The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is an idiosyncratic creation of Iran’s revolutionary class that now sits at the centre of the modern Iranian state. In 1979, the Islamic constitution established the group as an “ideological army” — in deliberate …
How Iran’s protests erased the Kurds
After her death, Jina Amini trended under a name her family and friends never used for her. As Kurds living in Iran, Jina’s parents couldn’t register their daughter using the Kurdish name they had chosen. They had to pick from …
The year the West erased women
If 2022 has been the year of the “woman”, it is a tale with two different final chapters: one hopeful, one less so. The first is set in a distant country, where an archaic, theocratic regime threatens to be toppled …
Should England fans support Iran?
Neymar smirks down at me from a billboard. Nearby, Ronaldo and Mbappé gaze off in the direction of the sea. A few streets down, Lionel Messi holds a ball in the crook of his arm, looking sweet. Here in Dubai, …
Is Iran’s Arab Spring doomed?
Ayatollah Khomeini was a fundamentalist cleric who inspired the 1979 Islamic Revolution to overthrow a millennia-old history of Iranian monarchy. He was also, legend has it, an athletic young man who became the leapfrog champion of his village of Khomein …
What Western feminists can learn from Iran
Is this it? Could this, finally, be the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran? As huge crowds of women and men surge through the Iranian streets, burning hijabs and calling for “Death to Khamenei!”, is an impossible dream finally …
Writers shouldn’t submit to Islamists
Ever since my childhood, I’ve been afraid of them. I was five years old and they had the face of Iranian ayatollahs. I was 15 and they raged through neighbouring Algeria. I remember, on television, their faces eaten up by …
The infidels will not be silenced
Thirty-three years ago, when I was a teenager in Nairobi, I was a book burner. The year was 1989, the year of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and I was seduced by the rising tide of Islamism. I greeted the …
This is how despotism ends
The absurdly long table Vladimir Putin sits at, whether with Emmanuel Macron last month, or his terrified subordinates now, was the giveaway. There is stately furniture, then there is 20 feet of thuddingly symbolic paranoia. Isolated during the pandemic, padlocked …
Will Trump go to war with Iran to save America’s oil industry? — RT Op-ed
It’s believed that a US-Iran war would disrupt the flow of Middle Eastern oil and, as such, should be avoided at all costs. With US oil futures trading in the negative, has the risk of such a war suddenly become …
600 People Have Died And 3,000 Have Been Poisoned In Iran After Drinking Neat Alcohol To ‘Cure’ Coronavirus – Healthy Food House
The world is now witnessing something that was never seen before, or at least not to this extent. Countries are struggling to find the most suitable solution to the crisis and prevent devastating numbers of citizens infected and dead while …
This video has circulated in reports about people who died during the
A video has been viewed thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter alongside a claim that it shows bodies being removed from a hospital in Iran during the novel coronavirus pandemic. The claim is false; the video has circulated in …
