Juan Cole

A massive bomb shook Shiite east Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 70 persons and wounding 135. It was unclear, Ned Parker of the LAT reports, who was behind the strike, whether Sunni radicals or Shiites involved in a faction fight. Me, I’d put my money on Sunni radicals. There has at no point been any proof […]

President Barack Obama had this to say about the Iran crisis on Tuesday: ‘ First, I’d like to say a few words about the situation in Iran. The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the last few days. I strongly condemn these […]

Bombings and other violence left 30 dead in Iraq on Monday, and the three-day death toll is 100. Monday’s strikes included a bombing of a mini-bus with students aboard in Shiite Sadr City. In my own view,the Shiites won the battle for Baghdad and largely ethnically cleansed the city of Sunni Arabs, who I suspect […]

Iran’s Guardianship Council, a sort of clerical senate on Tuesday ruled out any cancellation of the results of the recent presidential election, as called for by the opposition. The official outcome gave incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term. The vote tallies for Ahmadinejad have struck large numbers of Iranians as wholly unbelievable. So the Supreme […]

AKI is reporting that Iran’s national guard, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, with help from the popular militia, Basij, just broke up a demonstration by hundreds of Mousavi supporters in downtown Tehran. They used tear gas and beatings, characterizing the peaceful assembly as “sabotage.” The small crowd was successfully dispersed. End/ (Not Continued)

Reformist presidential aspirant Mir Hosain Mousavi called Monday morning for another round of big street protests by his supporters against the attempt of the regime to steal the election for hard liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps has replied by warning it will crush any further street protests with a “revolutionary confrontation.” FT […]

An authoritative study from Chatham House (pdf) , the renowned UK think tank, finds that with regard to the official statistics on the recent presidential election in Iran released by the Interior Ministry, something is rotten in Tehran. The authors compared the provincial returns in the 2005 and 2009 elections against the 2006 census and […]

Update This video posted by BBC is worth watching all the way to the end. Update: A friend passed on this further eyewitness account of Saturday’s events: ‘ “it was a real mess yesterday..but the real feel of a start of something big…made it to Tohid Sq by 4.30……by 5 there were already large stream […]

The death toll caused by the state’s crackdown on the demonstrations in Iran on Saturday has risen to 10-13, with 100 injured. The regime has arrested Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, daughter of the former president, who spoke at a pro-Mousavi rally, along with 4 other members of that family. This step is typical of an old […]