splurge at Gucci and Rolex in Dubai. Saudi women speed down desert highways; and once again Turkish leaders kneel before the call to prayer. One thing, however, remains unchanging: the Iranian government’s ability to find new and evermore sadistic ways of persecuting its own people. Yesterday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced on live TV that Iran would reject the American BioNTech-Pfizer and British Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. ‘Imports of US and British vaccines into the country are banned. I have told this to officials and I’m saying it publicly now,’ he said. This statement is typical in that it both defies belief and is

Last year, in the cigar bar of an opulent London hotel much favoured by visiting Arabs, an interesting conversation took place. My friend was rich enough to have two private jets and claimed to be doing private shuttle diplomacy between Israel and one of the Gulf states. Smoke curled around our heads and a young Qatari in Gucci trainers passed by with a woman my friend assured me was a Russian prostitute. My friend’s phone was out now and he was on a video call with a man he said was a senior official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He asked him about a drone strike on Saudi Arabia’s two

In the last days of November, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert was released from Tehran’s Evin prison and flown back to a welcome in Australia. A dual Australian-UK national, she had served two years of a ten-year sentence for espionage — pronounced after a secret trial. She had been in Iran for a conference and was detained as she was about to leave. She had strongly protested her innocence. So why, many Britons might ask, is the Australian-British academic suddenly free after two years in which the Iranian security services tried in vain to ‘turn’ her — while the UK-Iranian dual national, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, remains under house arrest in Tehran, with the

The news that Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen ‘father of the bomb’ Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, met his end in a hail of bullets near Tehran today comes as no surprise. As with so many things these past four years, this is all about Trump. Whoever carried out the hit, it is all but certain that Trump gave it the nod. Once again, he is trying to put a stamp on the Middle East that Biden will find difficult to scrub out. His actions would hardly be without precedent; Obama, Clinton and Reagan all made last-gasp moves in the region to shape it in their image. But none of these Presidents were anywhere

‘We’re going to be back in the game,’ our presumptive and somewhat previous new president tells us. ‘It’s not America alone.’ But America was never out of the game under Donald Trump and never alone. Look who is also back in the game: Tony Blinken, Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, will be Biden’s secretary of state. Jake Sullivan, once one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is going to be Biden’s national security adviser. John Kerry, the disastrous diplomat who gave us the Iran nuclear deal, is Biden’s climate emissary. And it was all going so well. Trump might not have built his wall, but he had the first successful

Last Friday the UN Security Council rejected any extension of the arms embargo on Iran. That embargo — imposed in 2007 — began to get phased out after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But a ‘snapback’ provision was put in place intended to allow the return of all such sanctions should Iran violate the terms of the deal. Iran has been violating those terms for some time, but on Friday, when the United States hoped that its allies would join it in deploring this fact, only the Dominican Republic voted with it. The UK, like France and Germany, chose to abstain. On the question of whether Russia and China should