Posts tagged : "Iran"

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s Green Movement reformist leaders are being widely eulogized on social media on the 11th anniversary of being put under house arrest. But while some Iranians may pine for the heady days over a decade ago when reformists were seemingly on the ascent, conservatives are widely expected to sweep presidential elections in June, further consolidating their hold on the Islamic Republic. As moderate President Hassan Rouhani’s final term draws to a close, many of his ambitions and promises will go unrealized, not least his vow to win the release of reformist luminaries Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Zahra Rahnavard. It isn’t clear to most how Iran’s moderates and progressives can...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran has long championed the cause of repressed Muslims worldwide, an often vocal stance that has underpinned the Islamic Republic’s self-proclaimed leadership role in the Muslim world. But Iran has willfully ignored the ordeal of more than 1.5 million Uighur Muslims now confined by China in controversial “vocational training” camps, a silence that has spoken volumes about Beijing’s growing influence over Tehran. Iran’s support for persecuted Shiite Muslim groups reaches far and wide, from repressed Shiites in Sunni-governed Bahrain, to the Houthis waging war in Yemen, to the  pro-Iranian Islamic Movement in Nigeria which seeks to establish an Islamic state and whose rebel logo includes a...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s carpet industry, once a rich trademark of Persian culture and a key source of non-oil and gas export revenues, is coming unraveled under the double whammy of US sanctions and a Covid-caused recession. Without meaningful government relief and investment, the fast-fading export industry that normally employs 2.5 million people and provides livelihoods in associated businesses to as many as 10 million will soon be decisively overtaken by rival nations’ wares in regional and global markets, experts and analysts warn. Local media reports suggest as many as one million Iranians involved in the rug industry have already lost their jobs. Iran’s carpet industry survived the chaos that...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: In the midst of a full-blown national economic crisis, the latest polemics of a powerful hardline preacher have served as a distraction for Iranians, with many caught by surprise and others taking to social media to poke fun at the fundamentalist cleric’s rabble-rousing. Ahmad Alamolhoda, the Friday prayer leader of the holy city of Mashhad and the representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Razavi Khorasan province, unveiled his novel prescription for social and family life when he said in recent remarks, “unfortunately, as a result of the impact of the Western culture, the spouses call each other by first names at home.” He went on to theorize that “in the first layer of...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: The coming weekend marks the Persian New Year. Nowruz, or New Day, heralds the advent of spring and jubilantly injects life into the frozen veins of nature. Even those who don’t celebrate it agree that this festival is an exceptional opportunity to enshrine the rejuvenation of the Earth after a chilly hibernation and embrace sights in our surroundings that manifest themselves on scarce occasions like the vernal equinox, which coincides with Nowruz this Saturday, March 20. It is true that Nowruz was originally the New Year festival of Iranians and a cohort of countries in Central Asia and the Middle East, but thanks to recognition by the United Nations and UNESCO, its venerable pedigree has been...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s hardliners are pressuring moderate President Hassan Rouhani’s government to ban popular social networking platform Instagram in their latest bid to keep Iranians disconnected from the wider world. Last week, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, Iran’s 39-year-old Minister of Information and Communications Technology, was subpoenaed to the culture and media court operating under the aegis of the judiciary to defend himself over a litany of complaints. These include allegations he is defying a court order mandating that Instagram be blocked. Other suits include a complaint filed by 150 clerics that Iran’s cyberspace is ridden with “immorality,” which the minister has allegedly failed to...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani squabbles with hardline parliamentarians over next year’s national budget, state broadcaster Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) will inevitably be richly funded despite rising public objections to its partisan reporting. A draft of the budget bill for the next Iranian calendar year, which begins on March 21, sparked an uproar over a proposed 35% year on year increase of IRIB’s budget. IRIB operates upwards of 100 local, national and international radio and television stations, and holds an absolute monopoly over media services in Iran. With satellite dishes capable of receiving international signals still officially banned and no real competition...

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 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);...