The victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran was an earthquake that upended the political order in the Middle East, and the aftershocks are still being felt 40 years later.

When Shi’ite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ousted the shah’s last government in February 1979 it was a moment that for many was completely “unthinkable, unexpected”, said Clement Therme, a researcher on Iran at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“The victory was an immense surprise for the Middle East and the world,” Therme told AFP.

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had been a seen as a pillar of stability and bulwark of U.S. influence in a region where Cold War tensions were playing out with the Soviet Union.

But the tumult of the revolution soon ended that spectacularly.

“One of the founding events for the foreign policy of the new regime was the taking hostage of American diplomats,” said Therme.

The saga at the U.S. embassy in Tehran ran for 444 days from November 1979 and ruptured ties between Washington and its one-time regional ally.

And events in Iran did not just reverberate on the global stage: across the region it fired up political Islam that represented a major threat to monarchies and ruling elites.

“For Sunni Islamist movements and for the Shiite minorities in the region”, the message of the Iranian Revolution was “a source of inspiration”, Therme said.

According to the official narrative of the Islamic Republic, the revolution did not stop in 1979 with the overthrow of the monarchy but remains a process that is still going on.

“The Islamic Revolution has three levels in the view of the Imam (Khomeini); one is Iran, the other is the Islamic world and the last one is the world of the oppressed,” said Abdullah Ganji, editor-in-chief of ultra-conservative Javan daily.

War and isolation

“We did not have any plans at the beginning for the Islamic Revolution to go beyond Iran’s borders,” Ganji told AFP, drawing a distinction with Soviet military interventions abroad.

But he said the changes in Iran inspired a string of startling events in the Middle East: attacks against U.S. embassies, protests by Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia and the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981.

The convulsions rattled rulers around the region and fears of Tehran were “among the reasons that led to the invasion of Iran by Iraq” in September 1980, said Therme.

The bloody conflict with Saddam Hussein’s forces ended in 1988 after hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost.

While it strengthened Islamic rule at home in Iran, it left the country cut off from most of the rest of the world.

Except for some key allies: most notably Syria and the Shi’ite movement Hezbollah that arose after Israel’s invasion in 1982.  

“There was a division in the Arab world between supporters and opponents of the ‘axis of resistance’ promoted by the Islamic Republic,” said Therme.

‘New strategy’

Ganji said that after the war with Iraq, Tehran developed a “new strategy” aimed at confronting U.S. influence around the region.

“The strategy of the Islamic Republic over the last 30 years has been preventing America from having a foothold in the Middle East,” he said.

From Syria to Yemen to Lebanon, the standoff between Washington and its allies and Tehran continues to shape events.

The U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia see Iran’s hand pulling the strings in a raft of hotspots.

Tehran has helped prop up Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad during nearly eight years of civil war, is accused of aiding Shi’ite Huthi rebels in Yemen and maintains Hezbollah as a major threat against Israel.

But Iranian officials insist the U.S. is really responsible for the conflicts and that allegations of regional meddling are used as an excuse to target the Islamic Revolution.

Last year, the U.S. pulled out of a landmark 2015 accord on Tehran’s nuclear program and reimposed sanctions, citing in part Iran’s role in regional conflicts.

Conservative Iranian politician and analyst Amir Mohebbian said the West’s “massive arms sales” to Arab monarchies in the Gulf are justified because “Iran remains a danger” to U.S. designs in the Middle East.

Analyst Therme said that “militant anti-Zionism” has been one of the constants of Iranian foreign policy since Khomeini transformed the country.

But now the current geopolitical aims of Tehran seem focused mainly on one goal, he said: “First and foremost to ensure that (the Islamic Republic) endures.”
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Conjoined twin boys born in Yemen who were in urgent need of treatment abroad died Saturday, the health ministry in Houthi-controlled Yemen said overnight.

Doctors treating 2-week-old Abd al-Khaleq and Abd al-Rahim in the capital Sanaa had said the boys could not survive in Yemen’s war-ravaged health system and needed to be taken abroad.

But the airport in Houthi-controlled Sanaa has been closed to civilian flights since 2015 because the Saudi-led coalition has control over Yemeni airspace. Only U.N. planes can land there currently and re-opening the airport is a key aim of U.N.-led peace talks, which began with negotiations in Stockholm in December.

A Saudi organization, the King Salman Center for Relief and Humanitarian Works, had been looking into how to get the boys abroad for treatment, Saudi state news agency SPA said Wednesday.

The tiny boys had separate heads but a shared torso.

In a statement carried by the Houthi-run Saba news, the health ministry said the deaths reflect the health and humanitarian situation Yemen’s children are living through as a result of the war.

Yemen’s almost four-year war pits the Iran-aligned Houthi movement against a Saudi-backed coalition trying to restore the government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi after it was ousted from power in Sanaa by the Houthis in 2014.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people, collapsed the economy and brought millions of people to the brink of famine. 
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The support for a boycott of Israel by the first two Muslim women in the U.S. Congress has opened a breach in the Democratic Party and threatens to create a fissure in the ironclad U.S.-Israeli alliance.

Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib made their debut in the House of Representatives in January openly declaring their support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, or BDS.

​What is BDS?

The movement, launched more than a decade ago and modeled on the 1960s movement to pressure South Africa over apartheid, calls for people and groups to sever economic, cultural and academic ties to Israel, and to support sanctions against the Jewish state.

But for Israel partisans, including many Democrats and Republicans in Congress, BDS smacks of anti-Semitism and poses a threat to Israel.

Tlaib, 42, has Palestinian roots and represents a district of suburban Detroit, Michigan, that is home to thousands of Muslims.

She argues that BDS can draw a focus on “issues like the racism and the international human rights violations by Israel right now.”

Omar, 37, is the daughter of Somali refugees who was elected to represent a Minneapolis, Minnesota, district with a large Somali population.

She accuses Israel of discrimination against Palestinians akin to apartheid, but denies that she is anti-Semitic.

Pro-Israel anger

Her remarks in January to Yahoo News however sparked anger among the large pro-Israel contingent in Congress, the powerful, largely Democratic U.S. Jewish community, and Israel itself, where BDS is seen as a national threat.

“When I see Israeli institute laws that recognize it as a Jewish state and does not recognize the other religions that are living in it, and we still hold it as a democracy in the Middle East, I almost chuckle,” Omar told Yahoo News.

“Because I know that if we see that in another society we would criticize it — we do that to Iran, any other place that sort of upholds its religion.”

Fissure among Democrats

Omar and Tlaib sparked the BDS controversy during a period when Donald Trump’s administration has strengthened relations with Israel and slashed aid to the Palestinians.

But Republicans saw their support for BDS as both a threat to Jews and an exploitable rift among Democrats.

“Democrats have made it clear that hateful, bigoted rhetoric toward Israel is not confined to a few freshman members. This is the mainstream position of today’s Democratic Party and their leadership is enabling it,” Republicans said in a statement Jan. 29.

​Bids to legislate

The worry about the small but growing support for BDS in the United States predates Tlaib’s and Omar’s political rise.

A number of states have passed or proposed constitutionally questionable legislation and policies that would penalize supporters of the boycott movement.

But the arrival of Tlaib and Omar in Congress was greeted with the first proposed federal law to fight to that end, in the Senate.

Senator Marco Rubio argues that BDS aims to eliminate the state of Israel, and said his legislation would protect states’ rights to exclude from public contracts any supporters of BDS.

Republicans, the majority in the Senate, along with more than half of the Democrats approved the legislation.

But a significant number of Democrats opposed it, because, they said, it violates constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression.

‘Political football’

That has left Democrats vulnerable to charges of anti-Semitism.

To fight that, in January prominent party members formed the Democratic Majority for Israel, touting themselves as “The Voice of Pro-Israel Democrats,” which for some came across as a rebuke of Omar and Tlaib.

After Omar joined the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee, according to The New York Times, Jewish committee Chairman Eliot Engel privately made it clear that he would not ignore any “particularly hurtful” remarks she might make.

“You hope that when people are elected to Congress, they continue to grow,” he reportedly told her.

“There is obviously a serious fight going on within the Democratic Party with respect to how to deal with BDS and some within their party who advocate for it,” said Alvin Rosenfeld, who directs the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism at Indiana University.

“Should the party swing to the far left and appear to be way out of line with America’s traditional ties to one of its strongest allies, Israel, the party will surely suffer at the polls,” he told AFP.

Amy Elman, a political science professor at Kalamazoo College, said anti-Semitism should not be used as a “political football by any party.”

“Democrats should care less where the charges of anti-Semitism come from. What matters is if the accusations are valid,” she said.
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U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian forces said Saturday they have launched a final push to defeat the Islamic State group in the last tiny pocket the extremists hold in eastern Syria.

Syrian Democratic Forces spokesman Mustafa Bali tweeted that the offensive began Saturday after more than 20,000 civilians were evacuated from the IS-held area in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour. An SDF statement said the offensive was focused on the village of Baghouz.

The SDF, backed by U.S. air power, has driven IS from large swaths of territory it once controlled in northern and eastern Syria, confining the extremists to a small pocket of land near the border with Iraq.

Scores of IS fighters are now besieged in a small area consisting of two villages, or less than once percent of the self-styled caliphate that once sprawled across large parts of Syria and Iraq. In recent weeks, thousands of civilians, including families of IS fighters, left the area controlled by the extremists.

“The decisive battle began tonight to finish what remains of Daesh terrorists,” Bali said, using an Arabic acronym to refer to IS.

U.S. President Donald Trump predicted Wednesday that IS will have lost all of its territory by next week.

“It should be formally announced sometime, probably next week, that we will have 100 percent of the caliphate,” Trump told representatives of a 79-member, U.S.-led coalition fighting IS.

U.S. officials have said in recent weeks that IS has lost 99.5 percent of its territory and is holding on to fewer than 5 square kilometers in Syria, or less than 2 square miles, in the villages of the Middle Euphrates River Valley, where the bulk of the fighters are concentrated.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that since the SDF began its offensive against IS in the area on Sept. 10, some 1,279 IS gunmen and 678 SDF fighters have been killed. It said 401 civilians, including 144 children and teenagers, have been killed since then.

Earlier Saturday, IS militants attacked SDF fighters near an oil field in the country’s east, triggering airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition.

The Observatory said 12 IS gunmen attacked the SDF and clashed with them for several hours until most of the attackers were killed early Saturday. It said 10 attackers were killed, while two managed to flee.

Other activist collectives, including the Step news agency, reported the attack, saying some of the attackers used motorcycles rigged with explosives.

The fighting was concentrated near al-Omar field, Syria’s largest.

 
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Turkey’s president was among hundreds of mourners who attended the funeral Saturday for nine members of a family killed in the apartment building collapse in Istanbul as the overall death toll increased to 17.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials joined the funeral prayers for the Alemdar family following the president’s first visit to the site of Wednesday’s tragedy. Five other members of the Alemdar family, including two children, remain hospitalized.

The cause of Wednesday’s collapse is under investigation but officials have said the top three floors of the eight-story building in the Kartal district were built illegally.

“In this area, we have faced a very serious problem with illegal businesses like this done to make more money,” Erdogan told reporters outside a hospital.

Thirteen people remain hospitalized with seven of them in serious condition.

Erdogan said there were “many lessons to learn,” and the government would take “steps in a determined way” after investigators complete their work. Earlier, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca increased the death toll to 17.

Friends and relatives waited near the wreckage for news of their missing loved ones as emergency teams, aided by sniffer dogs, worked around the clock to reach possible survivors.

Officials haven’t disclosed how many people are still unaccounted for. The building had 14 apartments with 43 registered residents.

 
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