All Blog Posts from World Watch

Turkey's president has sought to allay Western fears that his country — NATO's only majority-Muslim member — is shifting its affinity from Washington and Europe toward Iran.

Increasing closeness between Turkish leaders and Iran, and Turkey's quest for better ties in the broader Muslim world, have fueled concerns in the West that this key U.S. ally is moving gradually to the East.

But Turkey's president used a speech Monday at the opening of an Islamic nations' summit in Istanbul to try and ease worried Western minds.

President Abdullah Gul told the Organization for the Islamic Conference's Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC) that Turkey's foreign policy maneuvers in the West and in the East are "complementary to each other, not contradictory."

Read full post…

Leaders from 48 Islamic states met Monday in Turkey to begin an economic summit which may see its stated purpose overshadowed by some controversial guests, and the decades-old quest for peace in the Middle East.

The one-day gathering drew Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is engaged in a standoff with the West over Tehran's nuclear program, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, on his first trip abroad since being controversially re-elected, and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Gul told attendees that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the basis of all conflicts in the Middle East, stressing the need to find a final solution to this issue and end the Israeli occupation of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

Read full post…

Going into Thursday's high-stakes negotiations with Iran, President Obama will soon see for himself the corner into which the Islamic Republic has thrust his predecessors.

Iran has the world over a barrel, literally. The country's vast oil reserves will undermine Obama administration efforts to increase U.N. sanctions, and Iran knows it.

U.N. sanctions only work when they are airtight. Despite the White House's message that the veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council (the P5 as they are called: the U.S., Russia, France, China, and the U.K.) and Germany are unified in their response and that the Iranian missile tests of last week were a game changer, they are dodging the harsh reality that China is not even close to being "on board" for tough sanctions.

Read full post…

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned President Obama on Friday not to press Tehran on the disclosure of a second uranium enrichment plant, Time Magazine reports.

"If I were [President] Obama's adviser, I would definitely advise him to refrain making this statement because it is definitely a mistake. It would definitively be a mistake," Ahmadinejad told TIME in an exclusive interview.

Mr. Obama and the leaders of France and Britain demanded Friday that Iran fully disclose its nuclear ambitions "or be held accountable" to an impatient world community. They threatened new sanctions after the disclosure of a secret Iranian nuclear facility.

Read full post…

An Iranian justice official has confirmed the execution of 24 convicted drug traffickers at the end of July, believed to be one of the largest mass-executions carried out by the Islamic Republic since the revolution brought the Ayatollahs to power 30 years ago.

The message of swift, decisive "justice" delivered by Iran's leaders is clear, and comes at a time when those leaders, both political and religious, are wrestling to overcome an image of internal dispute and reassert their authority following post-election violence that left at least 30 people dead and hundreds jailed.

Tehran's deputy prosecutor, Mahmoud Salarkia, said the 24 were hanged at the notorious Karaj prison on July 30th. "Their execution was approved by the supreme court," said Salarkia, without naming the prisoners.

Thus far, Iran has killed at least 219 prisoners this year, according to a tally from the French news agency AFP, and the pace of the executions seems to have increased since the postelection turmoil.

President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad was sworn in on Wednesday for a second term after his purported land-slide reelection on June 12.

Since then, Iranian police and Basij paramilitary members have cracked down hard on thousands of opposition supporters who took to the streets with their claim the vote was rigged on a dramatic scale by Ahmadinejad and his supporters.

Also since then, and officially unrelated, Iran has executed at least 44 drug convicts, 19 Baluch minorities convicted of supporting a terrorist group, and possibly two young men sentenced for murders they allegedly committed before the age of 18.

Read full post…

Iranians are bracing themselves for more street violence Wednesday, reports CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer.

The country's reform movement intends to demonstrate outside Parliament tomorrow to protest the swearing-in of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (left) for a second term as President. Reformers believe he stole victory in a rigged election on June 12, and has no right to take office.

Read full post…

Witnesses tell news agencies that Iranian police have arrested at least four people and prevented Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi from attending a ceremony Thursday afternoon at a Tehran cemetery marking the 40 day anniversary of 27-year-old Neda Agha Soltan's death.

Unidentified witnesses told the Associated Press that hundreds of police surrounded Mousavi as he tried to approach the grave of Soltan, whose widely publicized shooting amid postelection violence fueled the opposition movement. The AP reports that Mousavi was forced to leave the cemetery but hundreds others gathered to mourn Soltan and others killed in the violence were allowed to stay.

Web sites affiliated with the opposition movement reported earlier Thursday that Mousavi and fellow presidential opposition candidate Mehdi Karoubi would attend the gathering at Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery, which coincides with other planned memorials and "silent wave" demonstrations across Iran.

The gathering at a Tehran cemetery, which is coincides with other planned memorials and "silent wave" demonstrations across Iran, is also meant to honor the other victims of the unrest in the Islamic Republic following the contentious June 12 election which saw President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reelected in an apparent landslide.

Opposition candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, who reportedly plan to attend the ceremony at the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, insist the election results were based on wide-spread fraud and rigging — with the collusion of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Mousavi and his backers applied last weekend for a permit to hold the cemetery memorial on Thursday — the anniversary of Neda's widely publicized death — but there was no indication the government had consented, setting the stage for yet another possible confrontation between Iranian security forces and opposition supporters.

Read full post…

Iran's elite military force, the Revolutionary Guard, has become the spine of a "military security government with a facade of a Shiite clerical system," according to an expert interviewed by The New York Times.

Rasool Nafisi, an Iran expert who recently co-authored a study on the Guard for the RAND Corporation, argues that the military wing has greatly extended its power in Iranian politics and society amid the chaos following the contested June 12 presidential elections.

At left: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accompanied by Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, right, and Chief of the Revolutionary Guard's general staff Ali Akbar Ahmadian, left, listen to the national anthem as he arrives for a meeting of Revolutionary Guard commanders in Tehran in a Sept. 11, 2007 file photo.

The Times article says the Guard is much more than a division of Iran's military — it has control over the country's missiles and at least some control over the nuclear program, but it also generates huge wealth through business enterprises ranging from laser-eye surgery to black market trading.

And the Guard is a great benefactor of current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (a former member himself), who opposition leaders claim stole the election through massive, organized fraud.

Since he took office, according to The Times report, the Guard has won some 750 government contracts — none of which are subject to oversight by Iran's Parliament.

The Guard's fast-growing tentacles, which touch every aspect of Iranian life, combined with its lead role in the post-election crackdown on opposition voices, "has led many political analysts to describe the events surrounding the June 12 presidential election as a military coup," according to the paper.

Iranian opposition protesters clashed with security forces in Tehran Friday in largest showing of strength since the regime cracked down on election demonstrations last month.

Sparked by the sermon of Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful cleric widely believed to be sympathetic to opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered, chanted and marched through Tehran's streets.

Here are some images and videos of the day's events:

Read full post…

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the senior dissident cleric in Iran's religious establishment, has issued his harshest condemnation of the Islamic Republic's leadership since the disputed June 12 election.

Mondtazeri never names Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei directly in his remarks, but he has long been an outspoken opponent of both Khamenei and the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Montazeri says "those who have lost, religiously and reasonably, the credibility for serving the public, are automatically dismissed, and the continuation of their work has no legitimacy."

The Grand Ayatollah also says Iranians have a religious right and duty to protest their leaders, if those leaders violate the tenets of Islam by usurping power.

Read full post…