Posts tagged : "Middle East"

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: 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: 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: Iran’s presidential election campaign has commenced in earnest, with seven Guardian Council-approved candidates vying to replace President Hassan Rouhani after his eight-year tenure. The 12-member Guardian Council, tasked with vetting and filtering candidates in elections, eliminated 585 other aspirants, many of them seen as moderate and pro-reform, narrowing the field to a handful of known conservatives. Chief among them is Ebrahim Raisi, the Islamic Republic’s Chief Justice known for his anti-Western views. He is widely viewed as the frontrunner in a field of candidates critics say has failed to capture the public’s imagination. Polling day is June 18. Distinguished pragmatist figures who...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: The novel agreements on the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and the governments of United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan have unveiled evolving paradigms in the geopolitical landscape of Middle East and North Africa. The accords expose how pan-Arab, pan-Islamic ambitions are being discarded by the regional states in favor of economic, technological and military incentives that initiating relations with the Jewish state might bring about. The majority of Palestinians feel they are abandoned following the signing of the Abraham Accords, brokered by the outgoing Trump administration. A September poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has found an overwhelming...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: A convoluted conflict that has triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the war in Yemen is now in its seventh year, with a staggering death toll of more than 100,000 and dire economic repercussions that have made life in the most impoverished Arab nation additionally painful. International efforts to extinguish the conflict have so far made little success and humanitarian assistance is supplied with great difficulty. Nearly 24 million Yemenis, constituting four fifths of the entire population, require urgent humanitarian aid. A child dies every 10 minutes due to malnutrition or disease, and the country’s health sector, reeling from a massive loss of human capital and demolition of infrastructure,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Nearly 73 years after it began to unleash havoc on the Middle East, little has changed in the dynamics of the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. World powers and international organizations seem to have thrown in the towel, conceding that they are incapable of remedying the impasse, and as time goes by, diplomacy and fence-mending prove more evasive. In the final days of the US administration of Donald Trump, the dawning of the Abraham Accords, through which a handful of Arab countries initiated diplomatic relations with Israel, offered solace to the Jewish state, boosting its foothold at the doorstep of its arch-nemesis, Iran. To the Palestinians scrambling for sovereignty, though, the...