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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.
Authorities in Iran have sentenced four Iranian ethnic Azerbaijanis to long jail terms for “peacefully defending their rights,” the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reports.
Afghanistan’s leading daily newspaper Hasht-e Sobh has blasted the Iranian government for blocking Afghanistan’s accession to the Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia (TRACECA) and using its leverage within TRACECA to “blackmail” the Afghan government and seek political concessions from Kabul.
The Iranian authorities yesterday arrested Ahmad Montazeri, the son of one of the founding fathers of Islamic Republic, to serve a six-year jail term for releasing tapes that shed further light on the regime’s mass executions of political prisoners in 1988, the Iranian media reports.
Iran’s behavior has not changed since President Donald Trump put the country “on notice,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford said at a public conference at the Brookings Institution earlier today. “From my perspective, the major export of Iran is actually malign influence across the region,” he explained.
The top religious leader of Iran’s Sunni minority has written to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to express his community’s concern over reports of a “secret order” issued by the country’s Judiciary to speed up the execution of Sunni death-row prisoners.
The Amnesty International Report 2016/17 released yesterday blasted the Iranian regime’s record of human rights abuses, particularly acts of torture and imprisonment of political activists after unfair trials, discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities, and an alarming number of executions.
As the Iraqi government announced on Sunday the launch of an offensive to regain control of western Mosul from the Islamic State, Iran-backed Iraqi militia units are playing a leading role in the military operations in the region, the Iranian media reports.
On February 19, Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani met with his North Korean counterpart Choe Thae-bok in Tehran and the two sides called for further strengthening ties between their countries, the Iranian parliament’s official website reports. “We have always pursued lasting relations with North Korea.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards test-fired several “advanced” rockets during military exercises on Monday, the Iranian media reported.
Ahmadraza Jalali, a Sweden-based Iranian researcher detained in Iran since April 2016, has begun a second hunger strike in Tehran’s Evin Prison to protest his unfair trial, the Campaign for Human Rights in Ir
Authorities in Bahrain claim they have dismantled a number of “terror cells” and arrested 20 individuals who reportedly received military training in Iran and Iraq, the Bahraini state-run media reports.
Recent reports that claimed the Trump administration is contemplating forming a military alliance with Arab allies to contain Iran have generated anxiety in Tehran.
