In January 2020, Iran introduced a new form that discriminates against religious minorities not protected under the constitution. The new form removed the option to select “other religion” in national identity cards. The card is a basic necessity to access government services and conduct banking…
Iran Policy
By Haleh Esfandiari
For the first time in eight years, Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, personally delivered the Friday prayer sermon in Tehran this week, at a moment of rising discontent and protests at home, and confrontation with the United States and fraying relations with…
Iranian newspapers widely covered the revelation that the Revolutionary Guards accidentally shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing all 176 people on board. Some of the headlines were mournful while others expressed anger at the government, which denied responsibility for three…
After three days of denying responsibility, Iran acknowledged on January 11 that it had shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. The incident occurred early on January 8, hours after Iran launched missiles at two Iraqi military bases housing U.S. troops in retaliation for the U.S.…
Iranian leaders hailed their country’s strike on two Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops. On January 8, Iran fired at least a dozen missiles at the al Asad air base in Iraq’s western Anbar province and another facility in Irbil in retaliation for the U.S. killing of Qassem Soleimani, the head of the…
Across Iraq, political and militia leaders uniformly condemned the U.S. drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, the Quds Force commander, and Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, the founder of Kataib Hezbollah and deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). They charged that the U.S.…
On January 5, Iran announced its fifth step away from its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Tehran said it would not abide by restrictions on uranium enrichment capacity, percentage of enrichment, stockpile size of enriched material,…
Iranians leaders from across the political spectrum condemned the United States for killing Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike on January 2. Hardliners promised retaliation. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had a personal relationship with Qods Force commander, declared three days of…
By Andrew Hanna
In late 2019, President Hassan Rouhani faced calls to leave office from both hardliners and moderates. The demands followed the largest protests since the 1979 revolution; they were triggered by the Rouhani government’s surprise hike in the price of fuel—by 50 percent—and the…
By Garrett Nada and Alex Yacoubian
As an oil-hungry island nation, Japan’s position on Iran has been fraught with inherent tensions. It has had to balance an existential thirst for oil—to fuel industries, cars and homes—against a moral abhorrence of nuclear weapons, especially as the only country…