"Ey Irân" is an Iranian patriotic song that serves as the country's unofficial national anthem. The music was composed by Ruhollah Khaleqi, and the lyrics were written by Hossein Gol-e-Golab. This anthem was first performed by Gholam-Hossein Banan.
Ann Curry is an American journalist and photojournalist, who has been a reporter for more than 45 years, focused on human suffering in war zones and natural disasters. Curry has reported from the wars in Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Darfur, Congo, and the Central African Republic. Curry has covered numerous disasters, including the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, where her appeal via Twitter topped Twitter's 'most powerful' list, credited for helping speed the arrival of humanitarian planes.
Farnaz Fassihi is an Iranian-American journalist who has worked for The New York Times since 2019. She is the United Nations bureau chief and also writes about Iranian news. Previously she was a senior writer for The Wall Street Journal for 17 years and a conflict reporter based in the Middle East.
Satchel Ronan O'Sullivan Farrow is an American journalist. The son of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen, he is known for his investigative reporting on sexual abuse allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, which was published in The New Yorker magazine. The magazine won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for this reporting, sharing the award with The New York Times. Farrow has worked for UNICEF and as a government advisor.
Roozbeh Farahanipour is an Iranian-American former student activist and a leader in the movement for an Iranian cultural renaissance and the chairman of the Marz-e Por Gohar resistance movement, which advocates the overthrow of Iran's Islamic government and its replacement with a secular Iranian Republic. After being imprisoned and tortured for his key role in the uprising of July 1999, Farahanipour went into exile in the United States where he received political asylum.
The Glorious Frontiers Party is an Iranian nationalist political party exiled in the United States. The party is banned in Iran.
Maryam Nemazee is a British-Iranian broadcast journalist, currently working with Al Jazeera English. She was born in London to Iranian parents.
Camelia Entekhabifard is an Iranian American journalist and the editor-in-chief of the Independent Persian, the first international newspaper published in Persian.
Robin B. Wright, is an American foreign affairs analyst, author and journalist who has covered wars, revolutions and uprisings around the world. She writes for The New Yorker and is a fellow of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center. Wright has authored five books and coauthored or edited three others.
Michelle Shephard is an independent investigative reporter, author and filmmaker. She has been awarded the Michener Award for public service journalism and won Canada's top newspaper prize, the National Newspaper Award, three times. In 2011, she was an associate producer on a documentary called Under Fire: Journalists in Combat. She produced the National Film Board documentary, Prisoners of the Absurd, which premiered at Amsterdam's film festival in 2014. Shephard also co-directed a film based on her book about Omar Khadr, Guantanamo's Child, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015.
The MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) is an academic research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It sponsors work focusing on international relations, security studies, international migration, human rights and justice, political economy and technology policy. The center was founded in 1951.
Lara Setrakian is an Armenian American journalist, digital strategist and entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Executive Editor of News Deeply, a digital media company that builds single-topic platforms that provide journalistic reporting, expert analysis, dialogues and opportunities for knowledge exchange on the issues they cover. Prior to founding News Deeply, she worked for five years as a Middle East correspondent for ABC News, Bloomberg Television, the International Herald Tribune, Business Insider and Monocle magazine, covering several major news events in the region like Iran’s election protests and the Arab Spring of 2011. As a Middle East correspondent Setrakian covered uprisings, conflicts, politics and economics around the region. She was instrumental in Bloomberg Television’s live on-the-ground coverage of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Following the toppling of Tunisia's president Ben Ali during what became known as the Arab Spring, Setrakian arrived in Egypt before the January 25th protest and was reporting live from Tahrir Square when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down. While reporting on the rise of piracy off the horn of Africa, Lara was the first American to interview the new president of war-torn Somalia, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.
Ali Hashem is a Lebanese journalist. He is currently a columnist for Al-Monitor covers the Middle East in general with special emphasis on Iranian affairs. He works for Al Jazeera English and prior to that he was BBC’s Iran affairs correspondent. With BBC he broke the news on the assassination of Qassem Soleimani on 3 January 2020. Hashem is among the first staff that launched Al Mayadeen news channel in 2012 and BBC’s Arabic Television in 2008. With Al Mayadeen, he was the Iran bureau chief, covering the nuclear talks during the presidency of Hasan Rouhani, the nuclear deal in Vienna where he was the only Arab journalist to interview Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the talks and after the announcement on 14 July 2015. He covered the fall of Mosul and the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and produced an hour-long documentary on the group’s leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. He wrote a biography of Al-Baghdadi for Al-Monitor and the Sunday Times that are referenced in several books on the subject. Until March 2012, he was Al Jazeera's war correspondent, covering the revolution in Libya and Syria, draught and famine in Somalia, and Iran’s general election. He was the first journalist to interview Libyan general Khalifa Haftar on the outset of the events in Libya. Ali has written for several international institutes and media outlets, such as Foreign Policy, The Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Middle East Institute, the Century Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, among others. In the Arab world Ali wrote for Lebanese daily As Safir, the Egyptian dailies Al-Masry Al-Youm and Al-Dustour and the Jordanian daily Al Ghad.
Lea Gabrielle is a former U.S. Diplomat who served as the Special Envoy and Coordinator of the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. Department of State from 2019-2021. She formerly served in the United States Navy for twelve years as a combat naval aviator and intelligence officer. As a civilian, she worked as a journalist and correspondent for the Fox News Channel and as a general-assignment reporter for Shepard Smith Reporting. On February 7, 2019, it was announced she would head up the U.S. Department of State's Global Engagement Center (GEC), tasked with countering propaganda from foreign actors such as Russia, China, North Korea, and ISIS. She has served in the position of Special Envoy and Coordinator of the GEC since February 11, 2019.
Negar Mortazavi is an Iranian-American journalist, political analyst, editor and host of the Iran Podcast. She is based in Washington DC.
Amanda Macias is an American journalist who reports on national security subjects for the financial news network CNBC.
Kathleen Anne Holland Hicks is an American government official who has served as the United States deputy secretary of defense since 2021. She is the first Senate-confirmed woman in this role and is the highest ranking woman to have served in the United States Department of Defense.
Gohar Eshghi is a civil activist, one of the Iranian Complainant Mothers and the mother of Sattar Beheshti, Iranian blogger who was killed in November 2012 due to severe torture while in custody of the Islamic Republic security forces in Iran. After the death of her son she made many efforts to bring his killer(s) to justice. She brought media attention to the circumstances of her son's death and caused a wide controversy in the ruling political system of Iran. In 2022, she was named in the BBC 100 Women list.
Yalda Moaiery is an Iranian photojournalist, she is known for war, protest, natural disaster, and conflict photographs. In 2019, she gained international notoriety after Donald Trump had used one of her photos on social media to support an attack on Iran, which she publicly spoke out on. During the Mahsa Amini protests in 2022, she was one of around twenty journalists arrested in Iran. She is a member of the Iranian Photojournalists Association (IPJA).
Ariane Tabatabai is an Iranian-American scholar of political science, writer, and senior policy advisor to the United States Department of Defense. She is a graduate of King's College London and the daughter of Javad Tabatabai, an Iranian philosopher and professor at the University of Tehran. Tabatabai is also a former researcher of RAND Corporation think tank, curriculum director and associate professor of security studies at Georgetown University, an international civilian consultant for NATO, the Middle East Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and several other research institutes.
