Latest news with #Najaf


Zawya
3 days ago
- Business
- Zawya
Gulf Air set to restart flights to Baghdad, Amman
Bahrain's national carrier Gulf Air is set to resume its scheduled flights to and from the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Najaf as well as Amman in Jordan, starting from tomorrow (June 28). The airline said its flights to these cities had been recently affected owing to the regional tension. Gulf Air has been operating since 1950, making it one of the earliest airlines established in the Middle East. It operates scheduled flights from its hub at Bahrain International Airport to various destinations across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Far East. The Bahraini flag-carrier said the rest of its flights to destinations across its network are operating as per schedule. Lauding its valued customers for their patience and understanding, Gulf Air said the recent developments in the region had led to the stalling of some of its flights to Jordan and Iraq. This decision was taken by the airline owing to its commitment to the safety and well-being of each of its passengers and crew, it added. -TradeArabia News Service Copyright 2024 Al Hilal Publishing and Marketing Group Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (


LBCI
25-06-2025
- Business
- LBCI
Middle East Airlines resumes full flight schedule to Iraq
Middle East Airlines (MEA) announced in a statement on Wednesday that, following the resumption of its flights to Baghdad earlier in the day, it will fully resume its previously scheduled flights to and from Baghdad, Najaf, and Erbil. The flight schedule is as follows: Baghdad: Two daily flights Najaf: Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays Erbil: Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays MEA invited customers to contact its Call Center for further information at the following numbers: Landline: 01-629999 Hotlines: 1320 and 1330 (free of charge from any landline or mobile phone) Mobile lines: 81-477905 / 81-477906 / 81-477907 / 81-477908

Yahoo
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Who is Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?
Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, Iran, in 1939, as the second son of a local religious leader, Javad Khamenei, and he grew up in relative poverty. He learned to read the Qur'an in early childhood before attending a theological seminary school in Mashhad. At 18, he travelled to Najaf in central Iraq to study Shia jurisprudence, but was later asked by his father to return. He was a student of Ayatollah Hossein Borujerdi and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. There is not much known about Khamenei's family life, except that he is married and has six children. Khamenei's interest in poetry is a well-known part of his public persona. He often cites poems in his speeches and hosts poetry gatherings where pro-government poets gather to read their poems to receive his comments. Khamenei's interest in literature is quite rare among religious clerics. The same goes for his interest in gardening. Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK's latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences. In the 1960s and 1970s Khamenei was involved in protests against the US-backed monarchy (the shah), and was an ardent supporter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then living in exile, and against the 'westernisation' of Iran. This led to his arrest by the shah's secret police and intelligence operation, the Organisation of National Security and Information (Savak), which suppressed opposition to the shah. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the monarch who ruled Iran until 1979, was backed by western powers including the US and the UK. After a decade of economic growth in Iran, mainly based on oil revenues, did not lead to an improvement in the standard of living for ordinary Iranians, a combination of students, intellectuals and clerics created combined support for a revolution. After the shah was overthrown in the 1979 revolution, Iran became an Islamic republic. Khamenei was appointed as a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Council, which was put in place to manage the revolution, and served as deputy defence minister and led Friday prayers in Tehran, which was considered highly prestigious. The new republic adopted an anti-western 'imperialist' foreign policy. This is known as 'global arrogance' (Estekbar Jahani) in Iranian post-revolutionary discourse. In 1982, he was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, winning 95% of the vote, after the previous president, Mohammad Ali Rajai, was killed in a bomb attack in Tehran. Khamenei had been the target of an assassination attempt two months earlier, leaving him with serious injuries and paralysis in his right arm. Iran's war with neighbouring Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, lasted from 1980 to 1988 and is known in Iran as the 'sacred defence'. The war began after an invasion by Iraqi troops on Iranian territory and resulted in around one million deaths across both countries. This was another significant period in Khamenei's career. He was active in managing Iran's defence as the chairman of the supreme council of war support during this period. The council was formed to make sure the country was as prepared as possible during the war and to take measures to mobilise forces and to meet the needs of the war at the battlefront. Read more: He also commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite part of the Iranian armed forces, from 1981. At the end of the war, Khamenei claimed Iran had won a 'luminous victory'. He praised Khomeini for his tactics in the war and said that the supreme leader had realised from the very beginning that it was not an ordinary conflict between two neighbours. 'He recognised the enemy and realised that the main enemy is not present in the war, and he recognised that Saddam is just a tool.' He went on to suggest that this was a war about US regional power and that Saddam Hussein would continue to receive US support. Khamenei became supreme leader in 1989 after the death of Khomeini. He was designated as the new leader by the Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body of Islamic clerics. He ruled in the same style, and with the same type of foreign policy, as his predecessor; looking for allies to offset US power in the region. The duties designated for the rahbar (supreme leader) are listed in Article 101 of the constitution and range from determining the political direction of the government (in consultation with an advisory committee) to commanding the armed forces to declaring war, peace, and the mobilisation of armed forces to pardoning or commuting sentences upon recommendation of the head of the judiciary. Khomeini's conception of Islamic government was centred on the doctrine of the guardianship of 'the jurist', known as velayat-e faqih, and this continued at the heart of the government that followed under Khamenei. This gives the supreme leader extensive powers, including control over the military, judiciary and media. This doctrine plays a vital role in legitimising theocratic power in Iran, linking religious authority with the state. Discussion about velayat-e faqih continues within Iranian society as part of an ongoing dialogue between traditional religious authority and civil society. Read more: The question of who might come to power after Khamenei was raised during the grassroots uprising and pro-democracy protests around Iran in 2022 and 2023. It was expected that any transition would take a considerable amount of time, especially if the aim was for a more democratic form of government. The current war might suggest a different outcome. Even though the Israeli attacks on Iran have again sparked discussion of a possible change of leader, the public is focused now on their own safety, and defending Iran, not on political change. Any external war or threats coming from outside Iran has historically united Iranians against aggressors. This means that the path to democratic change is not likely to be created, or helped, by Israeli air strikes or US threats. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Sahar Maranlou does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.


Times
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Times
Who is Iran's ruthless supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?
Tehran's bitter winter had penetrated the dungeon and left the frail inmate shivering with cold. Houshang Asadi, a communist dissident, took pity on his cellmate and gave him his sweater. The man refused it at first before tearfully accepting the gift. 'Houshang,' the man said, 'when Islam will come to power, not a single tear will be shed.' That memory of Ali Khamenei in 1975 as an idealist who suffered for his opposition to the Shah stayed with Asadi for decades to come. Years later, in 2003, Khamenei, now the undisputed dictator of Iran who threw young men and women into those same dungeons, repaid Asadi's kindness by forcing him into exile. 'He changed from a man who fought for freedom into a dictator,' Asadi told an interviewer. 'Now Mr Khamenei is more of a dictator than a shah.' If he met him again, he said, he would ask: 'Who are you, Mr Khamenei?' • Israel-Iran conflict: follow the latest news Khamenei might answer that he is a survivor, born to an impoverished cleric, Javad Khamenei, in the religious Iraqi city of Najaf in 1939. He began his religious studies at four, studying under various jurists, until one day in 1958 he came across Ruhollah Khomeini — later supreme leader of Iran from 1979 to 1989 — in the Iranian seminary city of Qom. That encounter set Khamenei down a path that almost led to his death this week, when Israel spotted an opportunity to kill the leader — although the US vetoed the plan. If Khamenei escaped assassination, it would not be the first time. He had become a confidant of Khomeini, who began sending him on missions across Iran to agitate against the Shah, leading to his arrest and eventual exile. He returned to Iran triumphantly in 1979 with his mentor, and quickly rose up the ranks of the new Islamic regime. Two years later, a bomb hidden in a tape recorder blew up in his face as he gave a religious lecture, leaving him with a paralysed right arm. • Does Iran have nuclear weapons? Why Israel is attacking now In a picture taken at his hospital bed, Khamenei peers out from behind his thick spectacles, his arm in a sling, with a faint smile hidden by his bushy moustache and beard. Three months later, he became the president of Iran. Iran in the 1980s was torn by revolutionary fervour, purges and war. Opponents of the new Islamic regime were 'disappeared' and executed, as Khomeini sought to plant the seeds of Islamic revolution — and Iran's influence — in the region by backing militants from Lebanon to Kuwait. Iraq, backed by the US and Gulf countries, invaded Iran, setting off a ruinous war. The Iraqis were beaten back fairly quickly but Khomeini and Khamenei decided to counter-invade Iraq, a decision Khamenei later rued as Iran became bogged down in a war attrition that only ended in 1988. Before Khomeini died a year later, he had chosen Khamenei to succeed him. It was a controversial choice. Khomeini had been widely expected to be replaced by the relatively moderate Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, with whom he had fallen out shortly before his death. • Inside the Iranian opposition, from a rapper to the Shah's son Unlike Montazeri, Khamenei was not a Shia religious authority, a prerequisite to become the supreme leader. But Khomeini's confidence in him — and his own uncanny ability to build a network of alliances throughout the state — thrust him onto the voting council. As with Asadi's sweater on that winter's day in 1975, Khamenei made a show of declining the gift. 'My nomination should make us all cry tears of blood,' he said. He spent the following three decades ruthlessly entrenching himself, often at the expense of the state, by planting loyalists in the Islamic Republic's power centres and playing them off each other, weakening all but him. A self-professed admirer of western literature with the affectations of a philosopher, Khamenei had doubled down on Khomeini's hatred of the US and Israel. On his watch, Iran turned into an undisputed regional power, building allies and proxies in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza, while building the region's largest missile arsenal and furthering its nuclear programme. He occasionally allowed reformist presidents to be elected, only to undermine them publicly and privately. • The Iran-Israel conflict in maps, video and satellite images His police and soldiers periodically put down protests, and his regime is more unpopular than ever. In recent years, Khamanei has busied himself with preparations for his succession. After President Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash last year, he appears to have settled on one of his six children, Mojtaba. Those plans are in disarray. Iran's allies in the region have been devastated by war with Israel over the past two years, and Khamenei, who had predicted the Jewish state's demise by 2030, may not survive this one.


LBCI
18-06-2025
- Business
- LBCI
MEA cancels flights to Iraq on June 19, 2025
Middle East Airlines (MEA) announced the cancellation of its flights to Iraq (Baghdad, Erbil, and Najaf) scheduled for Thursday, June 19, 2025. For the full schedule, click here.