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Irans conservatives have been vocal in their criticism of President Hassan Rouhani, dismissing his outreach to the West as naive and the nuclear deal he championed as an economic failure.

But when it comes to challenging the moderate Rouhani for reelection in May, the hard-liners, who oppose expanding political and social freedoms, are struggling to agree on a message or candidate.

Ten possible candidates put forward by a bloc of political leaders this month are all seen as lacking the stature to oppose the first-term incumbent. Arguably the countrys most respected conservative, parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani, has thrown his support behind Rouhani.

While the field of aspirants wont be finalized until April, analysts say it is becoming clear that Rouhani a soft-spoken cleric who has staked his presidency on ending Irans isolation and reopening its economy to foreign investment is likely to secure a second term in the May 19 vote.

Rouhani is in a very strong position at this moment, said Behrooz Ghamari, an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois. The conservatives are in such disarray and finding it too difficult to rally around an agreed-upon agenda to pose any threat to Rouhani.

It is always challenging to interpret political maneuverings before Irans elections because all candidates must be approved by the conservative Guardian Council, and no one runs for office without the approval of the theocracys supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But Khamenei has shown a predilection for continuity. Since he became head of state in 1989, all three presidents before Rouhani have served the maximum two four-year terms. And Irans conservatives are notoriously unruly; they last agreed on a single candidate two decades ago.

Rouhanis technocratic administration, led by the U.S.-educated foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, promised that an easing of international sanctions following the nuclear deal would help revitalize Irans economy. But many unilateral U.S. sanctions remain in place, hindering the foreign investment that could fuel a recovery.

The nuclear deal with the U.S. and five other world powers calls for Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, which experts said could be used to develop a nuclear weapon, in exchange for a lifting of international sanctions.

The supreme leader has criticized Rouhani, most recently this month, for failing to stem rampant unemployment. At weekly Friday prayers last week, which the ruling theocracy uses to get its message out, Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani echoed Khameneis message by saying, No more talk about a long-term plan for improving employment. People must feel the improvement in their daily lives.

Such statements have led many Iranians to wonder whether the Guardian Council would even allow Rouhani to stand for reelection. But with President Trumps administration threatening to reconsider the nuclear deal and take action over Irans support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, experts say Iran is facing growing uncertainty beyond its borders.

It is very unlikely that the system disqualifies Rouhani, said Ali Vaez, Iran analyst with the International Crisis Group. Doing so amid concerns over Trumps policy toward Iran could add instability to uncertainty.

At the same time, Vaez said, the consistent criticism from Khamenei and his allies suggests that even if the president receives a second mandate, it would be a weaker one.

Rouhani appears convinced he will be a candidate again, this month assigning a widely respected moderate Mohammad Ali Najafi to help run his campaign. Najafi, an MIT graduate, has begun the reelection effort by reaching out to voters on university campuses, one of the urban constituencies that voted resoundingly for the president in 2013.

For reformists who seek greater political and social freedoms, Rouhani remains popular despite his inability to roll back restrictions on the media, the way women dress and other aspects of Iranians private lives. Analysts say these voters know that the ruling clerics are not ready to see anyone more culturally permissive than Rouhani take power for fear of sparking protests like those that followed the disputed 2009 election.

Anyone more reformist and culturally and political more open-minded than President Rouhani would cause social upheaval that could go wildly out of control, said Farshad Qourbanpour, a political analyst in Tehran who is close to the reformist camp.

Suppressing that wave, once it rises, would be very costly for the theocracy.

Although many Iranians have not felt it in their wallets, the economy is showing signs of improvement since Rouhani took office. After contracting in 2013, the economy grew by an estimated 7% last year, according to the Khabar news website. The inflation rate has dipped below 10%, while unemployment officially stands at 11%, though experts believe it is much higher.

Perhaps the strongest boost Rouhani received was from Larijani, the parliamentary speaker and a longtime advisor to the supreme leader. As conservative leaders called on their camp to agree on one candidate to oppose Rouhani, Larijani pointedly said he would not join their bloc and signaled that he would like to see Rouhani reelected.

Experts say Larijani has formed a good working relationship with the president. With Rouhani likely to win again, Larijani could have his eye on being a candidate in 2021.

I doubt that he would preempt his presidential chances in the long run, said Rouzbeh Parsi, a lecturer in human rights studies at Swedens Lund University, speaking of Larijani. If he still has those ambitions, it would be smarter to wait four years.

Special correspondent Mostaghim reported from Tehran and Times staff writer Bengali from Mumbai, India.

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

Follow @SBengali on Twitter for more news

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Trump talks tough on Iran, but can he bring jailed Americans home?

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Here's one country where hard-liners might not be poised for election success: Iran - Los Angeles Times

Iran, one of the states targeted by Donald Trumps Muslim ban, is a country from which the US could learn a lot on the resettlement of refugees, the UN has said.

The Soviet War in Afghanistan displaced six million people to neighbouring Iran and Pakistan in 1979. Almost four decades later, the Tehran government still shelters around one million registered Afghans, and up to two million are thought to also be living in the country - making Iran home to the worlds fourth largest refugee population.

The leadership demonstrated by the Iranian government has been exemplary in hosting refugees and keeping borders open, Sivanka Dhanapala, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Tehran, said on Wednesday.

It's a story that's not told often enough.

The remarks come as Mr Trumps administration tries to resuscitate its travel ban on peoplefrom seven Muslim-majority countries, and halt the resettlement of Syrian refugees.

The new ban - which could affect the one million Iranian nationals living and studying in the US - was slapped down on Wednesday by a federal court in Hawaii on the grounds it could cause irreparable injury.

It was ironic, Mr Dhanapala noted, that Iranians could be barred from the US while continuing to deal with the human fallout of the American conflict with the Soviet Union.

While Afghans resident in Iran - especially those who are undocumented - are often marginalised to the fringes of society as poorly paid manual workers, and are not allowed to apply for citizenship, the Tehran government has also recently taken positive steps such as ordering schools to take in all Afghan children, and embarked on a health insurance scheme that covers refugees.

The UN is fostering hopes that the country will ease work permit restrictions and register more undocumented Afghans in the future.

They are unlikely to return home voluntarily as Afghanistan becomes more unstable that it has been in years and its economy continues to stagnate. Worldwide, the average amount of time a refugee spends outside their home country is 20 years.

In a world where you have multiple bad stories about hosting refugees, I think Iran is really a good news story, Mr Dhanapala added.

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Iran's 'exemplary' refugee resettlement efforts praised by UN - The Independent

Iran is on track to out-produce Qatar, the worldsbiggest LNG exporter, at the vast natural gas deposit they share in the Persian Gulf.Its officials want to gain market share and attract foreign capital, even as U.S. President Donald Trump ratchets up confrontational rhetoric against Iran. But as much as they might want, the Iranians wont have much gas to export because they are likely to use most of the new production themselves.

Almost nothing. Iran has 18.2 percent of proven gas reserves, ahead of Russia and Qatar, according tothe BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Unlike its competitors, which have built far-flung pipelines and liquefied natural gas plants to reach foreign buyers, Iran exported 8.4 billion cubic meters (300 billion cubic feet) in 2015 while importing 7.5 billion cubic meters the same year. Until recently, it was a net importer, buying or bartering for gas from Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan because its domestic distribution network doesnt supply the entire country. Iran exports less gas by pipeline than Myanmar or Kazakhstan, which together hold less than 1 percent of global reserves.

Half of it goes to warming homes, 21 percent to generating power and 18 percent for industrial use, including petrochemicals production, according to Cedigaz, an industry research group. Iran, withabout 80 million people, is the fourth-biggest market for natural gas, after the U.S., Russia and China. New production can barely keep up with demand. Gas consumption almost doubled to 191.2 billion cubic meters in 2015from 102.7 billion in 2005, according to BP statistics, while output rose over the same period to 192.5 billion cubic metersfrom 102.3 billion.

Iranplans this year to start sending gas by pipeline to Baghdad in neighboring Iraq, a step that would make it the 15th-biggest exporter, up seven spots from its current rank. But Iraq is planning its own pipeline to export gas to Kuwait and may not prove to be a long-term customer. Irans development of LNG plants stalled for years due to international sanctions, and such facilities arent a priority given the impending glut of liquefied gas.

The country is considering pipelines to Oman, Pakistan and other countries, though cross-border links are scarce in the turbulent region.Floating LNG plants, a temporary fix until permanent facilities for liquefying gas can be built, are also an option. Ali Amirani, marketing director at the National Iranian Gas Export Co., concedes that the nation will consume most of its gas until at least 2024.

By March 2018, Irans outputat the giant South Pars gas field in the Gulf will have surpassed Qatars production at the connected North Field,Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said on March 7.Additional development phases at South Pars should give Iran more room for exports in the future. For now, Irans motivation for producing more gas is to re-inject it underground into crude reservoirs, especially into some of the shared oil fields with Iraq. The other incentive is to supply the domestic market, Stephen Fullerton, a research associate at consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd., said in a January interview.

Gas re-injection, which isnt considered part of marketed consumption, can increase the production and recoverable reserves of oil. The entire output from one South Pars phase went into Iranian oil fields, Fullerton said. They have huge demand for that, especially with the ramp-up of new projects for oil, he said.

For more on Irans natural gas export plans, click here.

Exactly. Iran is seeking to attract $100 billion of foreign investment into its energy industry. To boost crude output, it needs gas -- much more gas than its currently injecting. Iran required 93 billion cubic meters of gas for re-injection in 2014 but could only allocate 32 billion, according to Cedigaz. Gas used for oil production,together with domestic consumption of the fuel, is sapping volumes available for export.

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Qatar has placed a moratorium on new drilling in the North Field since 2005, and its international expansion signals a plan to preserve domestic reserves for as long as possible.The North Field-South Pars reservoir has enough gas for both countries to exploit, according to Wood Mackenzies Fullerton. Even though science shows few risks to the field from shared production, a perception that Qatar has already extracted at least twice as much gas as Iran may cause tensions, Jean-Francois Seznec, a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, wrote in an August study.

Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, Qatar Petroleums chief executive officer, denied that his company halted drilling to allay Iranian concerns. Irans development of South Pars has nothing to do with what we do with the moratorium, he told reporters in February. It never did and never will.

Read more from the original source:
Why Trump Doesn't Have to Do Anything to Stop Iran's Gas Plans - Bloomberg

Do you know about the Iranian Feast of NowRuz? Its the Persian New Year, and falls on March 21. Now means new and ruz means day, so NowRuz means new day. Here we know it as the vernal equinox and the start of springtime. In Iran, its also a pre-Muslim holy day for Zoroastrians, a day when Iranian families visit each other and talk about what they hope to see in the new year.

It would be a good opportunity for President Trump to mark a new day in US-Iran relations one that corrects his predecessors poor treatment of the Iranian people.

March 21, 2017, will be the 38th NowRuz since the 1979 fall of the shah and the Khomeinist revolution. How cruel the promise of a happy new year must have seemed during all those years!

Have you seen photos from pre-Khomeini Iran? Theyre heartbreaking. They show women fashionably dressed in the city or in bathing suits at the beach, boys and girls together on the sidewalks of Tehran.

Iranians who conducted themselves like that today would be busted by the countrys morality police. Theyre everywhere. Some of its members are simply volunteer busybodies, some are looking for the perks the regime has to offer college slots for their kids, government jobs, bank loans. At NowRuz theyll be out in force, to police those doffing winter coats to greet the sun.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has criticized the morality police but hasnt reined them in. Last year at this time, the regime announced that an additional 7,000 undercover officers would patrol the streets to arrest women who had too much hair showing from under a headscarf or were out walking with a boyfriend.

For criticizing the morality police, Rouhani was slapped down by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the man the morality police answer to, and thats put Rouhani on the defensive. Hes up for re-election on May 19, and its by no means a sure thing. He is opposed by several hardliners, and in any event the possibility of real liberalization is constrained by the real powers in Iran: the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Thats why change will come to Iran, if at all, from the streets, from an Iranian Spring. And the Iranians who want to rid their country of its oppressive regime must be told that America shares their goals. Unlike the Arab Spring movements in Egypt and Libya, an Iranian Spring would replace an implacable foe of the United States with a more liberal and pro-Western government.

Elsewhere, Arab Spring movements replaced friendly governments in Egypt, or defanged ones in Libya, with the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Islamic jihadists who killed our ambassador to Libya. Those were the kinds of uprisings President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton supported.

That was American foreign policy over the last eight years. For our friends betrayal. For our enemies submission.

What Obama and Hillary didnt support were the street protests in Tehran after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2009. Tens of thousands of people marched down the streets of Tehran shouting Down with dictatorship! while fighting running battles with the Revolutionary Guards. Obamas response was a tepid statement that its up to Iranians to make decisions about who Irans leaders will be, and that we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.

By contrast, an Obama spokesman supported the Tahrir Square protesters in Egypt even before the Mubarak government fell.

Its time to show our solidarity with the people of Iran. With Obama in office, we sided with one of the worlds greatest human-rights abusers, but they no longer have a friend in the White House.

I have a suggestion for Trump. After we ignored the street protests against the Iranian dictatorship, after we cut our disastrous Iran deal, after we abandoned Israel to the threat of medium-range missiles from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, after American hostages were allowed to rot in Iranian jails, let the president welcome NowRuz with a message to the Iranian people.

Let him wish them a happy and prosperous new year, and the freedom that all men deserve from their cruel oppressors.

F.H. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School. His most recent book was The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.

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Show Iran's oppressed people they have a friend in the White House - New York Post

Iran is home to one of the oldest civilisations on Earth, where turquoise-domed mosques, glittering palaces, and the tombs of long gone poets reveal the mysteries and intrigues of the ancients. Yet beneath the footprints of man lies an even lesser known, wilder Iran, brimming with remarkable geologic formations, ancient forests, and overgrown monuments that nature has reclaimed as its own.

In the northern Mazandaran Province, a striking panorama of rust-colored travertine terraces cuts across the mountains. The stepped, limestone formations were created over thousands of years by the flowing and cooling of water from two mineral hot springs. While travertine terraces are found in other placeslike Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone and Pamukkale in TurkeyBadab-e Surts distinctive colouring results from a high concentration of iron oxide sediments. Not only does it make for dreamy views, but one of the springs is thought to have healing properties due to its high salinity and mineral content.

Hikers descendMount Damavand, the highest peak in the Middle East. PHOTOGRAPH BY DIETMAR DENGER, LAIF/REDUX

Sixty-five kilometres northeast of Tehran, Mount?Damavands iconic ivory-frosted cone soars 5,671 meters into the clouds, claiming the title highest peak in the Middle East. Located in the Alborz mountain range, the 1.8 million-year-old dormant volcano is literally a thing of legends, immortalised in ancient Persian folklore and poetry. Climbers can take one of 16 major routes up Damavand in two to five days, navigating its rocky terrain, mineral hot springs, and rich flora and fauna. Mount Damavand was nominated for World Heritage status in 2008 and remains on Iran's Tentative List.

A rock formation rises from the desert floor in Dasht-e Lut, Iran. PHOTOGRAPH BY JAKOB FISCHER, ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

In south-east Iran, the shifting sands of Lut Desert forge a living work of art. Between June and October, subtropical tempests sweep over the landscape, creating aeolian formscorrugated ridges caused by wind erosion. The same phenomenon has also been observed on other planets like Mars, giving it an otherworldly quality. In 2016, Dasht-e Lut was inscribed as Irans first and only natural UNESCO World Heritage site for being an exceptional example of ongoing geological processes. Its also one of the hottest places on Earth, according to NASA. In 2005, it reached a record temperature of 159.3F (70.7C), beating out the previous record held by El Azizia, Libya.

Certain climatic conditions produce a type of algae that periodically turns Lake Urmia bright red. PHOTOGRAPH BY FRIEDRICHSMEIER, ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Nestled in the Iranian territory between East and West Azerbaijan, Lake Urmia was once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East. Over the past 45 years, the lake has shrunk at an alarming speed due to decreased rainfall, agriculture, and irresponsible environmental practicesit now holds less than 10 percent of its original volume, an issue that has prompted thousands of Iranian protestors to take to the streets in recent years. What remains of Urmias salt-caked shores continues to increase in salinity as more water evaporates, promoting a breeding ground for a specific type of algae that periodically turns the emerald lake bright red.

The verdant hills of Turkmen Sahra in Golestan Province, Iran PHOTOGRAPH BY ALI MAJDFAR, GETTY IMAGES

Bordering Turkmenistan and the Caspian Sea, an endless tableau of rolling green hills announces Turkmen Sahra, a region of Golestan Province inhabited by seminomadic Iranian Turkmen. Notable landmarks are the Khalid Nabi cemetery, known for hundreds of mysterious genitalia-shaped tombstones, and Gonbad-e Qabus, an 11th-century Ziyriad tower and UNESCO World Heritage site. The structure is considered a testament of cross-cultural exchange, and an outstanding example of early Islamic innovative structural design based on geometric formulae that became a prototype for tomb towers across Iran, Anatolia, and Central Asia.

Qeshm's salt caves are among the world's longest. PHOTOGRAPH BY ARV, ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Off the southern coast of Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, Bandari villages, monumental forts, and ancient shrines dot the rocky coastline of Qeshm, whispering of a long, storied past. The significance of the islandthe largest in the Persian Gulfdates back to the pre-Islamic era, when it was a strategic trade and navigation centre, and consequently a frequent target for invaders. Today the islanders are primarily fisherman, salt miners, and date and melon farmers. The biodiverse isle is also home to salt caves, mangroves, coral reefs, turtle hatching sites, and the Hara forestsfeatures that earned its place as Irans first UNESCO Geopark.

Margoon Waterfallmeaning snake-likesurges through Iran's Fars province. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALI MAJDFAR, GETTY IMAGES

Shiraz will forever be the birth and resting place of Irans most beloved poet, Hafez, but just an hour west, the 60-meter Margoon Waterfall surges through the north-west Fars province. True to its namewhich translates to snake-like in Persianwater streams down its slopes in a serpentine fashion. The region is also home to several plant communities and wildlife, including eagles, bears, hyenas, and boars. Scientists have warned that unregulated tourism has led to the erosion of these ecosystems, and called for increased protections.

Header Image:The rising sun illuminates the stacked terraces of Badab-e Surt, Iran.PHOTOGRAPH BY JAKOB FISCHER, ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

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Iran's Most Wild and Beautiful Places - National Geographic Australia