Mohammad Maleki, a Turkish-Azerbaijani civil rights activist and former political prisoner, was arrested in a violent late-night raid on his home in the northwestern Iranian city of Zanjan on Friday, May 8, 2026, and has since been transferred to an undisclosed location, IranWire reported on May 12. More than five days after his arrest, neither his family nor his associates have received any information about his fate or whereabouts. According to informed sources who spoke to IranWire, the security agents who came to detain Maleki subjected him to a physical beating during the arrest. The arresting agency has been identified as the Zanjan Provincial Intelligence Office — a branch of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence — which carries out operations against political and civil society targets in the region. Sources told IranWire that the agents explicitly threatened Maleki's family during the operation, warning them that they "would never see Mohammad again," leaving his l...
Turkish Think-Tank: Iran Shifts Strategy Against Kurdish Armed Groups From Retaliation to Sustained Attrition
Iran's ongoing missile and drone strikes against Kurdish armed organizations based in northern Iraq are not an improvised wartime reaction but rather the battlefield expression of a long-accumulating strategic transformation, researcher Çağatay Balcı argued in an analysis published May 2026 by the Iran Research Center (IRAM), a Turkey-based think tank specializing in Iranian affairs. For decades, Tehran's approach to secessionist Kurdish groups rested on three interconnected methods: decapitation, opportunistic strikes, and punitive retaliation. The most emblematic decapitation operations were the assassinations of Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) leaders Abdurrahman Ghassemlou in Vienna in 1989 and Sadegh Sharafkandi in Berlin in 1992 — operations designed not only to physically eliminate leadership but to seed distrust and organizational disintegration within the groups. The punitive dimension was equally systematic: every armed action inside Iran's borders was f...