Shabtabnews In this dark night, I have lost my way – Arise from a corner, oh you the star of guidance.

RFL/RE – Saeid Mollaei, an Iranian defector representing Mongolia at the Tokyo Olympics, has won a silver medal in judo for his adopted country. Mollaei, 29, lost to Japan’s Takanori Nagase in the men’s 81-kg judo final on July 27. Mollaei, who won the 2018 world championship title, left Iran two years ago after being ordered to deliberately lose at …

Iranwire – Furious anti-government protests continued in cities across Iran last night, almost two weeks after demonstrations first began over the water crisis in Khuzestan. In videos published from the city of Isfahan in central Iran, a large night-time crowd could be heard chanting “Isfahan, Khuzestan, Unity, Unity” while protesters tore down a banner depicting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Similar slogans were …

Iranwire – Former Iranian prison official Hamid Nouri is to stand trial on the charges of grave war crimes and murder in a Swedish court next month. Swedish public prosecutors Kristina Lindhoff Carleson and Martina Winslow have brought the case against the 60-year-old for his alleged part in the 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners in Iran in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq …

Iranwire – The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has had heart disease for the best part of 25 years. The fact that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was diagnosed with this condition as far back as 1998 was only recently revealed in the latest instalment of former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s memoirs. In his diary entry for May 30, 1998, which was …

VOA – When the civil war erupted in Syria a decade ago, some Middle East observers and climate scientists argued drought was one of the significant drivers of the conflict. Drought in the years preceding the war caused an agricultural collapse in parts of eastern and northern Syria, forcing rural families to migrate to cities in ever larger numbers and …