Website of Kourosh Ziabari, award-winning journalist and reporter

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...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As nations worldwide jockey to secure access to the newly authorized Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19  vaccine, Iranian authorities continue to issue contradictory statements about how and whether inoculations will be made available in the country. Iran, the Middle East’s hardest pandemic-hit country, is by all accounts lagging in the global race to obtain the shots, sparking new criticism of President Hassan Rouhani’s perceived as lacking pandemic response. Iran’s Covid-19 death toll surpassed 53,000 on Thursday. Iran is one of 94 countries that have inked commitment agreements with the COVAX facility co-led by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI);...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Forty-two years ago, Iran was a crucial party to the alliance of Western powers, crowned by US president Jimmy Carter as “an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world.” Today, the same country, having undergone a political metamorphosis, is the bête noire of that alliance, aggregated by George W Bush into an “Axis of Evil,” blamed as culpable for a catalogue of challenges facing humanity. As a comeuppance for its post-1979 policies and actions seen by the world as destructive and malign, Iran has been disciplined with unsparing economic sanctions. The United States, the foremost enforcer of these punitive measures, oversees sanctions regimes targeting nearly 30...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the sun sets on America’s costly 18-year war in Afghanistan, neighboring Iran is poised to gain an upper hand as foreign troops chart their withdrawal from the war-ravaged country. That is despite Tehran’s vehement vocal objections to a nascent peace deal between the US and Islamic fundamentalist Taliban group aimed at ending a war that by some estimates has cost American taxpayers nearly US$2 trillion. In February, US President Donald Trump’s administration and the Taliban reached a conditional agreement following nine rounds of intense negotiations in the Qatari capital of Doha. The deal covers four key issues: a sustainable ceasefire, facilitation of intra-Afghan talks now underway...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Nearly one week since the high-profile assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on the outskirts of Tehran and the world is waiting to see how Iran’s rulers respond. While a dramatic retaliatory attack may not be imminent, newly tabled legislation promises to accelerate Iran’s nuclear program in defiance of the assassination’s apparent aim of curtailing its progress and perceived threat. Fakhrizadeh, a brigadier general with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and a key figure in Iran’s nuclear program was ambushed and killed on November 27 in what many observers have described as an “extraterritorial targeted killing.” Iranian authorities have reflexively blamed...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: The November 27 assassination of an elite Iranian nuclear scientist, almost unanimously blamed on Israel’s intelligence apparatus, has put the Middle East on high alert and raises the specter of a military confrontation that will scupper any chance of a fast thaw in Iran-US diplomacy when US President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was a brigadier general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a lecturer in physics at Imam Hossein University and one of the most senior scientists in Iran’s multilayered, sophisticated nuclear enterprise. Some have referred to him as the Abdul Qadeer Khan of Iran, the “father” of Pakistan’s clandestine and ultimately...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Much of what the global media report about Iran these days revolves around its unpopular nuclear program, its involvement in proxy conflicts across the Middle East, and its human-rights violations. Yet the concealed face of Iran is that it is the inheritor of one of the most magnificent art heritages in the world history, reflecting a 5,000-year-old cultural tradition that many people are incognizant of as the nation’s artistic and cultural contributions are eclipsed by its political isolation. The London-based Victoria and Albert Museum, which bills itself as the world’s leading museum of art and design, has announced that it will stage the UK’s biggest exhibition on Iranian art, design and...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Reports that US President Donald Trump consulted senior aides about military attack options on Iran has raised speculation that a new destabilizing conflict could be imminent in the twilight of his tumultuous term. Trump reportedly backed away from launching a strike when confronted with the scenarios such a hit would likely set in motion. But there are still concerns the lame-duck president may fire parting salvos at his Iranian adversary, leaving behind a conflict for his rival President-elect Joe Biden to untangle. Trump raised the strike option in a November 12 meeting at the Oval Office with his top-tier cabinet members, namely Vice-President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting...