Iran

Trouble continues to brew inside Iran. The ordinarily supine Attorney-General, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi, has defied Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by preventing him from visiting an imprisoned aide. Ahmadinejad is viewed as having acted against the country’s powerful clerical establishment, with whom Ejehi is closely aligned. Indeed, Ahmadinejad’s aide is currently being detained over charges of publishing material which ‘offends’ Islamic norms. He is just one of a dozen political allies close to Ahmadinejad to have found themselves arrested as relations between the political and clerical authorities become increasingly strained. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad continues to bluster about ‘external enemies’. State media reported that Iranian Special Forces are busy training for the possibility of

Thousands of Iranians took to the streets this week to protest inflation and the collapse of Iranian currency on international markets. Tehran’s historic Grand Bazaar closed for business with many of its merchants leading the demonstrations. This will worry the government because traders there are normally seen as bridging the gap between clerics and Iran’s influential mercantile classes. The atmosphere inside the Bazaar is a useful barometer of Iranian political discontent. During the abortive Green Revolution in 2009 which challenged Ahmadinejad’s re-election, merchants from the Grand Bazaar offered only muted support. In 1979 they swung decisively behind the Islamic Revolution and helped unseat the Shah, having previously secured concessions from

The enormous naval deployment in the Persian Gulf, coupled with the deluge of leaks and rumours about a pre-emptive strike by Israeli forces on Iran, has perhaps diverted attention from the war in Afghanistan until the events of this weekend. The attack on Camp Bastion by 15 Taliban fighters masquerading as US troops, which killed 2 American marines and destroyed or damaged considerable materiel and installations, has captured headlines over the weekend, not least because the Taliban claimed that their primary target was Prince Harry. One possible response to the Taliban’s propaganda gambit is to point out that they failed in their alleged objective. Spokesmen for the British Army, which

An article in an Iranian state-controlled newspaper has claimed that the Jews are spreading gays. According to Mashregh News the ‘Zionist regime’ (with the help of the US and UK) is deliberately spreading homosexuality to pursue Zionism’s real goal of world domination. Quite how you can dominate the world through gays, I don’t know. It’s true that the very hard to spell Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became the world’s first openly lesbian head of state in Iceland a few years ago. And only last year Elio Di Rupo became the first gay Prime Minister of Belgium. But if Israel is in fact the force behind this then it seems to me one

It is not uncommon for new leaders of new nations to flex their muscles. And in spite of its millennia of history as a nation, this is precisely where Egypt now finds itself. It has hosted its first free and fair democratic elections, and, for the first time, has a civilian occupying the Presidency. In this new nation, reborn for the umpteenth time, Mohamed Mursi is busy showing off the Brotherhood’s sinews. He landed in Tehran today, a move the Ahmadinejad government had touted as a diplomatic coup. No Egyptian leader has visited the country in more than three decades, and relations have been little more than frosty at the

Trying to read the tea leaves on Islamist politicians is notoriously tricky. What else could explain why so many Middle East observers have misinterpreted Mohammed Mursi’s decision to visit Iran later this month as confirmation that Cairo’s Islamists are seeking closer union with Tehran? These fears are misguided. Egypt has not had any official diplomatic relations with Iran for more than thirty years and Mursi’s visit will not change that status quo. He won’t be conducting a state visit but will instead be attending a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, a group formed to promote the interests of developing nations during the Cold War. Egypt currently holds its rotating presidency.

The same problem keeps occurring for the megaphones of Iranian propaganda in the West: they keep being let down by their own side.  Every time another op-ed appears in the Guardian or Nation arguing that Iran isn’t seeking a nuclear device (and even if was it would never use it, and even though it doesn’t want a nuke and wouldn’t use it if it did, it does still at least have the ‘right’ to one) another Iranian official or one of their proxies lets slip the truth. The latest person to let the side down is the Hezbollah MP Walid Sakariya.  The MP for the Iranian Revolutionary government’s party in

The war with Iran has already been raging for many months. So far, Western powers have largely confined themselves to covert operations designed to thwart Tehran’s nuclear aspirations. However, the bombing of a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria on Wednesday marks a dramatic escalation in hostilities. In the past, western intelligence agencies have assassinated and kidnapped Iranian nuclear scientists, at one stage picking off a different target every few months. Not only did this hinder Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, but it was also deeply embarrassing to the regime because of the sophistication with which attacks were being conducted right under its nose. Further embarrassment occurred in late 2010

Are sanctions among the most pointless tools in contemporary diplomacy? That certainly seems to be the case in Syria where sanctions have been in place against the Assad regime ever since he launched a brutal crackdown against his own people 16 months ago. Last week, Wikileaks began releasing a massive tranche of emails from Assad’s inner circle which will make uncomfortable reading for many companies in the West. They reveal that in May 2011 a subsidiary of Finmeccanica, the Italian defence manufacturer, sold over £30 million worth of equipment to the Syrian government just when an EU trade embargo was being placed on the regime. As recently as February of

The weekend’s six power talks with the Iranians about their nuclear programme were more fruitful than many, including I, expected. It seems that the EU sanctions on Iranian oil and gas, which are due to come into force in July, have concentrated minds in Tehran. However, we won’t know whether the Iranians are just playing for time again until the next set of talks in Baghdad on the May 23. These six power talks are an imperfect vehicle in that the Russians and the Chinese take a far softer line than the French, British, Germans and Americans. But as James Blitz blogs over at the FT, one of the most