Research & Commentary Results

In defiance of a 30-day ceasefire resolution by the UN Security Council, Tehran said on Sunday that pro-Damascus forces would continue military operations against a rebel-held enclave near the Syrian capital,

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has dispatched medical practitioners and equipment to Syria and Iraq to treat those injured in combat from its allied forces, a top IRGC general revealed earlier today.

Every resistance group emerging in the region is a “thorn in the eye” of the United States and Israel and the future of the Middle East belongs to Iran and its regional allies, Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri, the deputy chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, said today.

UPDATE August 31, 2018: After repeated cuts, the U.S. government has reportedly decided to end all funding to UNRWA (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/us/politics/trump-unrwa-palestinians…)

In January, President Donald Trump announced a major cut–$300 million–to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Since 1949, UNRWA has provided a critical lifeline to Palestinians displaced by war. Today, UNRWA supports 5 million Palestinian refugees.

Decision-makers in Iran are in a unique position. Years of sanctions, which ostracized the country and crippled its economy, have been lifted, giving way to a deluge of foreign investment in energy, consumer goods and other key economic sectors. These two factors together have already paid political dividends for the leadership in Tehran, which has used the influx of investment to finance its military opposition to the Saudi-led Sunni bloc in Syria and Yemen and to legitimize its status as a critical regional and even global actor.

Read the full artice on The National Interest

Afghan authorities in Herat Province today paraded a group of 10 militants who were reportedly trained in Iran to sabotage the inauguration ceremony of the landmark TAPI gas pipeline project in western Afghanistan. Mohammad Ayub Alizai, the head of the extremist group, claimed that he and his colleagues had received all necessary training and equipment to disrupt the ceremony.

The secretary-general of Harakat al-Nujaba, an Iraqi militia group with close ties with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), has said that the group will avenge the blood of Iraqi paramilitary forces recently killed in the Iraqi province of Kirkuk by “cleansing” Iraq of the American presence,

The latest anti-regime protests and internal security problems are more damaging to Iran’s national security than external threats, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, a senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, warned today.

Turkey is one month into its military offensive against U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces in the area of Afrin in northern Syria. How is the operation going, and how has the strained U.S.-Turkish relationship been affected? Gonul Tol, director of Turkish studies at MEI, and Amberin Zaman, a journalist and columnist for Al-Monitor, join host Paul Salem to discuss.

The extraterritorial operations Quds Force of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC-QF) is supposedly a secret special operations unit. Yet, leading commanders of the Quds Force have aggressively been seeking public attention lately.

Dozens of Iranian fighters have joined the ranks of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the northern Syrian city of Afrin to fight the Turkish military and its allies trying to expel the Kurdish forces from the region,

Relations between the U.S. and the Palestinians are in free-fall. The Trump administration’s decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and then cut funding to UNRWA to force the Palestinians back to the negotiating table have been met with mass protests and official recriminations. Meanwhile, peace has never seemed more distant, with a recent poll showing support for a two-state solution at a historic low among both Israelis and Palestinians.

Read the full article on The National Interest

While donor countries and organizations pledged $30 billion for Iraq’s reconstruction at an international conference held in Kuwait on February 14, Iran – which portrays itself as Iraq’s closest ally – made no financial commitments.