AFGHANISTAN The Taliban and Pakistani forces clashed on Wednesday in the eastern border province of Paktia as the Taliban accused Islamabad of erecting a military post on the border. Crisis Group expert Graeme Smith says tensions between the sides have been simmering for months and have occasionally escalated into armed clashes. Pakistan has grown frustrated with the sanctuary that Afghanistan’s […]

Iran has signed a Memorandum of Obligations to become a permanent member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Iran’s foreign minister said on Thursday, as Tehran seeks to overcome economic isolation amid U.S. sanctions. “By signing the document for full membership of the SCO, now Iran has entered a new stage of various economic, commercial, transit and energy cooperation,” Hossein […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The special representative of Iran in Afghanistan has said that the new rulers of Afghanistan do not have enough forces at border posts and Iran should unilaterally establish border security. But the Ministry of National Defense says that they have deployed forces to 450 security posts that have advanced military equipment along the borders of Afghanistan with neighboring countries. Iran […]

The foreign ministers of Qatar and the United States met Thursday on the sidelines of the meeting of foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Cambodia and discussed the situation in Afghanistan. In this meeting, Doha-Washington bilateral cooperation, developments in Afghanistan, the latest developments related to the Iran nuclear agreement negotiations, as well as some common […]

President Joe Biden said Monday that a U.S. missile strike over the weekend has killed the leader of al-Qaida, Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. For the past decade, al-Zawahiri headed al-Qaida, the Islamist terror group that spawned franchises around the world after the stunning attacks on U.S. soil on September 11, 2001.