Iran’s underground enrichment bunker at Fordow has recently seen upgrades designed to boost its enrichment capacity by orders of magnitude. It will be a major topic when Iran and the P5+1 sit down in Kazakhstan for another round of talks regrading Iran’s atomic program. In anticipation of the talks Alaeddin...

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Foreign policy analysis suggesting that Hezbollah has morphed from being an Iranian proxy into being a Lebanese national movement has not held up well in recent months. There are the overarching dynamics that situate the group within intra-Iranian politics and put them on one side of the regional Sunni-Shiite divide....

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State-controlled Syrian media is reporting that shells fired by opposition forces have struck a stadium in Damascus, killing an athlete. The reports come alongside those from the opposition, which indicate that over 50 people were killed in Damascus suburbs yesterday. The increasingly Islamist rebel forces have been making slow but...

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Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s humiliating episode at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University – which came during a recent Cairo visit and saw the Iranian leader publicly upbraided by Sunni figures – may have been symptomatic of structural barriers blocking a restoration of Egyptian-Iranian ties. The two countries have been at odds since...

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United Nations human rights officials are urging the U.N. Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court, citing documented atrocities committed by forces loyal to the Bashar al-Assad regime during the country’s two-year-long conflict. Most plausible scenarios for prosecution of Syrian officials would require a referral by the United...

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The Gulf Cooperation Council has announced a “total rejection” of what GCC head Abdellatif Zayani is describing as another Iranian attempt at “interference in the internal affairs of Arab states.” The criticism comes in response to a proposal made by Iran’s Deputy Minister for Asian Affairs Abbas Araghchi, conveyed through Iranian media, proposing...

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Iran has begun to install advanced IR-2m centrifuges in the country’s Natanz facility, after declaring its intention to do so weeks ago. The technology is an upgrade from the current generation of centrifuges that the Islamic republic employs in the facility and will increase the pace and efficiency of nuclear enrichment...

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A Hamas delegation to Bulgaria has been expelled for posing a “serious threat for national security,” according to Bulgarian security officials. The delegation had been in the country for less than two days, having been invited by Bulgaria’s Center for Global and Middle East Studies. The center’s head, Mohammed Abu Assi,...

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The latest round of talks between Iran and the UN’s nuclear watchdog have ended without progress. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency will now pause “to reflect” on the situation: “We will work hard now to try and resolve the remaining differences, but time is needed to reflect on...

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Talks between the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog and Iranian officials – aimed broadly at increasing the transparency of Iran’s atomic program, and specifically at securing access for investigators to Iran’s military facility at Parchin – have again ended without a deal being reached. Iran is widely suspected of having conducted work related...

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