Arash Azizi

1 week ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

Sepideh Qolian, a 30-year-old Iranian labor activist, spent two years in Tehran’s Evin Prison, where she wrote two books, one of them a celebrated prison memoir in the form of a baking cookbook. Just last week, Qolian was released—and three days later, Israeli missiles and drones began striking targets inside Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has addressed the Iranian people, telling them that his war can help them free themselves from their oppressive government.

2 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

News of the Israeli attacks on Iran reached me in the United States just before 5 a.m. Tehran time. The city had been hit in multiple places, and strikes meant for Iran’s military commanders and nuclear scientists had brought down residential buildings across the city. So I figured my friends and family in the Iranian capital would be awake. I rushed to call. To my shock, I woke several of my relatives. They hadn’t heard anything. No sirens had sounded; there had been no rush to shelters.

2 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

Having once described Donald Trump as Israel’s “greatest friend ever,” Benjamin Netanyahu must be watching with some consternation as the American president enthusiastically pursues a nuclear deal with Iran. After all, the Israeli prime minister made every effort to stop the Obama administration’s Iran deal in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018, perhaps partially at Netanyahu’s urging.

3 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

Opposition to women’s rights has helped fuel authoritarian movements in Russia, Hungary, Brazil, and the United States. That the same is true in South Korea, which is holding an early presidential election tomorrow, is perhaps less well known. There, the role of anti-feminists is particularly stark, helping to put women’s issues at the very center of the country’s fraught contest.

2 months ago | theatlantic.com | Arash Azizi

In the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeatedly rejected the U.S. president’s offer of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, just as he had during Trump’s first term. Tehran would not talk to this U.S. administration, Khamenei insisted. And even if it did talk, it would only do so indirectly. Talking to Washington was “not honorable,” the supreme leader claimed.