Posts tagged : "Ebrahim Raisi"

Persepolis Kourosh Ziabari - Stimson Center: Modern-day Iran is the inheritor of a hallowed civilization and ancient monuments that have survived millennia of invasions, natural disasters, and political upheaval. While Iran’s current diplomatic and economic isolation discourages foreign tourism, the country’s cultural heritage remains one of the nation’s key distinctions, cherished by Iranians and many others around the world who hope to be able to explore it in person one day. There are presently 26 registered UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Iran, more than in Japan, the United States and Greece on the roster of places catalogued by the United Nations’ cultural and educational agency. Among them are well-known...

Kourosh Ziabari - Stimson Center: Emigration from Iran is on the rise again as more and more Iranians conclude that their country has been turned into scorched earth by the Islamic Republic and seek shelter, stability, and opportunity elsewhere.   While not as dramatic as the exodus from some other nearby countries such as Afghanistan or Syria, the human flight is a simmering societal cataclysm with long-term negative implications for Iran’s prosperity and national security. Over the past four decades, waves of emigration have deprived Iran of its most talented youth, who instead have become engines of economic growth in Europe and North America. Nepotism, failure to reward merit, shrinking civil liberties, and a lack of...

Kourosh Ziabari - AGSIW: After more than four decades of frozen relations, signs are emerging that Iran and Egypt are seeking to thaw ties. Since its inception, the Islamic Republic of Iran has professed an unwavering commitment to the ideal of Islamic solidarity, but that avowal has often rung hollow, given its thorny relations with most of the Muslim world heavyweights, including Egypt. A senior Iranian member of parliament said on May 14 that there have been backdoor negotiations between Iran and Egypt hosted in Baghdad, and a deal to normalize diplomatic ties is imminent. Fada Hossein Maleki, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan between 2007 and 2012, told Tasnim News Agency that a meeting between Iranian President...

Kourosh Ziabari - PassBlue: Nationwide protests convulsing Iran triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody last September have tapered off, but as the women-led uprising recedes from the streets, a new spectacle is dominating slowly. It is unnerving the authorities once again. In the post-Woman, Life, Freedom movement, women are scrapping their headscarves in growing numbers and appearing in public without the compulsory hijab. The government has not reinstated the morality police to go after the women but has instead conjured up new ways of enforcing the hijab with economic repercussions. The measures include shutting down venues and businesses that cater to women who don’t wear a headscarf and conditioning...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: As the administration of the ultra-conservative Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi finds itself lonely on the world stage with a dwindling appetite for foreign relations beyond “strategic” partnerships with China and Russia, the functioning of foreign embassies based in Tehran is becoming increasingly unsteady. In the wake of the nationwide protests that followed the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini in custody of the morality police, the Islamic Republic’s relations with Western nations went down a slippery slope of estrangement as more countries raised their voice in support of the protesters and decried the crackdown. Amid this period of precarity, embassies in Tehran...

Kourosh Ziabari - Democracy in Exile: Spooked by the success of citizen journalists in revealing the magnitude of the state-sponsored crackdown on protests and the critical role of popular public figures in mobilizing grassroots activists, Iran's parliament is pursuing two pieces of legislation that boil down to a government fiat that Iranians shouldn't have public opinions and express them freely. As part of the first legislation, which is being euphemistically promoted as a "bill to criminalize the publication of news contradicting citizenship rights," the judicial commission of Iran's Majlis, or parliament, is working to codify into law a ban on publishing—both by individuals and media outlets—any news that may...

Kourosh Ziabari - Democracy in Exile: As nationwide protests have gained steam in Iran following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the so-called morality police in September, the Islamic Republic has confronted dissent with new levels of severity. As of Sunday, 488 protesters, including 68 minors, have reportedly been killed, and with some 18,000 protesters arrested, detention facilities are overflowing. After several reported executions in the province of Sistan and Baluchestan, some of which haven't been documented, two protesters were hanged to death in a span of four days in Tehran and Mashhad. As the crackdown widens, artists and athletes who express solidarity with the protest...

Kourosh Ziabari - Democracy in Exile: The nationwide protests rocking Iran for the past month, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the so-called morality police, show the depth of anger and resentment that Iranians feel toward their government for its stifling of women, symbolized by the compulsory hijab law that so many Iranian women are now openly defying. But this sweeping outrage and outpouring of dissent across the country could have erupted at any time, well before the current protest movement crystallized against the violence unleashed by the morality police and the government's unremitting enforcement of the hijab. Widespread frustration and fear have been building up among Iranians for years,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Atlantic Council: The sweeping nationwide protests that followed the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in police custody on September 16, 2022 have been distinct from previous rounds of uprisings in Iran. Aside from the inclusive nature of the movement, which has straddled social boundaries and unified people of all stripes, the government crackdown has also been unprecedented. To quell what appeared to be a thundering revolutionary wave, the Islamic Republic unleashed violence, killing at least 524 people, making over nineteen thousand arrests, and, for the first time in years, engaging in a head-on confrontation with the nation’s most prominent artists, athletes, and celebrities who sympathized...

Kourosh Ziabari - Arab Center Washington DC: Over the past four months, the international community has been heaping praise on the Iranian people for their audacious uprising, which has been challenging the country’s clerical establishment despite a heavy-handed crackdown that is now being bolstered by a wave of retaliatory executions. The ongoing protest movement, whose spirit and core message have been captured in its unifying slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” was initially ignited by the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, who died while in the custody of Iran’s “morality police,” a force that millions of Iranians have decried for its brutality and arbitrary enforcement of the...

Kourosh Ziabari - Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington: Thousands of Iranian pilgrims were stranded at the Iran-Iraq border in mid-September as they staged for the Arbaeen pilgrimage, an Islamic Republic-sponsored event marking the 40th day after the anniversary of the martyrdom of the third Shia imam, Hussein ibn Ali, in the Battle of Karbala. Reports about turmoil and instability at the border precipitated by the influx of crowds of pilgrims and the unpreparedness of the Iranian authorities were widespread in the run-up to the pilgrimage in neighboring Iraq. In one incident on September 11, 10 Iranian pilgrims died as the van carrying them crashed and exploded. On September 9, Iran’s Red Crescent...

Kourosh Ziabari - Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington: The tidal wave of the coronavirus pandemic is subsiding. Increasingly countries are returning to normalcy as vaccinations and herd immunity are prevailing, and states are beginning to bounce back from the throes of the crisis. In Iran, the second country in the Middle East to confirm a coronavirus case, and once a hotspot of contagion, the government’s idiosyncratic response to the health emergency and its ideological handling of the immunization plans still resonates with many as the symptom of a broader malaise: the perception that to the government, politics supersede Iranian lives. It remains unclear when the first case was diagnosed versus what was...