Women's News Iran: Kurdish woman under torture to make TV confessions An Iranian Kurdish woman is under torture and inhuman pressures to make false televised confessions. Chini Akharkhoob, from Saqqez, a city in Iranian Kurdistan Province, who was arrested by intelligence agents on September 26, 2017, is still in prison after 40 days. The Department of Intelligence has told Ms. Akharkhoob that they would release her only after she speaks out against Kurdish opposition parties before the camera. She has refused to give in to this demand and as a result the Intelligence Department has increased its pressures on her and her family in order to make her cave in. After the independence referendum for Iraqi Kurdistan, held on September 25, 2017, hundreds of Iranian Kurds were arrested by security and intelligence agents for celebrating the outcome. At least  10 of those arrested were women . The clerical regime has conditioned the release of these prisoners on making fa...

Defeating ISIS isn’t enough: Trump urgently needs a new Syria policy By Anne Pierce Ph.D., Fox News In Syria, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, millions of people remain displaced and countless souls are physically and psychologically scarred. Throngs of children are without families or homes, entire villages and farming communities no longer exist, and cities are in ruins.  Fallout from the seismic Syrian civil war and upheaval besets the Middle East. Aggressor regimes and extremist groups have capitalized upon the chaos and despair.  It will be very difficult at this late juncture to get America’s Syria policy right, but the moral and strategic stakes are too high to keep getting it wrong. Instead of slouching toward a fatally flawed paradigm, the Trump administration should conduct an urgent policy review, such as it did for North Korea and Iran.  U.S. efforts in Syria are hampered by a narrow focus on defeating ISIS and corollary downplay...

Trump Excludes Iraq’s Popular Mobilization from his Iran Strategy 10/22/2017 7:00:38 PM Iraqs Popular Mobilization Force commits criminal activities in Kurdish regions Huffington Post, Oct. 22, 2017  - Trump’s exclusion of Iraq from his enumeration of Iranian violations in the Arab world and the IRGC roles there, in Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon, has interesting implications. Iraq seems to occupy a special position for President Trump. The prime minister in Baghdad, Haider al-Abadi, may have earned the trust of the US president, and even a preferential position with regard to US support, possibly at the expense of the Kurds, Washington’s erstwhile long-standing ally. Indeed, Trump has overlooked the participation of the Popular Mobilization forces in battles alongside the federal Iraqi forces to retake Kirkuk from the Kurds and other Kurdish-claimed regions in northern Iraq, bearing in mind that the US Treasury Department has now targeted the IRGC as a suppo...