Posts tagged : "Iran"

Kourosh Ziabari - TRT World: It was once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East, and the sixth largest on Earth. Along its fertile banks, civilisations rose and fell. It was the cradle of life, sustaining millions of lives through millennia — humans, animals, birds. It is now dying. Lake Urmia in northwestern Iran is fast on its way to desiccation or drying up. And the emergency management authorities of the West Azerbaijan province have warned as recently as July 14 that more than 95 percent of the highly saline lake’s water has disappeared. This follows a two-decade pattern of annually losing 40 centimetres of its water level. Although officials blame the runaway drying of the lake to the conundrum of climate change and...

Kourosh Ziabari - Al-Monitor: As the administration of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi faces discontent over increasingly difficult economic  conditions, the government is ratcheting up agitprop around compulsory hijab, the Islamic dress code, in what many Iranians say is a bid to divert public attention from the nation’s day-to-day hardships. The government's efforts to enforce hijab rules are divisive in Iranian society with its outward-looking young population and liberal-minded middle class. On July 12, as the government hyped “chastity and hijab week,” thousands of Iranian women pushed the envelope of their traditional social roles and recorded themselves walking around the streets of Tehran and other cities...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: It seems that not a day passes in Iran’s blistering summer without the state media publishing something new about the administration of President Ebrahim Raisi’s plans to counter the alleged corruption of social morality through women’s lax compliance with the government’s strict hijab mandate. Debate on the imperative of observing the Islamic dress code, or hijab, has been ongoing since the advent of the 1979 revolution. There are few priorities, like the way women should dress, that Iran’s theocracy treats as a life-and-death urgency. Not even the desolate state of the national economy, spiralling poverty, unfettered inflation and human capital flight precipitated by the traction of nepotism...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: In June, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro arrived in Iran for a two-day visit, marking the first time in five years the leader alighted in the equally isolated Islamic Republic. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who has crafted his foreign policy around anti-US motifs, is investing in elevating relations with Venezuela as Iran misses out on boosting relations with traditional Asian allies and lacks a roadmap for renewing ties with the West. During the visit, Iran and Venezuela signed a 20-year cooperation agreement, the details of which have not been made public. But for the two countries whose economies have been crushed under years of biting US sanctions, there is potent symbolism in giving...

Kourosh Ziabari - The National Interest: More than most countries in the Middle East and West Asia, international attention is gravitating toward Iran, which has become one of the crucial news hotspots of the world. Iran is not garnering interest because of all the fancy things typically associated with it: windcatchers and Persian gardens, millennia-old castles, saffron, carpets, or poetry; rather, it is at the heart of some of the most difficult conversations around nuclear security, terrorism, and human rights. In a 2013 study, Elad Segev, an associate professor of international communication at Tel Aviv University, found that the centrality of Iran coverage in the media organizations worldwide is huge—maybe even outsized. On...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: UNESCO World Heritage Sites are natural areas and cultural, man-made structures judged to be outstandingly paramount to humanity, designated by the United Nations’ cultural agency as landmarks that merit international attention and conservation at home. Iran, however, as isolated and cornered as it might be these days, hosts 26 such properties dotted across the country, and is the world’s 10th country in terms of the frequency of World Heritage Sites. The last Iranian monument to be inscribed on the World Heritage Sites inventory in 2021 is the cultural landscape of Hawraman. Encompassing an extensive area in Western Iran, spanning the provinces of Kurdistan and Kermanshah, Hawraman is a...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: As the United States Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling has sparked a global debate over abortion, the Iranian people have turned to social media to reject the hardline administration of President Ebrahim Raisi’s aggressive population policy and its baby boom ambitions. In a country of 85 million in which the median age is 31 and almost two-thirds of the population are under 40 years of age, the Iranian government is pushing for resistance against demographic ageing and jumping through hoops to boost the fertility rate. In 2013, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei explicitly demanded that the population should nearly double to 150 million and the...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: Many residents of Minneapolis, Minnesota, cross over the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge every day or move past it. It offers a unique vantage point to the well-liked Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, epitomised by the iconic $500,000 Spoonbridge and Cherry sculptural design. Most of the locals recognise Whitney, a Twin Cities philanthropist and civic leader who was married to the 1980 Independent-Republican gubernatorial candidate Wheelock Whitney and passed away in 1986. But to many Minnesota denizens and visitors of the Garden who happen to walk over the bridge spanning an interstate highway, or at least catch a glimpse of it from afar, the story behind the structure is almost undisclosed, unless one is...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: Only a few months have rolled by since Saudi Arabia pulled off its largest campaign of mass execution by beheading 81 people in a single day, and it seems the scandalous misadventure has been clouded by the passage of time. Corporate media’s coverage of the Middle East has barely been affected by that travesty, and human rights advocacy organisations appear to be preoccupied with other things, including their unvarying Iran fixation. Even by the standards of Saudi, one of the most profligate practitioners of capital punishment, such a large-scale execution is rare. In fact, it has been recorded as the largest in the kingdom’s modern history. Of those sent to the gallows, 41 people were Shia...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: The Paris climate agreement, despite all sorts of criticism it receives for its loopholes and flaws, is an unmistakable manifestation of collective determination on behalf of the world nations. It is a solid step towards addressing a crisis that is not only harming people around the world and jeopardising the inhabitability of the planet, but also creating a grim future for the posterity. With its legally-binding provisions and quantifiable targets for how anthropogenic emissions should be phased out, the Paris Agreement is a call for global awakening on what the United Nations has termed the most immediate threat to human rights. Out of the 193 United Nations member states, only four nations have...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: In Iran, where social fissures are vividly displayed and routinely reinforced, debate on feminism and equal rights for women is an exclusively polarising stimulus for public contretemps, not only because of the degrading way in which feminist advocates are treated by the state, but also the quotidian clashes which pits feminists against each other. It is quite rare for Iranian feminists to agree on how women rights should be defined and promoted, leaving little room to focus on charting concrete paths in reclaiming the rights of women within a patriarchal society. However alienating and fruitless the intellectual spats tend to be, almost everybody concerned over the dire conditions experienced by women...

Kourosh Ziabari - Foreign Policy: While the United States and its allies cobble together package after package of punitive measures on Russia to drive home that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adventurism in Ukraine will have grave consequences for his country and catapult it into global isolation, and as the humanitarian crisis precipitated by the blitzkrieg is consuming resources and shifting global consciousness, the eccentricity with which Russia’s southern Caspian Sea neighbor and ally Iran has responded to the crisis has mostly remained unnoticed. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was one of the first world leaders to pick up the phone and call Putin to pledge allegiance as soon as the news of the war flashed over TV...