Bahrain’s chief prosecutor has formally accused the Iranian military of training opposition fighters to conduct attacks inside the Gulf kingdom, after Manama announced earlier this week that it had seized a boat trying to smuggle explosives from Iran and Syria into the country. Chief prosecutor Osama al-Oufi said the intelligence service reported...

• Kindle

Analysis published last Friday in the National Post piles on doubts regarding the Obama administration’s figures for the immediate sanctions relief that the Joint Plan of Action (JPA) provides to Iran. The administration has insisted that the relief being provided to the Islamic republic will amount to roughly $7 billion,...

• Kindle

Der Spiegel yesterday published analysis – headlined in part “International Investors Flock to Tehran” – describing a scramble by companies and nations to re-enter Iran’s market in anticipation of the removal of sanctions. The paper quoted Daniel Bernbeck, head of the German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Tehran, characterizing the financial...

• Kindle

The Wall Street Journal yesterday published an extensive report, based on previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence, assessing that Hezbollah is smuggling advanced anti-aircraft, anti-ship, and surface-to-surface missiles into Lebanon. The moves illustrate how both Hezbollah and Israel are using Syria’s civil war as cover for what increasingly is seen as a complex and...

• Kindle

A new oil contract being negotiated between China and Iran, which would see the Chinese state-trader Zhuhai Zhenrong Corp purchase light crude from Tehran, could according to Reuters boost imports from the Islamic republic “to levels not seen since tough Western sanctions were imposed in 2012,” in the process undermining Western efforts...

• Kindle

Iran is constructing what the Associated Press describes as ‘a new generation of centrifuges’ able to enrich uranium at a faster pace, potentially shortening the amount of time it would take Tehran to convert its enriched nuclear stockpile to weapons-grade purity, per statements made by Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi and...

• Kindle

The domestic upheaval rocking Turkey – which has now slipped into open political warfare between the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the powerful Islamist movement led by U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, and which is threatening to bring down Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan – seems set to directly impact...

• Kindle

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs took to Buzzfeed on Tuesday to outline what the article’s headline described as “20 Threats Iranian Leaders Made Against Israel in 2013,” with the subsequent story conveying an array of statements documenting that “Iranian leaders are consistent in their anti-Israel rhetoric, clear about their hostile intentions,...

• Kindle

The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported that that the Pentagon’s criminal investigation arm is probing allegations that Anham FZCO, a Dubai- and Virginia-based company awarded an estimated $8.1 billion contract to supply troops inside Afghanistan, has been moving some of its supplies through Iran. The investigation was triggered by a previous Journal article, published in September, which...

• Kindle

News reports Monday deepened concerns that both of the Obama administration’s central claims about sanctions relief provided to Iran under the Joint Plan of Action (JPA) – specifically, that the relief would be worth only $7 billion and that so-called “core sanctions” would still be effective – may prove difficult...

• Kindle