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Alireza Akbari: The British-Iranian Executed by Tehran 

Alireza Akbari, Iran's former deputy defense minister, speaks during an interview with Khabaronline in Tehran, Iran, in this undated picture obtained on January 12, 2023. (Khabaronline/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via Reuters
Alireza Akbari, Iran's former deputy defense minister, speaks during an interview with Khabaronline in Tehran, Iran, in this undated picture obtained on January 12, 2023. (Khabaronline/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via Reuters
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Alireza Akbari: The British-Iranian Executed by Tehran 

Alireza Akbari, Iran's former deputy defense minister, speaks during an interview with Khabaronline in Tehran, Iran, in this undated picture obtained on January 12, 2023. (Khabaronline/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via Reuters
Alireza Akbari, Iran's former deputy defense minister, speaks during an interview with Khabaronline in Tehran, Iran, in this undated picture obtained on January 12, 2023. (Khabaronline/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via Reuters

Iran has executed British-Iranian national Alireza Akbari, the judiciary's Mizan news agency reported on Saturday, after sentencing the former Iranian deputy defense minister to death on charges of spying for Britain. 

Here are some details about Akbari and his case: 

- He served as deputy defense minister when Ali Shamkhani was minister from 1997 to 2005, part of the administration of reformist President Mohammad Khatami. He had been a close ally of Shamkhani - currently the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council - since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. 

- He served in other security roles including as an advisor to the Iranian navy, and led the implementation of UN resolution 598 that ended the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. 

- According to a caption in a video aired by Iran's state news agency IRNA on Thursday, Akbari moved to Britain after being briefly detained and released on bail in 2008. Reuters could not verify if Akbari had moved to Britain in 2008, or when he returned to Iran. 

- He was arrested in 2019. In an audio recording purportedly from Akbari and broadcast by BBC Persian on Jan. 11, he said he had returned to Tehran following an invitation by a senior Iranian diplomat involved in Tehran's nuclear talks with world powers. 

His wife, Maryam Samadi, told BBC Persian he was put in solitary confinement for 10 months, before being moved to Tehran's Evin prison, where Iran has incarcerated other dual nationals. 

- In the audio recording, Akbari said he had made false confessions as a result of torture. "With more than 3,500 hours of torture, psychedelic drugs, and physiological and psychological pressure methods, they took away my will. They drove me to the brink of madness...and forced me to make false confessions by force of arms and death threats," he said. 

"They would tell me: 'If you resist, we will send you to the dark cells of Evin prison where you'll face an interrogator with a whip.'" 

- Iranian state media broadcast a video on Thursday that they said showed that Akbari played a role in the 2020 assassination of Iran's top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, killed in a 2020 attack outside Tehran which authorities blamed at the time on Israel. In the video, Akbari did not confess to involvement in the assassination, but said a British agent had asked for information about Fakhrizadeh. 

- Britain has described the death sentence as politically motivated and had called for his immediate release. 

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Climate Change Imperils Drought-Stricken Morocco’s Cereal Farmers and Its Food Supply

A farmer works in a wheat field on the outskirts of Kenitra, Morocco, Friday, June 21, 2024. (AP)
A farmer works in a wheat field on the outskirts of Kenitra, Morocco, Friday, June 21, 2024. (AP)
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Climate Change Imperils Drought-Stricken Morocco’s Cereal Farmers and Its Food Supply

A farmer works in a wheat field on the outskirts of Kenitra, Morocco, Friday, June 21, 2024. (AP)
A farmer works in a wheat field on the outskirts of Kenitra, Morocco, Friday, June 21, 2024. (AP)

Golden fields of wheat no longer produce the bounty they once did in Morocco. A six-year drought has imperiled the country's entire agriculture sector, including farmers who grow cereals and grains used to feed humans and livestock.

The North African nation projects this year's harvest will be smaller than last year in both volume and acreage, putting farmers out of work and requiring more imports and government subsidies to prevent the price of staples like flour from rising for everyday consumers.

"In the past, we used to have a bounty — a lot of wheat. But during the last seven or eight years, the harvest has been very low because of the drought," said Al Housni Belhoussni, a small-scale farmer who has long tilled fields outside of the city of Kenitra.

Belhoussni's plight is familiar to grain farmers throughout the world confronting a hotter and drier future. Climate change is imperiling the food supply and shrinking the annual yields of cereals that dominate diets around the world — wheat, rice, maize and barley.

In North Africa, among the regions thought of as most vulnerable to climate change, delays to annual rains and inconsistent weather patterns have pushed the growing season later in the year and made planning difficult for farmers.

In Morocco, where cereals account for most of the farmed land and agriculture employs the majority of workers in rural regions, the drought is wreaking havoc and touching off major changes that will transform the makeup of the economy. It has forced some to leave their fields fallow. It has also made the areas they do elect to cultivate less productive, producing far fewer sacks of wheat to sell than they once did.

In response, the government has announced restrictions on water use in urban areas — including on public baths and car washes — and in rural ones, where water going to farms has been rationed.

"The late rains during the autumn season affected the agriculture campaign. This year, only the spring rains, especially during the month of March, managed to rescue the crops," said Abdelkrim Naaman, the chairman of Nalsya. The organization has advised farmers on seeding, irrigation and drought mitigation as less rain falls and less water flows through Morocco's rivers.

The Agriculture Ministry estimates that this year's wheat harvest will yield roughly 3.4 million tons (3.1 billion kilograms), far less than last year's 6.1 million tons (5.5 billion kilograms) — a yield that was still considered low. The amount of land seeded has dramatically shrunk as well, from 14,170 square miles (36,700 square kilometers) to 9,540 square miles (24,700 square kilometers).

Such a drop constitutes a crisis, said Driss Aissaoui, an analyst and former member of the Moroccan Ministry for Agriculture.

"When we say crisis, this means that you have to import more," he said. "We are in a country where drought has become a structural issue."

Leaning more on imports means the government will have to continue subsidizing prices to ensure households and livestock farmers can afford dietary staples for their families and flocks, said Rachid Benali, the chairman of the farming lobby COMADER.

The country imported nearly 2.5 million tons of common wheat between January and June. However, such a solution may have an expiration date, particularly because Morocco's primary source of wheat, France, is facing shrinking harvests as well.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization ranked Morocco as the world's sixth-largest wheat importer this year, between Türkiye and Bangladesh, which both have much bigger populations.

"Morocco has known droughts like this and in some cases known droughts that las longer than 10 years. But the problem, this time especially, is climate change," Benali said.