Alhurra

In the Middle East, major shifts rarely unfold where analysts expect them. Over the past two years, attention has centered on parsing the signs of divergence between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Yet Iran’s latest moves have pushed a different question to the surface: Could a rising external threat revive cohesion within the Gulf bloc? A…

Because Ali Khamenei was killed in a foreign airstrike rather than dying in bed, the succession is unfolding under a different set of rules. Instead of a planned insider handover, Iran now faces a war‑time power struggle. The IRGC can point to the assassination and the U.S.–Israeli attacks to argue for an overtly military system…

 Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989 and a central architect of the Islamic Republic’s entrenched hard‑line, anti‑Western course, has been confirmed killed in a joint U.S.–Israeli strike on Tehran, aged 86.  Khamenei was only the second supreme leader in the forty-seven-year history of the Islamic Republic, succeeding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini was a…

Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, began in the third week of February, bringing more than two billion Muslims around the world a deeper spirituality as well as a religious responsibility: fasting from dawn to sunset. It is not an easy fast, because neither a morsel of food nor a drop of water is allowed, which…

On Jan. 27, Donald Trump issued an ultimatum to Baghdad. Noting that Iraqi lawmakers were considering “reinstalling” Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister, Trump delivered an uncompromising verdict: “Because of his insane policies and ideologies, if elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq.” These words were enough to end the prospects of…

Amid the nationwide protests that have shaken Iran in recent weeks—brutally suppressed by the regime at the cost of countless dead—there was one particularly striking detail. Some of the protesters targeted not only government offices and security headquarters but religious sites as well. According to reports from Iranian state media, as well as opposition outlets…

In today’s world, a jet fighter is never just a jet fighter. Modern warplanes lie at the core of complex technological ecosystems. A country that buys planes from another nation is buying far more than individual planes. The purchaser is also signing up for maintenance contracts, spare parts schedules, various types of weaponry designed to…

Under the bright lights of Beverly Hills, I steered my car south toward San Diego, California. It was a journey I had long dreamed of taking, though I never imagined it would be motivated by a meeting with a man whose face told a story of escape, and whose memory held a homeland he never…

The source had only a few moments to write down his account until he lost access to the internet. He had contacted me from northeastern Iran. He told me how officials in Mashhad, the country’s second largest city, were disposing of corpses – the victims of the Iranian government’s crackdown on protestors. “They were putting…

If I were Khamenei, I would sleep poorly these days. Not because of guilt – tyranny is rarely burdened by scruples – but because fear, once a visitor, quickly becomes an obsessive, clingy roommate: Fear of the moment when uniforms hesitate. When orders are delayed. When the machinery of repression develops a conscience. When the…