TEHRAN The Trump administration’s withdrawal of the Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, monopolizes 24/7 the highest levels of government in Tehran. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, meeting with the EU’s energy chief Miguel Arias Canete, reiterated that mere words of support from the Europeans are not enough. The JCPOA joint commission meets in... Read More

Baghdad On a sandstorm-swept morning in Baghdad earlier last week, Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, the legendary deputy leader of Hashd al-Shaabi, a.k.a. People Mobilization Units (PMUs) and the actual mastermind of numerous ground battles against ISIS/Daesh, met a small number of independent foreign journalists and analysts. This was a game-changing moment in more ways than one.... Read More

Just when world public opinion feared the US and North Korea were on the brink of nuclear war, the new axis of evil times (North Korea, Iran, Venezuela) yield a dramatic plot twist; President Trump is adamant the real threat is the Iran nuclear deal. Enter a brand new, major international crisis deployed out of... Read More

Gideon Levy, Israel’s most well-known journalist outside of Israel, and the most controversial inside of it, was referring to the royal welcome given to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by a joint session of the US Congress a month earlier and to his announced plans to pressure the US Congress to kill any deal that... Read More

It always helps to start with the truth, and in Iran’s case, the truth is quite simple. Iran has no nuclear weapons, it has no nuclear weapons program, and it’s never been caught diverting nuclear fuel for other purposes. Iran has pursued nuclear technology for peaceful purposes alone. These are the facts. They may not... Read More

There’s something that doesn’t ring-true about the coverage of crisis in Iraq. Maybe it’s the way the media reiterates the same, tedious storyline over and over again with only the slightest changes in the narrative. For example, I was reading an article in the Financial Times by Council on Foreign Relations president, Richard Haass, where... Read More

Turkish artillery is firing across the border into Syria. Explosions have torn apart buildings in Aleppo, Syria's largest city, making their floors collapse on top of each other so they look like giant concrete sandwiches. The country resembles Lebanon during its civil war, the victim of unbearable and ever-escalating violence but with no clear victor... Read More

There has always been something stagey and contrived about Israel's blood-curdling declarations that it is going to bomb Iran, but as a strategy it has worked astonishingly well, at home and abroad. Benjamin Netanyahu has been expert at manipulating Israelis' perception of threat. His popularity with voters enabled him last week to dumbfound the country's... Read More

The way in which the growing confrontation with Iran is being sold by the US, Israel and West European leaders is deeply dishonest. The manipulation of the media and public opinion through systematic threat exaggeration is similar to the drum beat of propaganda and disinformation about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction that preceded the... Read More

The world’s press is choc-a-bloc with “if” questions about Iran and war. Will Israel attack? Is Obama, coerced by domestic politics in an election year, being dragged into war by the Israel lobby? Will he lunch the bombers? Is the strategy to force Iran into a corner, methodically demolishing its economy by embargoes and sanctions... Read More

Iran has long been denounced in Washington as the source of much of the evil in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies see the hand of Tehran behind protests in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province. As the last US forces leave Iraq by the end of the year, there are... Read More

First, a simple rule: utter absurdity in allegations leveled by the US government is no bar to a deferential hearing in our nation’s major conduits of official opinion. Suppose the CIA leaks a secret national security review concluding that the moon is actually made of cheese, and the Chinese are planning to send up a... Read More

The claim that Iran employed a used-car salesman with a conviction for cheque fraud to hire Mexican gangsters to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington goes against all that is known of Iran's highly sophisticated intelligence service. The confident announcement of this bizarre plot by the US Attorney General Eric Holder sounds alarmingly similar to... Read More

Teheran The attempt by the Green movement, as anti-government activists are known, to emulate the protests across the Arab world is failing to shake the Iranian authorities, still less overthrow them. Over the past week the centre of Tehran has been calm with protesters making a negligible impact. "The regime has got good at calibrating... Read More

25,000 Jews live in Iran. It's the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel. Iranian Jews are not persecuted or abused by the state, in fact, they are protected under Iran's constitution. They are free to practice their religion and to vote in elections. They are not stopped and searched at checkpoints,... Read More

The abduction of the British computer expert Peter Moore and his four bodyguards was carried out partly in revenge for deadly bomb attacks in south-west Iran which Iranian officials blamed on Britain, according to a well-placed source in Baghdad. The five men were abducted by an Iranian-backed group in 2007 and it is now believed... Read More

In the latest act of the grim drama surrounding the fate of the five hostages, officials in London have told the families of two of the guards, Alan McMenemy, from Glasgow, and Alec Maclachlan, from South Wales, that the two men are probably dead. The bodies of two other guards, Jason Creswell and Jason Swindlehurst,... Read More

Iraq will be plunged into a new war if Israel or the US launches an attack on Iran, Iraqi leaders have warned. Iranian retaliation would take place in Iraq, said Dr Mahmoud Othman, the influential Iraqi MP. The Iraqi government's main allies are the US and Iran, whose governments openly detest each other. The Iraqi... Read More

Late last week the New Yorker released a 6,000 word story by Seymour Hersh under the vague title, “Preparing the Battlefield”. The lead paragraph ran as follows: Beyond the assertion in the second paragraph that secret ops against Iran by US military and CIA are being “significantly expanded”, that was about it so far as... Read More