Articles

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Unprecedented water shortages in Iran have sparked protests across southwestern Khuzestan that have quickly spread to other regions, a popular uprising that threatens wider stability as authorities violently crack down. Residents of Khuzestan provincial cities have taken to the streets for the past 12 days to demand a swift solution to the water crisis and resignation of local authorities who they believe are corrupt and incompetent. In a show of solidarity, people across Iran in Aligudarz, Karaj, Isfahan, Mashhad, Tabriz, Tehran, Saqqez, Zanjan and various other cities have also taken to the streets, chanting slogans decrying authorities for their perceived endemic mismanagement of Khuzestan. On...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Across Khuzestan province, the oil-rich yet ironically impoverished and underprivileged heart of Iran’s economy, resentful protesters have been dominating the streets for nearly a week, trying to voice their anger at the power outages and water-supply cuts that have traumatized their daily lives. The government has responded, expectedly, with Internet shutdowns and the use of force. Nationally, the progress of the Covid-19 inoculation program has been a failure, and while much of the world races back toward normalcy, only 2.6% of a population of 85 million have been fully vaccinated. In what construes as a national embarrassment, Iranians are flocking to neighboring Armenia, where they are offered...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As US troops quickly withdraw after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, regional powers are moving to fill the emerging power vacuum in a country long bedeviled by lethal internal rivalries. Iran, the top trading partner of Afghanistan and an influential neighbor with high stakes in its stability, has engaged both the Afghan government and Taliban insurgents in recent months. This comes even though many Iranians have decried their government’s overtures to the Taliban as treacherous considering the group’s track record of sponsoring violence and terrorism including in Iran. The US troop withdrawal has already created massive reverberations across Afghanistan. The Taliban have recently claimed to...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: For nearly two decades, the global media coverage of Iran has functioned in such a way that the name of the country has been bracketed with a pernicious nuclear program and malign conspiracies to destabilize the Middle East and beyond. That Iran has been receiving bad press for a long time is not a mystery or the allegation of a jingoistic mind. It is an inevitability attested to by the pundits and commentators of media organizations that let bias sweep through their reporting. There are plenty of reasons to feel bitter about Iran, perceive its regional role as counterproductive and consider its brand of statecraft as erratic. The Islamic Republic’s foreign-policy adventures have been...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Deliberations are underway in Iran’s parliament to outlaw the use of international social media platforms and instant messaging services, legislation that threatens to cast the country into cyber-darkness. The pending bill would also criminalize the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxy servers now used to bypass internet blocks and bans in a country that enforces one of the most rigorous online censorship regimes in the world. The bill, ironically titled “Protecting the Rights of Users in Cyberspace and Organizing Social Messengers,” has stirred nationwide controversy. Journalists, political and online activists, lawyers and ordinary citizens all fear the restrictions will...

Kourosh Ziabari - The National Interest: The latest flare-up of violence between Israel and the Palestinians was extinguished on May 21 after eleven days of exchanging rockets and missiles, leaving behind a trail of casualties and destruction and further compounding what is an intractable dilemma that has demonstrated its resistance to resolution throughout decades. The conversation about the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can go on infinitely, and there are always questions that remain unanswered. But the less-meditated aspect of this multi-pronged, byzantine feud is the role external powers have been playing since 1948 in lengthening and exacerbating what is no longer a fracas over territory, but a scene of...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Speculation is rife in Iran over who will steer the economy under President-elect Ebrahim Raisi, the conservative cleric and judicial head who clinched an easy victory in the June 18 election. The challenges Raisi faces are severe and experts are already casting doubt on his ability to remedy the economy given his limited statecraft experience and the ambiguity surrounding his plans for post-Covid economic recovery, taming hyperinflation and incentivizing investment. By any measure, Iran is in the throes of a cataclysmic economic recession, aggravated by the global pandemic and the economic sanctions that have crushed the livelihoods of ordinary citizens and businesses since former US president...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: It’s official: hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi is Iran’s new president and will formally succeed Hassan Rouhani in August. What’s less clear is the Islamic Republic’s new foreign policy and economic direction. Raisi secured 17.9 million popular votes, accounting for 61.9% of the ballot in a preordained result marred by the disqualification of pro-reform and moderate candidates. Raisi, a darling of the conservative establishment, saw his supporters celebrate in eastern Tehran on Saturday evening in defiance of millions of Iranians who boycotted the polls. As anticipated by many observers, voter turnout was a record low in the history of the Islamic Republic at 48.8%. The boycott was a silent...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: More than a year after the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing watchdog Financial Action Task Force (FATF) blacklisted Iran as a “high-risk jurisdiction” subject to a call for action, debate on the ratification of FATF-related bills has been rekindled in Tehran. Reformists are blaming conservatives for stonewalling the normalization of the country’s banking and trade relations with the outside world – an issue that will indirectly factor in the June 18 presidential election where a conservative candidate will almost certainly win. Headquartered in Paris, FATF is an intergovernmental body set up by the G7 in 1989 to draw up binding regulations to combat money laundering. In...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s presidential election campaign has commenced in earnest, with seven Guardian Council-approved candidates vying to replace President Hassan Rouhani after his eight-year tenure. The 12-member Guardian Council, tasked with vetting and filtering candidates in elections, eliminated 585 other aspirants, many of them seen as moderate and pro-reform, narrowing the field to a handful of known conservatives. Chief among them is Ebrahim Raisi, the Islamic Republic’s Chief Justice known for his anti-Western views. He is widely viewed as the frontrunner in a field of candidates critics say has failed to capture the public’s imagination. Polling day is June 18. Distinguished pragmatist figures who...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: When facing down public dissent and unrest, Iranian authorities are known to downplay the magnitude of the various crises they confront. But officials are uncharacteristically sounding the alarm about a mounting water crisis, one which could trigger a full-blown conflict over access to the essential resource. According to Minister of Energy Reza Ardakanian, the coming summer in the Iranian calendar year will be the “driest in the recent five decades.” The minister said he was concerned about peaking demand for drinking water and cast doubt on the government’s ability to ensure an uninterrupted supply of water nationally. Iran is now confronting its most severe drought in half a...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: While US-Iran relations are apparently warming, with hopes rising of a resumption of the scuppered Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear pact, Washington continues to pile on punitive measures, particularly in the technology sector. The US government recently imposed a penalty of US$8 million on Germany’s SAP Software Solutions for “illegally” exporting US-origin software, including upgrades and security fixes, to Iranian users. The sale violated the technology sanctions placed on the Middle East nation, which is home to nearly 60 million internet users. From 2010 to 2017, SAP and its international partners exported the technology a total of 20,000 times to people in Iran and...