An enormous thunderstorm has blown up over Tehran tonight. Maybe tomorrow’s election results will bring another kind of tempest. I’m cautious about opinion polling in Iran, but it’s clear that the opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi is at the very least a serious challenge to President Ahmadinejad, who seemed so secure just three weeks…
ESFAHAN, IRAN – Some snapshots from the Mousavi rally (the video report is here).
ESFAHAN, IRAN – A video dispatch from this historic city, on one of the most passionately fought election campaigns I have ever seen anywhere: (Read more from Esfahan here.)
ESFAHAN, IRAN – I can bear witness to the fact that support for Ahmadinejad’s main rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is not confined to wealthy north Tehran. We nearly got crushed in the crowd in Esfahan‘s central square yesterday. It wasn’t even the main man speaking but his prominent and much-loved supporter, former President Khatami. The…
I love Iranian politics. It never fits into the simple reformist/conservative paradigm so beloved of us western reporters. It’s about complex relationships between different layers of power. And it’s never about the people in the public eye. It’s always about Rafsanjani.
TEHRAN, IRAN – The biggest mosque in Tehran was full. It was, according to a true believer I met, the biggest rally ever, anywhere in the world. Their leader, president and presidential candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to address them. They screamed slogans, sang patriotic songs and waved national flags. Music blared from huge speakers. It…
It’s being reported that Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi has been, or is to be, freed from prison. Ms Saberi was arrested in Iran in January, apparently for buying wine, and later sentenced to eight years in prison for espionage. Our international editor, Lindsey Hilsum, has blogged on the case several times, including her conversations with…
Jon Snow
Throughout my reporting career, Iran has always held a special place. I was there for the revolution, there too for the seizing of the American hostages and the abortive US military effort to release them. And many times thereafter. One of the greatest highlights thus far in anchoring Channel 4 News was the week of…
I have just managed to get through to journalist Roxana Saberi‘s father, Reza, on the phone in Tehran. He and her mother, Akiko, have run the gamut of emotions these last three days – from despair on Saturday when their daughter was sentenced to eight years imprisonment for espionage, to hope today, after the chief of…
Friends of Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American journalist imprisoned in Tehran, are getting increasingly worried. She’s now been charged with spying – the classic allegation made by paranoid governments against foreign reporters. Today, I spoke to Henry Newman, a friend who studied with her at the Dehkhoda Institute at the University of Tehran in 2003. “It’s…
Jon Snow
A former CIA contact of mine with specialist knowledge on the Middle East, and good connections, suggests there could be moves inside the embryonic Netanyahu government to reopen the question of bombing Iran. Such rumours – and I will restate we are just talking about the reopening of a question – have to be taken…
As you’re reading this, a young Iranian-American journalist called Roxana Saberi is alone in Evin prison in Tehran, waiting to find out her fate. I met Roxana Saberi a few years ago – dynamic and full of enthusiasm, she was just the kind of person who wouldn’t give up despite the myriad obstacles the Iranian government…
Less journalistic and more philsosophical… at the new British Museum exhibition Shah Abbas, The Remaking of Iran, a poem illuminated by the 16th-century calligrapher Imad al-Hasain, in English translation: Seize the day, for the world is fleeting, In the eyes of the wise, the moment is better than the whole world. Alexander, who ruled the whole…
TEHRAN, IRAN – Last week we went to interview the Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, who’s been threatened by hardliners in recent weeks. We decided to take a small camera to be less obtrusive but we didn’t have a boom pole for the microphone.
Jon Snow
There’s been a lot of anniversary stuff about the fatwa issued against the writer Salman Rushdie 20 years ago by Ayatollah Khomeini. It all happened 20 years ago, and I found myself in my day job in and out of Iran, reporting on Mr Khomeini, and at home entertaining Mr Rushdie in the secrecy of…