Posts tagged : "Middle East"

Kourosh Ziabari - Middle East Institute: At the start of January, Iran found itself embroiled in a new diplomatic spat. This time, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons pouring scorn on the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruffled feathers in Tehran, and the foreign ministry vowed decisive action to prevent future affronts to “religious authority.” Unlike in Iran, media in the West are not supposed to take orders from the state, and the Iranian foreign ministry’s rage directed at the French government was obviously misplaced. Nonetheless, the Islamic Republic was quick to launch its first retaliatory measure, announcing the closure of a...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: The nationwide uprising that ensued after the death of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police in September added a new dimension to the global media coverage of Iran and dislodged the exclusive focus previously set on the country’s nuclear program and the stalled negotiations to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Now, the media are spotlighting the heroism of the Iranian women braving an overwhelming crackdown to reclaim their dispossessed rights, as well as the often-untold stories of ordinary citizens who are these days the protagonists of an epoch-making, dramatic struggle for freedom. These stories are being relayed to an...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Protests continue to roil Iran after the shocking death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman arrested by the morality police for an “improper hijab,” who is widely believed to have been beaten to death while in custody of the guards. Despite a crackdown that has so far claimed at least 76 lives, Iranians are not ready to back away and are raising their voices, more strongly than ever, demanding the abolition of the vice squads and the annulment of the hijab mandate. No apologies have been offered by the authorities, no resignations extended, and the Ministry of Interior, tasked with investigating the incident, insists that Mahsa Amini had pre-existing conditions that caused her to...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: One year since conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi rose to the presidency, his campaign promises to shield the Iranian economy from sanctions and lift it to new heights have gone wholly unfulfilled. As street protests against the dire state of the economy spread across the country, political stability is being put to a potential make-or-break test for the politically inexperienced leader. Iranian purchasing power has recently hit record lows amid runaway inflation, stagnant wages and a collapsing currency, galvanizing more and more Iranians to take to the streets to protest against their economic plight and the government’s perceived mismanagement. Despite the protests mushrooming across the country,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Middle East Institute: Iran and Russia, two isolated fossil fuel giants suffering under U.S. sanctions, are rapidly trying to develop new areas of bilateral cooperation in order to make up for their pariah statuses. But rather than being spurred by shared values or a history of warm ties, the Tehran-Moscow bond is incentivized by their shared enmities as well as short-term calculations about their present standing in the world. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which fast-tracked Moscow’s progressive estrangement from the West, drove Russia and the Islamic Republic to solidify their connections in the face of the United States’ apparent determination to cement their isolation. From reports that Iran...

Kourosh Ziabari - Foreign Policy: Progressive commentators in the United States who once championed U.S. President Joe Biden and touted his appetite for multilateralism as an advantage of his foreign policy are now openly criticizing the president for his Middle East approach. Specifically, they say it’s reminiscent of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s agenda and failed legacy in the region, epitomized by his catastrophic withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The argument is that Biden squandered moderate former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s final months in power in 2021 to finalize a JCPOA revival while a breakthrough was imminent and that he is...

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 - 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: 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: 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...