Mohammad Khatami has criticized a six year jail sentence handed to journalist and activist Serajeddin Mirdamadi. In speaking out, the former president reflects a sense among fellow reformists that little…
Gareth Smyth
Gareth Smyth
Gareth Smyth has reported from around the Middle East for more than two decades and is the former Financial Times correspondent in Tehran.
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Afghan opium is contributing to Iran’s drug problem — an issue which Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli is being surprisingly candid about. In recent pronouncements, he said 1.3 million Iranians,…
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There has been a note of triumph in Iran’s welcoming of Bashar al-Assad’s reelection. “In Syria, America is building castles in the air,” said Major General Hassan Firuzabadi, chief of staff of…
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Sergei Ryabkov, deputy Russian foreign minister, spoke in early May of the potential for agreement between Iran and world powers on “elements of a coordinated text and details of a…
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Anyone who witnessed events in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1990s will feel déjà vu as events in Kurdish Syria unfold. After Saddam Hussein withdrew from northern Iraq in 1991, due…
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Fighting talk is nothing new in Iran, and cries of ‘economic jihad’ have revived since February’s decree on the ‘resistance economy’ from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Despite November’s Geneva interim agreement…
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When Iranian students first seized the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979, Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi went to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for guidance and was told to “go and…
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Nothing raises the entrepreneurial juices like the smell of a new market. Last month’s implementation of November’s interim Geneva nuclear deal between Iran and the world powers alerted United States…
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So far, so good. Few would have expected the early months of Hassan Rouhani’s presidency to go so well. World powers including the United States have, at least for now,…
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As 2013 opened, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was struggling to manage an unpredictable and often truculent president in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At the end of 2013, Iran’s supreme leader oversees a…