Ahmad Majidyar

On January 22, the Iranian Judiciary confirmed that a Revolutionary Court in Tehran had upheld a five-year jail term for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker incarcerated in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. Judiciary Spokesman Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i did not make public the specific charges against her, but called her a “security convict.”

On January 23, a top Iranian military official called on the ground forces of the country’s regular army to boost their combat readiness a

A senior Iraqi official has said that Baghdad will welcome Iran’s controversial pick to be its next ambassador to Iraq. Earlier this month, the Iranian media reported that Brigadier General Iraj Masjedi, a senior advisor to Quds Force Commander Qassem Suleimani, will be Iran’s next envoy to Iraq. The news drew criticism from Saudi officials.

Iran will build a mobile phone network in Syria under an agreement signed by the two countries’ ministries of information and communications technology, Iranian media reports.

On January 19, a senior Iranian official complained that Britain’s latest “positions” vis-à-vis Iran were undermining relations between the two countries. In a meeting with vising Britain’s Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Tobias Ellwood in Tehran, Majid Takht Ravanchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for Europe and America affairs, said the latest statements made by some British officials ran counter to agreements between the two countries aimed at improving bilateral ties.  

On January 18, Amnesty International strongly criticized Iran’s “persistent use of cruel and inhuman” corporal punishments, including internationally banned methods such as floggings, amputations and forced blinding. In one recent case mentioned in the report, Iranian authorities had lashed a journalist 40 times for inaccurate reporting.

While much ink has been spilled about how Iran’s involvement in the Syrian civil war has fueled sectarianism and instability in the Arab world, the implications of Iran’s increasing recruitment of Afghan and Pakistani Shiites on security and stability in South Asia have largely been overlooked. Over the past five years, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has recruited, indoctrinated, trained and deployed thousands of Afghan and Pakistani Shiites to fight under its command against Sunni rebel groups across Syria.

As Russia and Turkey are trying to broaden the scope of the upcoming peace talks on Syria, Tehran says it opposes the inclusion of the United States in the meeting scheduled for next week in Kazakhstan.

In the latest example of Iranian interference in Iraq, a top Iranian general has said that the presence of the Saudi consulate in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, is not “just

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson said yesterday that he would conduct a “full review” of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal if the Senate confirmed him. Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tillerson pledged that he would add further verification systems to “clarify whether Iran is complying.”

The Iranian government’s reaction was swift.

On January 12, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) confirmed that Tehran will soon receive a shipment of 130 tons of natural uranium that it has purchased from Russia.

Speaking at an event celebrating the first anniversary of the seizure of American sailors, a top Iranian general

The Iranian media reports that a senior Quds Force commander will be appointed Iran’s new ambassador to Baghdad.

On January 12, Iran’s Fars News Agency (FNA) reported that the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) “liberated” three regions in the west of Mosul.

According to FNA, an outlet affiliated with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), PMF forces are preparing for the “sixth phase of operations to liberate the west of Nineveh Province.”