Encouraging local insurgencies to weaken Tehran may seem like a good plan, but would it work? Fomenting ethnic or religious tensions in the enemy camp is an old military tactic, which the US itself has used many times in the Middle East.
Kordia was arrested in 2024 during the Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia University. The charges against her were dropped the next day, but she was detained in March 2025 by ICE during a routine immigration check-in.
Whether they were saying their prayers, or mouthing the anthem, it was clear to anyone watching on that the players had received the message from home that they needed to demonstrate symbolic solidarity with their homeland, currently under siege. Catherine Ordway, an Australian lawyer, academic and sport integrity consultant who has worked with numerous international sporting bodies, told DW.
Pahlavi pledged to lead a transition to a 'free and democratic Iran.' He called on President Trump to continue the American-Israeli military operation against Iran, in the hope of displacing a regime he decried for placing a 'sea of blood' between itself and its people.
We at the Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq condemn in the strongest terms this cowardly terrorist crime, which we consider a direct attack on the feminist struggle and the values of freedom and equality.
Carrying banners showing the face of the country's slain leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, people on Monday held a new portrait that of his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei. Other similar scenes on state media showed pledges of loyalty from several cities across the country, with people chanting, Death to America and Death to Israel, as security forces looked on.
As recent demonstrations showed, a sizable segment of the Iranian people already opposes the regime. But when President Trump told them to 'take over your government,' it seems unlikely he considered how the regime responded to those protests, or other movements for a more open Iranian society.
The Iranian announcer was grieving the loss of a "father," as he put it, while for Alinejad and so many other Iranians in exile and at home, the vaporized ma[n represented something entirely different]. Such torrential downpours, from loyalists and dissenters alike, often follow the deaths of notorious and long-ruling dictators-Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein.
US representative Mike Waltz used his prepared remarks at the meeting to criticise the Iranian government's response to the protests, noting that the ongoing internet blackout in Iran made it hard to verify the true extent of the crackdown by authorities there. The people of Iran are demanding their freedom like never before in the Islamic Republic's brutal history, Waltz said,
The MEK is an Islamic political opposition group with socialist tendencies. Founded in Iran in 1965, it took up arms against the ruling Pahlavi dynasty, waging bombing campaigns against the Shah's government and US targets in the 1970s and supporting Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1978/1979 Islamic Revolution. Shortly after the revolution, however, the MEK fell out with the new rulers in Tehran and was banned in the country. It then went into exile, continuing its opposition activities from abroad.
Some 182,000 Kurds living in Iraqi Kurdistan were killed in 1988 by chemical weapons launched by Saddam Hussein's regime in a series of attacks known as the Anfal campaign. That campaign included chemical attacks on Halabja, a village on the Iraq-Iran border, and other communities. Five thousand people are estimated to have died in Halabja. They were the victims of sarin and VX nerve agents, and mustard gas.
