Iran

Until last night Ariana Grande’s fans, predominantly tweens and teens, were more preoccupied with the concept of friendship than the ripple effect of international politics. I witnessed this first hand when I was working at MTV and oversaw a Twitter Q&A with Grande, where she spent an hour or so answering questions sent in by fans. As Grande and I scrolled through the 90,000 tweets, I couldn’t help but marvel at how many were on the topic of friendship. ‘What do you look for in a friend?’ they clamoured to know. ‘Who’s your best friend?’ ‘Will you be my friend?’ Today, ‘Arianators’, as her fanbase call themselves, are tragically united in grief

Tehran Waiting to vote in Iran’s parliamentary election last year, Navid Karimi told me about his plans: to get a well-paid job with his recently acquired engineering degree, go on a road trip in the US and avoid dying fighting in Syria. Fifteen months on, as the country votes in a presidential election, I met him again in Tehran.  He is yet to find a job; the road trip, the result of being introduced to Jack Kerouac by an uncle educated in Illinois, is not going to happen anytime soon with the uncertainties surrounding Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban; but he has so far managed to avoid conscription and being sent

It isn’t just Iran who have been angered by the execution of Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Protests have erupted in Bahrain, Lebanon, Pakistan and Iraq, all places where the 1400-year-old Shia-Sunni divide remains a faultline. Iran’s reaction may seem uncompromising, with Ayatollah Khamenei tweeting: ‘The unjustly spilt blood of this martyr will have quick consequences’; but they have also sounded a note of caution. President Rouhani called for the arrest of the mob who stormed the Saudi embassy buildings. Perhaps he knows that, in the long run, Iran’s star is rising and the Saudis’ is falling. In January of last year, Douglas Murray observed in The Spectator that ‘the region’s two most ambitious centres of

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray discusses what Isis might do next” startat=1814] Listen [/audioplayer]When the creation of a new caliphate was announced last year, who but the small band of his followers took seriously its leader’s prediction of imminent regional and eventual global dominance? It straddled the northern parts of Syria and Iraq, two countries already torn apart by civil war and sectarian hatreds. So the self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to be just another thug and opportunist ruling over a blighted no-man’s land, little known and still less revered in the wider Islamic world. He was surrounded by a rag-tag army of jihadis, whose imperial hubris seemed to reflect

When the Iran nuclear deal was debated in Washington, the popular Iranian chant ‘Death to America!’ was a regular point of contention. According to the New Yorker, on one occasion the Texan republican Ted Poe asked John Kerry if the slogan meant that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted to destroy the United States: ‘I don’t believe they’ve said that,’ the Secretary of State replied. ‘I think they’ve said ‘Death to America’ in their chants.’ ‘Well, I kind of take that to mean that they want us dead,’ Poe quipped. So happily today, Khamenei has stepped in to clarify just what is meant by the now infamous chant, which first arose