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Ahmad Khalid Majidyar is a Middle East & South Asia analyst with a focus on Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was previously a senior fellow and the director of IranObserved Project at the Middle East Institute.
From 2008 to 2015, Majidyar worked as a senior research associate at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he co-authored two monographs on Iran: Iranian Influence in the Levant, Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan (AEI 2012), and The Shi’ites of the Middle East: An Iranian fifth column? (AEI 2014). He also published a number of research papers on Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As an instructor with the Naval Postgraduate School’s Leadership Development and Education for Sustained Peace program (2008-2016), Majidyar provided graduate-level seminars to more than 3,000 U.S. and NATO military leaders on Afghanistan and the broader region. In addition, he has provided briefings on Iran and Afghanistan at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Joint IED Defeat Organization, the National Defense University, the State Department, and Congress; and he has spoken as a guest analyst at think tanks, universities, and world affairs councils.
Majidyar’s articles on Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Fareed Zakaria’s GPS, Fox News, U.S. News & World Report, Daily Telegraph, and Forbes, among others. He has also discussed Middle Eastern topics on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera English, Sky News, CBC Canada, Bloomberg News and Voice of America’s Dari, Farsi, Urdu and English services.
Previously, Majidyar worked as a media analyst with the BBC Monitoring in Afghanistan and as a humanitarian aid worker with the UNHCR in Pakistan.
Bahrain’s interior minister said on Sunday that Tehran and its regional proxies are supporting militant groups that carry out terrorist actions on the Bahraini soil, Iranian and
A top advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei defended Iran’s costly involvement in regional conflicts and called for a long-term military presence in Syria and Iraq, Fars News Agency reported. “Our forces must stay in Iraq and Syria so as to defend Islamic unity. This is because if Iran is not present, no country can be the standard-bearer and guarantor of stability in the region,” said Ali Akbar Velayati, a former foreign minister who holds more than a dozen official positions in the Islamic Republic.
A senior Iranian naval officer said on Monday that the country’s warplanes warned off two US-led coalition vessels during a military drill in the Persian Gulf, the Iranian media reported. “This morning and in the first hours of the drills, two warships of the coalition which had approached the drills zone to monitor the Iranian Navy units were identified by the Navy drones,” Spokesman of the drills Rear Admiral Seyed Mahmoud Moussavi was quoted as saying by Fars News Agency.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs, Hossein Jaberi Ansari, today left Tehran for Moscow to hold talks over the latest developments in Syria and the broader region, the Iranian media reported. Ansari and his accompanying team met with Mikhail Bogdanov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy to the Middle East and African countries, to discuss ways of strengthening cooperation between the two countries in Syria. The two sides reportedly also talked about Yemen and other regional crises.
The deputy commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has said that the United States is no longer to “pull off a victory” in the Middle East and claimed that Tehran and its allies are driving the US forces out of the region.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s remarks that Washington will maintain a long-term military presence in Syria to continue to assist the Syrian Democratic Forces and prevent a potential ISIS reemergence have worried Tehran. An article in Fars News Agency, a mouthpiece of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), said that the “open-ended” deployment of US forces in Syria is aimed at “regime change” in the country.
In a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Palestinian Hamas, has praised Iranian support for the militant group, and particularly Tehran’s “unwavering and valuable” stance on the issue of Jerusalem. According to the Iranian media, Haniyeh denounced President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and emphasized in the letter that launching another intifada against Israel would be the best course of action at present.
Iran’s defense minister today denied a report that Tehran has accepted Western demands to hold negotiations on the country’s controversial missile program, according to Tasnim News Agency.
While Iran’s military involvement in regional conflicts and support for militant groups often make headlines, Tehran’s sophisticated soft power strategies aimed at promoting the Islamic Republic’s ideological and political goals in the region are largely overlooked. The establishment of Islamic Azad Universities in major Syrian and Iraqi cities and the expansion of its main branch in Lebanon is one example of how Tehran uses soft power tools to expand its sphere of influence across the region.
Afghan authorities in western Herat Province have arrested a government official who allegedly spied for Iran and transferred sensitive government documents to the Iranian intelligence agencies, the Afghan media reported. Jilani Farhad, the spokesman for the government of Herat, told the Khama News Agency that Asadullah Reza-yi, who previously worked in neighboring Farah Province, was under surveillance for a long time before he was arrested. The suspect is transferred to Kabul for further investigation, he added.
The deputy head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) has said that the Islamic Republic will not allow international inspectors to visit the country’s military sites, the Iranian media reported.
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) said today that its forces have seized a shipment of explosives and suicide vests in the restive southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan. According to a statement released by the public relations department of the IRGC Ground Force’s Quds Base (not to be confused with IRGC’s elite Quds Force responsible for external operations), the explosives and communications and other assets were captured in the Saravan county of Sistan and Baluchestan.
A prominent Afghan politician has cautioned that it is not in the interest of Iran to have close relations with the Taliban, Afghan media reported. “As an Afghan, I explicitly state that cultivating close relations – I hope it is a mistake – with an enemy, which has no difference with ISIS in its essence and substance, is harmful not only to the Iranian people but also to the people Afghanistan,” Amrullah Saleh, the head of the Afghan Green Trend and former intelligence chief, said at the Tehran Security Conference.
Iran’s Defense Minister accused the United States of playing a role in the latest anti-regime protests in the country and threatened that Tehran will take retaliatory measures against US interests.
The latest antigovernment protests in Iran indicate that the regime’s costly and destabilizing role in regional conflicts is taking a political toll at home. While economic grievances are the key driver of the current protests, ordinary Iranians are questioning the wisdom of their government’s military adventurism abroad and support for foreign state and non-state actors at the expense of domestic priorities.
