Yassamine Mather Before the death of ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on January 8 (an event that has dominated Iranian politics and news), Iranian clerics and leaders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had been competing with each other in making exaggerated claims about the significance of the fall of Aleppo: it was a victory against “heresy” and …
Category archives: Articles
Yalda, Triumph of light
Shabe Yalda, the festival of Yalda, is celebrated by Iranians, Kurds, Afghans, Tajiks and others, on the last day of the Persian month of Azar – which falls on December 21 or 22. It is a celebration of the longest night of the year, 40 days before what is assumed to be the end of …
Legacy of the 2003 war
We all know who is responsible for Fallujah As reports continue to come from Iraq indicating advances by the country’s armed forces on Fallujah, held by Islamic State, a number of international organisations, including the United Nations, are echoing earlier warning from Iraq’s main Shia cleric, ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, that the lives of the town’s …
Pro-Zionists are false friends
We need a movement for genuine solidarity with the working class When it comes to Iran, the world’s media has concentrated on the crippling sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies and then the long-drawn-out nuclear negotiations. Meanwhile, not a day has gone by when there has not been a strike, a protest, …
A dynasty of ill-gotten gains
Yassamine Mather looks at the life of Ashraf Pahlavi who died on January 7 aged 96 Ashraf Pahlavi, the twin sister of the ex-shah of Iran, was a deluded, ruthless megalomaniac. Until her last days she believed that the Iranian revolution of 1979 against the rule of her brother was a “plot devised by the …
Method behind the madness
While the Saudi kingdom’s callous executions must be condemned, Yassamine Mather says Iran’s official protests are sheer hypocrisy It appears as if the new leaders of Saudi Arabia woke up on the first day of 2016 and thought, ‘How can we make a terrible situation in the Middle East worse than it already is? How …
Time to shed illusions
Only the international solidarity of our class can deliver a lasting solution, writes Yassamine Mather As the situation in the Middle East continues to deteriorate, and in the wake of renewed political and military efforts led by the United States, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian allies have gone onto the offensive. On December 6, …
Deselect the Labour warmongers
On December 2 the House of Commons voted by 397 to 223 in favour of UK air strikes in Syria. Under the leadership of Hilary Benn, shadow foreign secretary, there were 66 Labour MPs who took advantage of the free vote offered by Jeremy Corbyn and openly sided with the ill-considered imperialist operations in Syria …
Making matters worse
Official reaction to the atrocities in France demonstrates once again that imperialism has no answers, writes Yassamine Mather in the 19th November issue of the Weekly Worker: http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1083/making-matters-worse/
Useful articles on the Kurdish question
Two articles from the 15th October issue of the Weekly Worker: Fruits of intervention Yassamine Mather surveys the mess that imperialism has created Their Kurdistan and ours Dariush Zand, communist medic