Yemen’s President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi on Monday blasted Iran for seeking to destabilize the country “through its support” for a range of separatists and rebels, a repeat of accusations that he has consistently and explicitly been leveling against Tehran for quite literally years. “Unfortunately, Iranian interference still exists, whether through its support...

• Kindle

Businessweek on Monday assessed that Iran’s appointment of Hamid Aboutalebi to be Tehran’s new ambassador to the United Nations may become “a dilemma” for President Barack Obama, just days after the outlet originally revealed that the Iranian diplomat – who had belonged to the group that captured and held 52 Americans hostage in 1979...

• Kindle

Iran dispatched a high-ranking military officer to Lebanon to lead a cleanup of Hezbollah after feared leaks to the West and Israel and mistakes made in Lebanon and Syria, according to the April 1 edition of The Daily Star Lebanon. The changes are a response to violations committed within party...

• Kindle

Just a day after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah spoke of “coffins of Israeli soldiers,” the organization has thrown into disarray internal Lebanese talks about a national dialogue. The Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar TV said the reason for the party’s boycott of the Dialogue session was what it termed [Lebanese President Michel] Suleiman’s...

• Kindle

President Barack Obama on Friday traveled to Saudi Arabia for what had long been anticipated as a fence-mending visit, after months of increasingly public disagreements between the US and its traditional Gulf allies over Washington’s posture towards Shiite expansionism, on the one hand, and political Islamists within the Sunni world, on the other. The...

• Kindle

The erosion in the international sanctions regime against Iran has generated what the Wall Street Journal last week described as “a steady flow of Western executives” – a signal that the outlet read as suggesting that “economic detente with the rest of the world may be on the horizon” – generating renewed concerns among journalists...

• Kindle

Facing uncertainty in the near future due to the America rapprochement with Iran and growing disunity among members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Gulf kingdom of Qatar is upgrading its defensive capabilities, especially its naval assets. At the recently concluded Doha International Maritime Defence Exhibition and Conference (Dimdex 2014),...

• Kindle

DefenseNews recently highlighted the capabilities of Iran’s navies, the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy (IRGCN). While neither navy is a major threat in conventional terms both are threats, especially in the Persian Gulf region, due to their “ability for irregular warfare.” A...

• Kindle

Al-Monitor on Thursday reported that top House lawmakers are in the early stages of drafting terror-related sanctions – the outlet described any legislation as “a work in progress” – that would target Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors due to the group’s global terror activities and its fighting on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad...

• Kindle

“Killing sprees” in Iran and Iraq were responsible for a global rise in capital punishment in 2013, according to a new Amnesty International report described Thursday by a range of outlets. At least 778 executions were known to have been carried out globally in 2013, 538 of them in Iran...

• Kindle