Pakistani security forces raided a militant hideout in a former Taliban stronghold near the border with Afghanistan Monday, triggering a shootout that killed five soldiers and four insurgents. Acting on intelligence, security forces launched the raid in North Waziristan, a district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, according to a military statement. North Waziristan and other former tribal regions in northwestern Pakistan […]

A radical decentralisation of politics and decision-making in Iran is needed to allow Kurdish communities to benefit from natural resources, experts have argued. Kurdish regions in Iran have rich minerals, dense forests and massive surface and underground water deposits. But deforestation, exploitation of the environment and the irregular and unconsidered extraction of gold and aluminium has resulted in environmental and […]

The Iranian Navy’s Jamaran destroyer seized two American maritime drones and then released them in a safe area in the Red Sea as means of preventing naval accidents. The destroyer encountered the “data collecting” vessels during a routine operation aimed at securing shipping routes and confronting piracy and maritime terrorism, the Navy said in a statement on Thursday. The Iranian […]

In 2015, President Barack Obama worked with three European powers, the European Union, Iran, China, and Russia to conclude the Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In 2018, President Donald Trump formally withdrew the United States from the deal. Instituting his policy of “maximum pressure,” Trump imposed crippling economic sanctions that punished Iran […]

When the school year began in Afghanistan in March 2022, journalists were poised to cover the return of girls to secondary education. Taliban leaders in Kabul had committed to allowing separate education for girls so long as they followed the Taliban-mandated dress code. Instead, the cameras recorded disappointed girls being sent back home. The Taliban’s decision-making process is opaque to […]

It is heartening to see Indian career diplomats of recent vintage penning their understanding of the complex India-Pakistan relationship. Soon after The People Next Door (Harper Collins, 2017)by T.C.A. Raghavan, India’s high commissioner in Islamabad from 2013-2015, we have India’s Pakistan Conundrum (Routledge Books, 2022), by Sharat Sabharwal, his predecessor in Pakistan from 2009-2013. Both Raghavan and Sabharwal also served […]

The foreign ministers of Iran and Russia weighed plans to strengthen coordination between the two countries on regional and international issues. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov talked about the “pressing issues of bilateral cooperation in follow-up to the agreements of the talks between the two top diplomats in Moscow on August 31, 2022,” Russia’s […]

China aims to expand its influence in the “Lithium Triangle” as a component of a broader campaign to construct a near-monopoly in the global lithium market. The Lithium Triangle, comprising Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, accounts for approximately 56% percent of global lithium supply. Beijing’s acquisition of multiple Argentinian, Chilean, and Bolivia lithium mining operations enables China to dominate regional lithium […]

In December this year, India will assume presidency of the economic grouping, G20, which comprises major developed and developing economies. For one year thereafter, New Delhi will be in the driver’s seat. It is not expected to be an easy ride given the rather difficult economic bends and steep geopolitical humps that will have to be negotiated. In fact, the […]

A war of words between Azerbaijan and Iran has again heated up, with semi-official sources in Azerbaijan openly calling for Iran’s large ethnic Azerbaijani minority to break free. “The time has come: Southern Azerbaijan should secede from Iran,” went an August 26 headline on Caliber.az, a website connected to Azerbaijan’s presidential administration. (“Southern Azerbaijan” is the irredentist term for Iran’s […]