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The Hindu
24-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Centre urged to back out of deep-sea sand mining projects
Green Movement, a Kozhikode-based environmental organisation, has demanded that the Central government back out of the deep-sea sand mining projects in Kollam, Alappuzha, and Ponnani on the grounds that it will have an adverse impact on marine life as well as the livelihood of fishermen. In a press release, Green Movement general secretary T.V. Rajan said the move would result in the collapse of sea walls, thereby raising the chance of coastal erosion. It would also restrict the right of States in the coastal area to just fishing, he added.
Telegraph
23-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Trump has done the right thing. Regime change must be the next step
I first visited Iran with a few fellow MPs back in 2006, and for eight years of my career in Westminster I co-chaired the Iran group in Parliament. I have met Iranian ministers and generals, some of whom are no longer alive after Israel's strikes. I have even been to a party (non-drinking) in North Tehran where the granddaughter of a Grand Ayatollah was in attendance. I have met the hardliners, the reformers and the ordinary Iranians. Iran is a beautiful country with some of the nicest people in the Middle East. They are a brave people, struggling to live free from oppression. I say brave because many Iranians challenge the regime at great cost to themselves. In recent times we have seen the Green movement and the Hijab protest. It is not uncommon to meet someone in Tehran whose friends have been beaten or detained by the authorities for something as simple as attending a party. Over the many years I have followed Iranian politics I have sadly seen a slide away from limited, measured reform towards the hardliners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. For years now the IRGC has extended its tentacles further across the globe. Iran's proxies have murdered, plotted and attacked not just Britain but also her allies in the region. Yet we all tolerated such behaviour. Some of us found hope in the inherent quality in the Iranian people. Perhaps over-optimistically, we hoped that as so often with revolutionary countries, there might be another revolution. Sadly, under the stewardship of the late General Soleimani – who was head of the IRGC Quds Force, responsible for foreign and clandestine operations, until he was assassinated by the US in 2020 – Iran became not only more aggressive but more capable. Slowly but surely it looked like Iran was heading towards a military dictatorship. The Revolutionary Guard 's grip tightened. Meanwhile the West kept trying to do deals on nuclear enrichment at the very same time that the regime's supporters were chanting 'death to America and death to Britain.' We all started to look like a parent who ignores the disruptive child for too long rather than saying 'no'. When one examines the long charge sheet of Iranian activity over these last 20 years it is amazing how we pretty much stood back. From death squads in London, to storming our Embassy and taking dual nationals hostage the Supreme Leader and his government have got away with so much. And it is only months ago that Iran's proxies – the Houthis – directly attacked British warships. You can only tolerate 'death to America! Death to Britain!' so many times before losing patience. I can give you an example of quite how insulting and ludicrous the regime can be. They have named the street next to the British Embassy 'Bobby Sands Avenue' in tribute to the IRA terrorist. Once when I visited they accused Britain of choosing the Pope! It would be funny if it wasn't so menacing. The recent strikes on the Iranian nuclear program were long time coming but Iran had been warned and warned. To put their program into perspective for civil nuclear power no one needs more than 20 per cent enriched uranium. Iran had in the last couple of years breached the 90 per cent levels needed to make a bomb, and still they were playing games. They only have themselves to blame. But there is a but. Because whether you thought it was wise or not for President Trump to do this, we are now in a whole new ball game. The worst thing to do would be to not see the mission through: this is not a video game which can be switched off from the golf course of Mar-a-Lago. To damage the nuclear programme and not destroy it would be probably worse than not doing anything at all. Twenty years of 'limited and proportionate responses' have got us nowhere: the time for limits is past. Meanwhile, Iran will respond – maybe immediately or maybe in months to come. To protect our allies in the Gulf, the military strikes must also degrade substantially the large stockpile of ballistic missiles that Iran has at its disposal. The Houthis in Yemen must not be allowed to resume their campaign against shipping. If Iran is going to be brought to the table it must have no options left. The regime itself must feel in peril. We should not hold back in offering to the Iranian people an alternative path: a path full of oil wealth and trade, leading to an open and prosperous society.
Times
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Times
I looked into Ayatollah Khamenei's eyes. He's willing to die a martyr
The closest I ever came to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was in the summer of 2009, during the Green Movement that brought millions of Iranians on to the streets to protest against a presidential election that had been rigged in favour of the Ayatollah's preferred candidate. One Friday in June that year I was one of two foreign journalists, and the only Brit, in the press section of a huge open air prayer space in the centre of Tehran while, a few yards away, the supreme leader delivered one of the most consequential sermons of his life. Amid chants from the congregation of 'Death to America!' and 'Death to Israel!' Khamenei abandoned his long-maintained pose of neutrality between Iran's political factions, declaring the election results legitimate and ordering the protesters to end their agitation or face 'blood, violence and chaos'. • US bombs Iran – follow live Accusing western countries of being behind the protests, Khamenei suddenly fixed his eyes on mine, declaring: 'And the most evil of them all are the British.' The faithful bayed dutifully: 'Death to Britain!' In the weeks that followed, as the Green Movement was obliterated by truncheon charges and pepper gas, show trials and prison rapes, I never forgot that look. Years later and now 86 years old, Khamenei is the least known of the three national leaders who will decide the future of Iran, and with it that of the Middle East. For Binyamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, the war that Israel started on June 12 is about Iran's ability to acquire nuclear weapons and threaten the Jewish state, which Khamenei has described as a 'cancerous tumour' that needs removal. Now, Trump has done what he previously seemed unwilling to do. Late on Saturday night, the US president ordered military strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. For Khamenei, this is a moment of truth in which his 46 years of service to the Islamic Revolution, 36 of them spent as the country's all powerful supreme leader — effectively its head of state, head of religion and commander-in-chief — will either be vindicated or reduced to ashes. It was Khamenei's mentor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 revolution that toppled Shah Mohammad RezaPahlavi after spending 15 years in exile. In the 1980s he waged an epic eight-year war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. (If you find the surnames of the two successive supreme leaders confusingly similar, you're in good company; from Trump down, the US administration calls Khamenei 'the Ayatollah', even though there are actually many ayatollahs in Iran.) Khomeini trusted his mentee and valued his commitment to revolutionary principles. When he died in 1989, Iran's Assembly of Experts, the body of more than 80 clerics who choose the supreme leader, elected Khamenei in his place. • Who is Iran's ruthless supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? As supreme leader, Khamenei is the ultimate power in Iran. Presidential nominees are vetted by the Guardian Council, which is partially selected by Khamenei and also vets laws passed by parliament. Critically, Khamenei also controls the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran's elite military force that acts an ideological shield for the revolution, controls the ballistic missile programme and runs the country's foreign military operations. In recent years, Khamenei has presided over what until last year looked like an unstoppable expansion of Iranian influence through the Middle East, backing militias in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, as well as Bashar al-Assad's Syria (a network that came to be known as its 'axis of resistance') — all the while enriching uranium to ever higher levels. Hubris took hold. The death in 2017 of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president of Iran and Khamenei's only equal among his peers in the political elite, robbed the supreme leader of the restraining influence of a pragmatist, a man who was more interested in reaching an accommodation with the West than in fighting it. Meanwhile, the rest of the religious establishment elevated this cleric of only middling expertise to the status of a major divine. The Revolutionary Guard commanders whom he coddled with lucrative sanctions-busting opportunities made his overseas mission their own. All this came to an abrupt halt after Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. This led to the mauling of Hezbollah at the hands of the same brutally effective Israeli intelligence services and air force that are now mauling Iran. To make matters worse, last year Assad's Syrian regime was overthrown, denying Iran its most important foreign client. The Islamic Revolution has been boxed back to its heartland on the Persian plateau. For the past week Israel's air force has been hammering nuclear, military and civilian targets in Iran, in the process killing more than 600 people, a third of them civilians. Unable to protect their own skies, Iran has retaliated by sending waves of missiles into Israel, including a device that got through Israel's defences and hit the Sorokah hospital, in Beersheeba, on Thursday. Trump has announced that he will decide within two weeks whether to enter the war — giving him enough time to ready his stealth bombers and aircraft carriers, but also to have a last crack at diplomacy. The world is waiting to see whether Trump uses his bunker-busting bombs to try to take out Iran's still intact Fordow uranium enrichment facility, near the seminary city of Qom, where Khamenei once studied 'at the feet', as the Persian saying goes, of his mentor Khomeini. If Trump does decide to fight, Khamenei's response will be just as critical. This could range from the 'unconditional surrender' that Trump demanded on Tuesday to attacking US forces in the Middle East by conventional means and — as a possibly suicidal last resort — further enriching the 60 per cent enriched uranium that Iran already possesses and going flat out for a bomb, assuming that Iran retains the materiel and expertise to do so. • The Iran-Israel conflict in maps, video and satellite images At stake now for the supreme leader is not simply the country's territorial integrity but also the ideologically radical and socially repressive ethos he has imposed on it. Revolutionary Iran is a country where the hijab remains mandatory for women, even if a large minority abandoned it during the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' protests of 2022-23, and have resisted the authorities' best efforts to force them to adopt it again. Modesty codes are imposed by the police and criticising the supreme leader is punishable by prison. Married women need their husband's permission to obtain a passport. Religious minorities face discrimination and the state executed 901 people in 2024, according to the UN. Conventional political careers are assessed on the basis of positions attained and policies enacted. But Khamenei, warrior, prophet and moral scourge, has made it his life's work to preserve the purity of the Islamic Revolution and deny Israel a moment's peace. It is by these measures that he asks to be judged. The style of the man is the antithesis of his adversaries. While they love to be seen, Khamenei is sparing in his appearances, a stranger to vanity and reportedly frugal in his tastes. A globetrotter he is not: he last set foot out of Iran in 1989 (destination: North Korea) and rarely accepts visits from westerners (an exception is made for Vladimir Putin). Gone even are the modest fripperies of his early adulthood in the shrine city of Mashhad, where he indulged an interest in poetry and music and cultivated the image of a worldly intellectual by smoking a pipe. From his earliest years, Khamenei was raised by his father, Javad, also a Shia cleric, to value austerity and devotion to Islam. Two of his brothers also became clerics. 'My father was a well‑known religious scholar who was very pious and a bit of a recluse,' Khamenei recalled. 'We had a difficult life. I remember that sometimes we didn't have anything in the house for dinner at night. Nevertheless, my mother would try to scrape something up, and that dinner would be nothing but bread and raisins.' Today, when Khamenei engages in verbal jousts with his current — and perhaps final — adversaries in Israel and the West, it is in his mind the confrontation of the implacable man of God, soft of voice, hard of will, and the histrionics of the fragile western ego. On Wednesday, in an address ostensibly to the Iranian people — but in reality directed at Trump — Khamenei made it clear that he won't capitulate. Occasionally raising his left hand to emphasise a point (he lost the use of his right hand in 1981 after an opposition group tried to kill him using a booby-trapped tape recorder), and frequently licking his lips, an old habit, the supreme leader said in his calm, even voice: 'The Iranians are not the kind of people who surrender … if America enters the fray it will suffer irreparable harm.' As I learnt to my cost at Friday prayers that day in 2009, Khamenei is an amateur historian who remembers with rancour the sway that Britain enjoyed over Iran for many decades, without, however, ever formally colonising the country. He hates sell-outs, particularly the last Shah's father, Reza Shah. Reza was brought to power by the British and, having made the mistake of favouring the Germans in the Second World War, was bundled into exile by the Allies when they invaded in 1941. An Iranian friend recently sent me a clip of Khamenei in a hall of people discussing the moment when the British told Reza to leave Iran. His style is conversational, intimate, grandfatherly — but above all virile. 'They told him to go,' Khamenei told his rapt audience, 'and he went! Can you imagine a greater humiliation for a country?' And, as if addressing Reza himself, he went on: 'If you're a man … if you possess a drop of spunk, you'd say, 'I won't go!' You'd let them kill you!' So when Khamenei issues his warnings from his bunker, do not confuse them with the empty fulminations of a Colonel Muammar Gaddafi or a Saddam Hussein, made while their praetorian guards melt into the night. Do not expect this man who has lived his life for a noble cause — and in his pious eyes has everything to gain from dying a martyr to it — to do an Assad and willingly exchange the leadership of his country for a Russian dacha. Right now, from exile in America, a second Reza Pahlavi — the grandson of Reza Shah, for whom Khamenei has such fierce contempt — has been calling for the Iranians to take advantage of the Israeli assault and topple their tyrannical ruler. It's true that millions of Iranians hate Khamenei for his callousness, his machinations, his driving of the country to the brink of disaster. But, if they are forced to choose between a foreign beast and a domestic monster, a great many will choose the latter. From his base near Washington DC, Pahlavi taunts the supreme leader, calling him a rat in his lair. But he knows, and everyone knows, the basic history. His father cut and ran when things got tough in 1979 and his grandfather did the same in 1941. Not, I think, Ali Khamenei. Christopher de Bellaigue is the former correspondent of The Economist in Iran and author of The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King
The Independent
21-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Hope of change by my fellow Iranians has turned to horror - our pain was primed for Israel's exploitation
'When are the Americans coming to save us from these mullahs?' my fellow Iranians would ask when I started my journalism career in Tehran some 22 years ago. That was just before the Middle East was transformed by the US's reverse Midas touch. Within a few years Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya had been reduced to rubble and ruin at the hands of US intervention. So salvation from the clerics shrank to two options: reform from within or revolt. Iran's hardline conservatives in charge would not abide either. Just as the Green Movement's promises of rights and rapprochement with the West seemed within reach, they were predictably extinguished, along with every ember of dissent that has come before and after. The closest Iranians came to change was three years ago, when the country erupted into mass protests sparked by the morality police's killing of a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini. It was the biggest uprising since the 1979 revolution. The regime had never appeared so vulnerable, or so aware of its frailty, as revealed by an internal missive meant for IRGC top brass but leaked to the world by hackers. The short bulletin revealed a flailing apparatus with a micromanaging Supreme Leader at the helm, disdainful of timorous officials. It concluded that with three quarters of the population supporting the protests, the country was in a state of revolution. This unprecedented situation demanded an unprecedented response: protesters were blinded, arrested, raped, tortured, and executed in a brutal wave of violence that has not ended. It was no surprise, then, that the first couple of days after Israel's unexpected attack were met with as much optimism as trepidation – as well as humour. One meme showed IRGC commander-in-chief Hossein Salami alongside a picture of his namesake sausage with the heading 'Salami becomes salami'. Messages of thanks to 'Dear Bibi' were posted on social media. But as the death toll rose – hundreds of civilians have been killed so far, and thousands injured – hope turned to terror. I've spent the last two decades covering the Middle East, and the last 20 months investigating Israel's war crimes in Gaza and its increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Spoiler alert – despite Dear Bibi's protestations he is saving the Persian people, Israel's intentions in Iran are not altruistic. And it's not just Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Israel's dismantling of the rules-based world order – executed with the same callous disregard as its killing of Palestinians – may have eased its journey to attacking Iran, but the road to this bombing campaign was paved long ago. Journalists of my generation did not need the latest US intelligence to debunk Israel's claim it attacked Iran because the mullahs were months away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. I've covered Israel's histrionic warnings about Iran's imminent nuclear bomb too many times over the years. According to Israel, Iran has been months away from a bomb for, well, hundreds of months. Even my bad maths knows Israel's timeline doesn't add up. For as long, Israel has been drawing from the colonial script of divide and rule to ensure its dream of a fragmented, conflict-riddled Middle East becomes a reality. Israeli medics stitched up Sunni fighters, including extremist Islamists, during the Syrian war. It has long supported Kurdish rebels. It is now using the Druze to stoke up ethnic tensions in Syria. And so, Israel's desire for my motherland is an Iran unravelled, its fabric shredded along ethnic lines, a nation undone by design - another carefully engineered fracture in the region. With the regime hanging so many of its citizens from nooses across the country, our pain was primed for Israel's exploitation. The ethnic minorities bore the brunt of the regime's butchery; Baluchis, Ahvazis and Kurds had their own axes to grind, and Israel offered the whetstone. Now, Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is a cornered rat with nowhere to go. His best chance at survival would be to evoke his spiritual superior and the regime's architect, Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1988, the war with Iraq was ended when Khomeini announced a ceasefire, saying he had been forced to drink the 'poisoned chalice'. But it is unlikely that Khamenei will do the same. As black smoke rises over my beloved city Tehran, I fear civil war. I hope I am wrong, and that Israel will be satisfied with a unified Iran with a puppet leadership; another client state of the USA ready to trade underpriced oil. Loss of dignity a small price to pay for peace. But I am old enough also to know how that story ends… and so the cycle will continue. One thing I am sure about is that it is not for me, nor my fellow compatriots in the diaspora who have spent most of our lives in safety and security, to decide the fate of our nation. It is for my fellow Iranians who survived the Iran-Iraq war, who have survived the regime's savagery, to decide.
New Statesman
19-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
What happens if the Iranian regime falls?
Photo byWhat will happen in Iran if the Islamic Republic's regime falls? Would Iran descend into instability? This is a question — perhaps the question — often posed about Middle Eastern countries facing potential political transition. The thinking often goes that while dictatorships may be unpalatable, at least they guarantee stability. And that stability is better for the international community even if it comes at the expense of the people under oppression. It is time to abandon this problematic approach to the Middle East. Syria provides some hard lessons. In 2011, the Syrian people protested peacefully against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It was Iran and its main proxy Hezbollah that swiftly advised Assad that making concessions to the protesters would be a projection of weakness. After all, just two years earlier Iran had witnessed the Green Movement —peaceful protests calling for regime change, sparked by popular rejection of the results of that year's presidential elections, which granted then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term. The Iranian authorities violently and quickly cracked down on the protesters. Assad heeded Tehran's advice. With Iran and Hezbollah's help, the Assad regime brutally attacked the Syrian protesters. Despite this, many in the international community expressed worry that were Assad to go, Syria would descend into war like what happened next door in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 or in Libya in 2011 after the ousting of Muammar Qaddafi. This line of thinking ignored that neither in Iraq nor in Libya was there a viable stabilisation and transition plan in place for the day after. It is not that the end of dictatorships automatically brings chaos. Chaos happens when there are no sober pre-emptive plans for handling obvious challenges like weak social cohesion or the absence of state institutions; deeply flawed, externally incubated governance formulas are parachuted on countries in transition; the voices of the local population are ignored; and foreign actors enter the picture as spoilers. The result in Syria was not regime change but a conflict that lasted almost a decade and a half and which would have been preventable had the international community not largely regarded Assad as the lesser of two evils — the dictator vs the unknown. Following the harrowing scenes from Assad's prisons that flooded the public domain after he was finally ousted in December last year, the world can now clearly see that virtually nothing could have been worse for Syrians than the continuation of Assad in power. In clinging to his position throughout the Syrian conflict, Assad was following the Iranian regime's playbook. He sacrificed the Syrian economy, state institutions, and the Syrian people for the sake of survival. The Islamic Republic is the same in its pursuit of regime preservation. Iran has been under sanctions for years and yet it has not modified its behaviour (such as funding foreign proxies) so that its economy can recover. Iran's prisons may not be getting much attention from the international media, but they are rife with torture. The justice system is not independent, with many imprisoned or executed without a fair trial. The Tehran regime would rather see large numbers of Iranian citizens suffer than give up power. The Assad regime was never defined by stability. Assad manipulated Islamist jihadists to cross the border into Iraq to attack British and American troops after 2003 and in 2011 he released many imprisoned jihadists to frame the uprising against him as an Islamist terrorist plot, paving the way for the emergence of Isis. He also allowed Hezbollah and Iran to use Syria as a thoroughfare for funds and weapons and a site for the training of militias. Anyone worried today about instability spilling over were the Tehran regime to fall must remember that the spillover has already happened and has been going on for decades. Iran has been the Middle East's main cause of instability since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 and this threat has extended beyond the region. Iran has been cooperating tactically with al-Qaeda and Isis across the Middle East and Africa, in addition to supporting Shia militias in Iraq and Lebanon among others. Iran and Hezbollah have conducted numerous terrorist operations worldwide including in Latin America and Europe. And Iran bears part of the responsibility for Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack on Israel. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The Syrian people suffered unnecessarily because the international community selectively ignored Assad's role in fostering terrorism both in the region and worldwide; was paralyzed by concern about who would rule Syria after Assad; and was not forthcoming about providing Syrians with the international assistance necessary for political transition. The Iranian people have been suffering for decades and deserve to be trusted to lead their country into a better future. But as the Iraq, Libya, and Syria scenarios demonstrate, the Iranian people need thoughtful and adequate international support in managing the transition. If the regime were to fall, the international community needs to abandon cliched thinking about the Middle East and work together with the Iranian people so that both Iranians and the world can recover from the ills of the Islamic Republic. [See more: Will Iran surrender?] Related
