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 Smith

Gareth Smith
Gareth Smith was a distinguished journalist who reported from the Middle East for over two decades. He served as the Financial Times correspondent in Tehran, where he was the chief Iran correspondent from 2003, following his earlier role as Lebanon correspondent. Throughout his career, Smith covered Middle Eastern affairs for leading media outlets, including The Financial Times, The Guardian, and the BBC. He also contributed as an editor to Executive magazine. His work as a freelance journalist in the 1990s, focusing on the politics of Iran and Iraq, paved the way for his appointment at the FT. In 2009, he relocated to the west coast of Ireland, where he balanced freelance journalism with his passion for nature and the land.
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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 …