Free Republic

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got out-populisted by his masters yesterday in a rare public display of disagreement between the Iranian president and the real power, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Khameini ordered his president to obey the legislature and fund subsidies for natural gas in a cold winter. Ahmadinejad had previously refused, claiming that the move would not be fiscally responsible: The political authority of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, suffered a serious blow today after the country's most powerful figure sided with MPs by ordering him to supply cheap gas to villages undergoing power cuts amid an unexpectedly harsh winter. In...

It is a rumor circulating in Tehran,” Amir Taheri told Richard Miniter, PJM Washington editor. “There is no way to know if it is true.” Taheri was responding to a Pajamas Media post yesterday of a report … as yet unconfirmed… that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. Taheri is an Iranian-born journalist with a wide range of sources inside and outside of his former homeland. He was executive editor-in-chief of Kayhan, Iran’s most read newspaper, from 1972 to 1979. Later, he joined the staffs of Britain’s Sunday Times and Germany’s Die Welt. Today, he is columnist for...

We keep reading that there are "no good options" for diminishing the threat of Iran's nuclear program. And certainly preemptive military strikes are an imperfect solution at best, though the option has to be kept on the table. But that still doesn't explain why the Bush Administration has been so reluctant to support Iranians who want to overthrow the bomb-building mullahs. Opposition to the Islamic Republic remains alive and well in Iran, despite the best efforts of Supreme Leader Ali Khameini and his loyal ayatollahs to kill it. On Monday the ineffectual Mohammed Khatami, the outgoing "reformist" president, was heckled...

TEHERAN - Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called for the armed forces to be boosted, as the Islamic republic unveiled a locally developed fighter jet, the official news agency IRNA reported on Friday. “Our country may not be faced with any military threat for years,” Khamenei was quoted as saying during a military parade in the western city of Hamedan. “But the Islamic republic’s powerful defence system must be prepared to defend the country and the people while consistently developing its abilities,” he said. During his tour of Hamedan, Khamenei was shown one of the country’s first home-made...

Al-Qaida's Links to Iranian Security Services Yael Shahar ICT Researcher Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, terrorism has served the regime of the ayatollahs as a tool of both domestic and foreign policy. This policy was directed against Iranian citizens inside Iran, as well as against advocates of opposition views in exile. Iran's sponsorship of terrorism has bridged ideological gaps and political divides; Teheran has provided arms and training to such groups as the Gama’a al-Islamiyah, the Egyptian al-Jihad, and the Algerian G.I.A. Al-Qaida too, has benefited from Iranian support and expertise for more than a decade. More recently,...