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Babylon & Beyond

IRAN: Analyst says supreme leader may have to ‘sacrifice’ Ahmadinejad

By Alexandra Zaviswriter 
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Noted Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour says something “historic” is afoot.

In a Q&A with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sadjadpour says the scale of the protests are unprecedented. People are beginning to openly question the system of governance. The nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has approved a partial recount of last week’s disputed election results.

“He was calculating that if he could buy time, the scale of these protests would gradually diminish. So far, that hasn’t been the case. He may eventually be faced with a situation of whether to sacrifice President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose ‘reelection’ he announced, or go down himself with the ship.”

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For Sadjadpour’s full comments, read the interview.

-- Alexandra Zavis in Los Angeles

Full coverage of Iran’s presidential election and its aftermath.

Pictures: Upheaval after Iranian election
Babylon & Beyond
Alexandra Zavis

Alexandra Zavis is a former writer and editor on the Los Angeles Times’ Foreign Desk who has reported from more than 40 countries. She spent a decade with the Associated Press, covering Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, among other war-torn places. After joining The Times in 2006, she has served as a Baghdad correspondent and as a California reporter covering poverty and veterans issues. She is a recipient of the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Award for distinguished reporting on foreign affairs and was part of teams of reporters awarded the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for foreign correspondence and APME’s International Perspective Award. She is a graduate of Oxford University and City University in London.

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