Website of Kourosh Ziabari, award-winning journalist and reporter

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: When a radical vigilante rammed his vehicle into two women in the Iranian city of Urmia on August 8 after criticizing their flouting of hijab rules, local authorities promised decisive action for the assault after the assailant’s arrest. But like those before him who have assaulted and attacked Iranian women over their state of dress, he’s widely expected to walk free. The attack, which went viral on social media, has reignited debate on compulsory hijab laws, with many questioning the sustainability and practicality of the strict Islamic dress code in place since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran’s hardline approach to the hijab is distinct from almost every other major Muslim country....

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: With new Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s official inauguration, all eyes have turned to his likely pick as foreign minister and the candidate’s view of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal that now hangs in the diplomatic balance. The parliament, or Majlis, says the new cabinet line-up will be revealed early this week. It is widely anticipated that religious traditionalists and hardliners will sweep the board in filling the vacancies. The early conjecture was that Ali Bagheri, a Raisi colleague at the judiciary as the Vice-Chief Justice for International Affairs and a former nuclear negotiator under hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would get the nod. However,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran and Saudi Arabia are inching towards a rapprochement that, if achieved, would profoundly shift the region’s dynamics, diplomacy and stability. Officials from both sides have recently hailed backchannel talks held first in Iraq and now in Oman as “constructive.” In May, Iraqi President Barham Salih confirmed his country had been hosting quiet talks between the two often bitter rivals. The talks, which started in April, have recently been attended by high-profile delegates, including Saudi chief of General Intelligence Directorate Khalid al-Humaidan and Iranian Deputy Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Saeed Iravani. The first symbolic breakthrough could be seen as early as...

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...