Pursuant to talks between Iran and the European Union to normalize relations, the president of Finland, Sauli Niinisto, was in Tehran on October 26. There, he was greeted by a number of Iranian officials who harshly attacked the policies of Western states in the Middle East.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is due to be in Moscow on October 28. There, he will meet with his Russian and Syrian counterparts to assess the military campaign against the Syrian opposition.
The secretary general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Ali Shamkhani, says latest political and economic deals signed with various countries will not impact Tehran’s fundamental foreign policy priorities.
On October 25, as the parliament of the European Union condemned Iran’s hostile posture toward Israel, a number of Iranian hardline sites published articles aimed at tormenting the Jewish state.
Just a few days after President Hassan Rouhani removed three of his ministers under pressure from his domestic critics, Oil Minister Bijan Zangeneh has come out on the offensive against his critics.
The leadership of the IRGC in Iran has unveiled a new policy of recruiting local volunteers among Iranians to fight on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria.
A number of Iranian hardline media outlets are presently running articles condemning the Bahraini government for its treatment of the country’s Shiite political leadership. On October 20, the offices of Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, a large Shiite political party, were reportedly raided by the Bahraini authorities. Calling it a “historical and strategic mistake,” the Iranian foreign ministry is urging Manama to reach a political settlement on the issue of Shiite political representation in Bahrain.
This is an excerpt of an article published by The National Interest. For the full article, please click here.
Fars News, a hardline outlet that promotes the views and interests of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), ran a so-called exposé on the latest arrests of six individuals charged with collaborating with the United States with the aim of toppling the Iranian regime.
On September 23-24, the Middle East Institute’s Initiative for Track II Dialogues convened its ninth meeting of the Middle East Dialogue in Muscat, Oman. Participants included current and former officials and senior experts from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Syria, Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government, Iran, Russia, China, the United States, and the United Nations.
In this week’s Monday Briefing, MEI experts Randa Slim, Gonul Tol, Charles Lister, and Paul Salem provide analysis on recent and upcoming events including potential fallout from the battle for Mosul, how the row between Turkey and Iraq will complicate the operations in Mosul, the implications of ISIS’ loss of Dabiq, and recent military cooperation between Egypt and Russia.
October 14, 2016 – In this interview Randa Slim discusses the latest diplomatic and political developments in the Syrian crisis and the regional battle against ISIS, including challenges to be dealt with in the aftermath of an offensive to retake Mosul, with host Paul Salem.
Audio Version
Iran’s dismal human rights record is once again under international scrutiny. On the 7th anniversary of the regime crackdown on the opposition after 2009, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran ran an extensive overview of major human rights violations, including torture and executions, which the Iranian authorities are predictably refusing to acknowledge.
Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, a senior Iranian diplomat close to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) came back into the Iranian headlines this week charging that the US and Israel were determined to change the borders of nations in the Middle East as part of an attempt to weaken the so-called “resistance,” the anti-US and Iran-led bloc of Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas and Bashar al-Assad of Syria; and that Iran had a duty to block these nefarious attempts and redouble its support to its regional allies. While hardly a household name in the West, Amir-Abollahian has been the IRGC’s soft fac
