Social and Political

Iranwire – More than a month has passed since three Kurdish kolbars from the village of Bavan Silvaneh, in the border rural district of Margavar, West Azerbaijan province, disappeared without a trace. Efforts by locals to find them have yielded no clue. The three were lost on their return from the Turkish border, walking on treacherous, winding mountain paths through a heavy …

RFL/RE – Mehrshad Soheili has collected a number of plaudits from the Iranian media in the past few years. The 17-year-old has been dubbed the Islamic republic’s “youngest commander” and a “teenage jihadist.” He has been lauded, as the purported head of the registered Imam Mehdi Garrison, as the hidden imam. And as president of the Imam Sadegh Institute, his …

gatestoneinstitute.org – More importantly, perhaps, does Putin’s Beijing pirouette represent a radical shift of Russia attitude towards China — something that could lead to the emergence of what Thomas Fichy and Jean-Marie Holzinger in their 2013 book, called “A New Mongol Empire” led by China with Russia as its bridgehead to Europe and Iran as its Trojan horse in the …

Iranwire – Yair Geller, a Turkish-Israeli citizen, a prominent individual in the global defense industry, was the assassination target of Islamic Republic agents who were apprehended earlier this week in Turkey. The Turkish newspaper Sabah said that the planned killing of the 75-year-old owner of CNC Advanced Technology and Engineering, which manufactures aerospace hardware, IT equipment, CNC machinery, and develops …

Iranwire – Ayatollah Khamenei has lashed out at independent media, identifying it and journalists as clear targets in his “combined offensive” against threats to Iran’s economy, society and security. “The clear policy of the media opposed to Islam and Iran is to distort the facts and use lies to distort the positive points of the revolution,” he told a group of …

HRW – Headlines about the beheading of 17-year-old Ghazaleh (Mona) Heydari shook Iranian society on Saturday. The police have arrested the victim’s husband and brother-in-law and stated that the motive was a “family dispute.” Heydari, who lived in Khuzestan province, was reportedly married off to her cousin at the age of 12 and had a three-year-old child. A source close to the victim reported that Heydari had attempted …

Al-Monitor – Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said Friday that Tehran “never has hope” in the ongoing talks seeking to revive the 2015 nuclear accord.  “We put our hopes in the east, west, north, south of our country and never have hope in Vienna and New York,” Iran’s hard-liner president said during a televised speech marking the anniversary of the 1979 …

Al-Arabia – The Arab Coalition has conducted 16 targeted strikes in Yemen’s Hajjah and Saada in the last 24 hours, in an attempt to deter the Iran-backed Houthi militia, the offical Saudi Press Agency reported on Friday.

Iranwire -Friday, February 11, is the 43rd anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The Iranian government has staged tens of abductions, forced disappearances and assassinations of its opponents in other countries around the world. On July 22, 1980, Dawud Salahuddin, an American convert to Islam, assassinated Ali Akbar Tabatabaei, a former Iranian diplomat under the rule of Shah …

Iranwire – Seventeen people have been arrested on attempted kidnapping charges and collusion with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence after Turkish authorities foiled a plot to abduct an Iranian man based in Turkey and return him to the Islamic Republic. Turkish media site Odatv reported that the Turkish Intelligence Service (MIT) arrested Morteza Soltan Sanjali, an employee for the Bai Sagholam Defense Industries Company …