Monthly archive : "January, 2021"

Asia Times - Kourosh Ziabari: Iranians are buying real estate in Turkey in hope of acquiring citizenship and leaving behind the bitter realities of life in Iran’s failing state and economy. Foreign nationals who purchase Turkish houses, apartments, offices, shops or land worth at least US$250,000 can obtain Turkish citizenship, according to the Turkish government’s citizenship by property investment scheme. The previous threshold was $1 million but Ankara slashed the minimum purchase in 2018 amid an economic crisis and eyeing increased investment by well-to-do Persian Gulf citizens as well as would-be Iranian immigrants. Immigration from Iran to Turkey has steady risen in recent years, with the first wave starting in 2009...

Asia Times - Kourosh Ziabari: New US President Joe Biden has started his tenure with a flurry of executive orders aimed at annulling various of his predecessor’s policies and decisions. But his move to repeal an entry block imposed on several Muslim nations signals a potential more conciliatory foreign policy in the Middle East. In January 2017, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, officially titled Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, which blocked the entry of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen nationals to the US. It also suspended indefinitely the admission of Syrian refugees and slashed the total number of refugees taken by the US to 50,000 per year. Since all...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iranians, suffering a raging pandemic as their mismanaged and failed state is crushed by US economic sanctions, are taking their own lives in increasing numbers. Even the young are resorting to suicide to avoid the harsh realities of a life of suffering and austerity. Health Ministry data shows suicide attempts rose 23% in the first three months of the Iranian calendar starting March 20, 2020, compared with the same period the year before. Local media, citing sociology researchers, revealed a 60% spike in suicide among Iranians from 2015 to 2019. Hossein Assadbeigi, head of the office of socially vulnerable people at the State Welfare Organization of Iran, said that 5,143 people, including...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: A group of MPs in Iran’s conservative-dominated parliament, or Majlis, have proposed legislation that if implemented as worded will spark new conflict and crisis in the Middle East. One year after Iran’s hero-worshipped military commander, Qasem Soleimani, was eliminated by a US drone strike in Baghdad, a group of Iranian lawmakers has proposed an idiosyncratic parliamentary motion in 16 articles obligating the government to retaliate the killing by laying the groundwork for the “annihilation” of Israel by 2041. At the helm of Iran’s parliament sits Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander now in plainclothes. Out of the 290 parliamentarians...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the first anniversary of the fatal downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps approaches, the Iranian and Canadian governments are not even close to settling their differences on the tragedy, with Ottawa even suggesting it may pursue justice at the International Court of Justice (ICC) at The Hague. Canada lost 55 citizens and 30 permanent residents when the IRGC, according to Iran’s official account, misidentified a Ukrainian passenger aircraft as a cruise missile flying over Tehran and downed it with two Tor M-1 missiles shortly after takeoff in the morning on January 8, 2020. All 176 passengers on the plane from six nations were...