Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said this week Tehran was ready to host an extraordinary meeting of foreign ministers of Afghanistan’s neighboring states in order to help ensure regional security. Speaking at a meeting in Tehran with Mohammad Sadiq Khan, the Pakistani prime minister’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Amirabdollahian described the relations between Tehran and Islamabad as excellent and underlined […]

The US officials met in-person with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s (IEA) officials on Saturday for the first time since the US claimed it had killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in late July, CNN reported quoting two officials familiar with the talks. According to CNN, the Biden administration sent the CIA’s deputy director and the top State Department official […]

The President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called for the rapid completion of a corridor linking his country to Iran via Turkmenistan. In a meeting with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, held on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand on Friday, Tokayev highlighted the achievements of his recent visit to Iran. He also stressed the need to accelerate […]

The Iranian Ambassador to Afghanistan, Bahadur Aminian, says at least 6,000 Afghan citizens enter Iran every day and that only about half have visas. The rest enter illegally, he said, adding that these migrants risk falling victim to human traffickers. Speaking to the BBC Aminian said the only way to reduce the wave of refugees into Iran was to create […]

The president of Iran and the prime minister of Pakistan weighed plans for cooperation between the two neighbors in the energy industry. In a meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand on Thursday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif welcomed the idea of cooperation between Tehran and Islamabad in the energy […]

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 […]