Spring of freedom

File photo of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The internal power struggles in Iran have not stopped since 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Shah’s regime and was monopolized by the religious establishment that controls all joints of the Iranian government. The conflict between the wings of the reformist and militant regime has reached bloody levels against the backdrop of the Green Movement of 2009, which would have almost overthrown the hardliner conservatives loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, had the bloody crackdown by reformist not been suppressed. Today and while Hassan Rouhani who is a moderate president with balanced relations with the moderate reformists on one hand and with the moderate conservatives on the other hand, who is at the helm of the executive power, at a time when the Islamic Republic is facing qualitative challenges in the face of harsh US sanctions, the hardliner conservatives left no chance but to ignore Rouhani...

Under scrutiny. The conference room of the Zahra Centre, the headquarters of a Shia association in northern France, after it was raided by 200 policemen, on October 2. (AFP) There was a time Iran systematically assassinated Iranian opposition members in Europe. Some of the more prominent assassinations of the 1980s and early 1990s were: Shahriar Shafiq, the shah’s nephew; General Gholam-Ali Oveissi; former Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar; regime critic Reza Mazlouman in France; Iranian Kurdish opposition leaders in Austria and Germany and Kazem Rajavi, representative of the People’s Mujahideen of Iran (MEK) to the United Nations in Switzerland. The practice of assassinating opponents abroad ended in the 1990s when the regime in Tehran tried to gain respectability and international acceptance. There are signs, however, that Iran is turning the clock back to the bad old days. The first ominous sign appeared in July when the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service confirm...