Expert: Iran - U.S. Crisis

Iran promised vengeance after a U.S. air strike in Baghdad on Friday killed Qassem Soleimani, Tehran’s most prominent military commander and the architect of its growing influence in the Middle East. Soleimani, a general who headed the overseas arm of the Revolutionary Guards, was regarded as the second most powerful figure after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Reuters)

Here is an expert from McGill University that can provide comment on this issue :

Milad Odabaei, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology

“The recent waves of protest in Iran demonstrate a widespread public distrust for the sociopolitical direction of the Islamic Republic. The current US administration is extending a longstanding policy of disempowerment of democratic politics in Iran by targeting the infrastructure of sociopolitical development through sanctions and by creating a state of emergency through threats of war. In the words of Iranian protesters, evil has surrounded Iran from every direction.”

Milad Odabaei comes to McGill from the University of California, Berkeley where he received his Ph.D. in Anthropology with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in May 2018. His current project, Giving Words: Translation and History in Modern Iran, is an ethnographic and historical reflection on the translation of European thought in Iran.

milad.odabaei [at] mcgill.ca (English)