The media have been hyping inflation pretty much non-stop for the last year and a half. They tell us that this the only thing people care about. They don’t care about whether they have a job, how much the job pays, whether they have health care, or any other economic issue. People care about inflation: full stop.
Some of the attacks by Iranian Revolutionary Guards on Iranian opposition party offices in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in late September struck towns and villages where the parties were not carrying out any military activity, according to local residents, Human Rights Watch said today. According to media reports, the attacks killed at least 16 people, injured dozens more, and displaced hundreds of families.
More than a month ago, “morality police” in Tehran accosted 22-year-old Mahsa Amini over the arrangement of her mandatory head covering, subjected her to such physical abuse that she fell into a coma and died three days later. Since then, international media have attached ever greater significance to the ensuing protests but have repeatedly fallen into the trap of undermining that perception with descriptions of the protests as “leaderless.”
That label clearly gives the impression that the uprising is also aimless, that there is no precise or unified ambition behind it, and that it is primarily just an expression of general outrage over Ms. Amini’s death at the hands of abusive authorities. In reality, the uprising moved beyond the issues of forced veiling and violent enforcement of religious behavior long ago. Its emphasis today is much broader, and its message conveys very specific demands for systemic change and the ouster of Iran’s existing clerical leadership.
Since the initial round of protests grew out of Ms. Amini’s funeral on September 17, the movement has expanded to encompass at least 190 cities spanning all 31 provinces. It has also seen continuous participation from a wide range of ethnic and religious groups, professions, class backgrounds, and ages. At the start of October, teenagers became a prominent force within the movement, as students in high schools began protesting and chanting “Death to Khamenei,” referring to the regime’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.
Later in the month, the movement acquired a strong economic component, with oil industry workers staging protests explicitly to express solidarity with the nationwide uprising. At the site of their strikes, the workers were heard repeating the same slogans that have defined the current uprising and several prior nationwide protest movements. Chief among these is “death to the dictator,” “Death to Khamenei,” and “Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Leader (Khamenei).”
Additionally, protesters throughout the country have been heard to publicly embrace a message of self-sacrifice that reflects an accompanying increase in the rate of direct clashes between security forces and civilians.
It is difficult to imagine people all across Iran chanting, “We will fight, we will die, but we will reclaim Iran,” if those people do not believe themselves to be unified behind a specific goal with an established leadership and a network that leads the protests and its slogans all across Iran. Indeed, it is absurd on its face to suggest that the message of these protests could swiftly come into nationwide alignment and remain aligned for more than a month without significant leadership and organization behind them. The slogans and actions that have been established by the MEK Resistance Units in the past five years.Unfortunately, such claims are par for the course when it comes to international media coverage of Iranian affairs. Even more, unfortunately, such coverage has contributed to the widespread perception within Western policy circles that there is no viable alternative to Iran’s theocratic dictatorship. This, in turn, has encouraged a longstanding trend of wrong-headed policies for dealing with the Iranian regime – policies that arguably rise to the level of appeasing the Iranian regime while continually marginalizing the Iranian people.
To their credit, Western journalists and policymakers have appeared increasingly open to the notion that the current uprising could set the stage for a new revolution and ultimately lead to the mullahs’ ouster. But as they continue coming to terms with that idea, the same journalists and policymakers must make stronger efforts to understand precisely where that revolution will lead.
There are several Western policymakers who have long since acquired that understanding. In the United States House of Representatives, there are at least 260 of them who have endorsed a resolution affirming the Iranian people’s right to oppose tyranny and expressing support for the leading pro-democracy opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). The MEK has played an unmistakable role in this and several prior uprisings that gave voice to public demands for regime change and a democratic alternative.
No less an authority than the regime’s Supreme Leader Khamenei acknowledged the MEK’s role in January 2018, when Iran was in the midst of another series of protests – the first of several to feature explicit condemnation of the entire system on a national scale. Since then, the MEK’s network of “Resistance Units” has continually grown more active, broadening its tactics to include the defacing and shutting down government websites and state media broadcasts alongside the destruction of government billboards and statues and the posting in public spaces of pro-democracy messages and images of Maryam Rajavi the President-elect of National Council of Resistance of Iran and Massoud Rajavi, leader of the Iranian resistance.
The 10-point plan of Maryam Rajavi for the future of Iran and the MEK’s platform is well-known to Iranians, especially young Iranians, who have made a regular habit of evading the regime’s restrictions on access to the internet and independent media. Thus, whether made explicit in protest gatherings or not, it is clear that the MEK’s vision is the vision that most Iranians are pursuing whenever they band together to chant “Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Leader (Khamenei).”
The Iranian cyberattack on Albania earlier this year threatened to paralyze public services and digital systems, hack into state records and further sow chaos.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama arrived in Israel on Sunday to strengthen his country’s cyber defense after a series of attacks from Iran that led his country to cut ties with Tehran.
According to officials, Israel has succeeded in almost completely curbing Iran’s ability to transfer weapons to Syria and to manufacture weapons there.
The Israeli military has destroyed about 90% of Iran’s military infrastructure and attempts to entrench itself – with Hezbollah – in Syria, top officials in the defense establishment claimed over the weekend.
On an early autumn day in Tehran, the morality police arrested in a city park a 22-year-old Iranian woman who was in the capital on a family visit, bundled her into a van and drove her to the police station.
The detention of Mahsa Amini on September 13 set in motion a chain of events that one month on has left Iran’s clerical leadership under supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 83, facing one of its biggest challenges since the 1979 Islamic Revolution but whose final outcome remains far from certain.
Cumhurbaşkanı Recep Tayyip Erdoğan geçtiğimiz hafta Asya’da İşbirliği ve Güven Artırıcı Önlemler Konferansı’nın (CICA) 6’ıncı zirvesi dolayısıyla Kazakistan’ın başkenti Astana’ya gitti. Burada Erdoğan’ın Rusya Devlet Başkanı Vladimir Putin ile yaptığı bir buçuk saatlik görüşme ve Putin’den gelen açıklamalar hem ulusal hem de uluslararası medyada üst sırada yer aldı. Putin, yaptığı açıklamada Türkiye’ye uluslararası bir gaz dağıtım merkezinin kurulabileceğini söyledi. Türkiye’de heyecanla karşılanan bu haberin ardından gelen açıklamalar soru işaretlerine neden oluyor. Türkiye bir enerji merkezi, enerji hub’ı olabilir mi? Analizde buna yanıt arayacağız.
DEVA Partisi Lideri Ali Babacan Erzurum mitingini Bartın’daki maden faciası nedeniyle iptal etse de kendisine eşlik eden gazetecilere röportaj vermiş.
Putin’in Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan’a özel olarak teşekkür etmesi ve Türkiye’yi enerji üssü yapma teklifi de konuşulmuş belli ki ama biraz farklı bir açıdan konuşulmuş.
The country’s political class now stands at a crossroads: Will it seek to heal the country’s deep divides or go back to business as usual?
Iraq hit two anniversaries this month. Three years ago in October, Iraqis rose up to protest the failure of the Iraqi government and political class in delivering basic services, providing jobs, fighting corruption and more. One of the outcomes of those protests was early elections, which were held on October 10, 2021, but have yet to yield a government. The last year witnessed crippling political gridlock, as the winner of the 2021 national parliamentary elections, Moqtada al-Sadr, eventually withdrew from the political process after failing to form a government.
In Ankara’s Sincan district, a 24-year-old enslaved Yazidi woman was rescued after her relatives in Australia (who themselves are asylum-seekers) purchased her freedom on the dark web. The woman was held captive in a house in Sincan for 10 months and systematically raped. Signs of torture in the form of cigarette burns and razor cuts were found on her body.