Major earthquake hits southeastern Iran

Iranian officials are expecting hundreds of deaths after a major earthquake on Tuesday hit Iran near the border with Pakistan. Reports of the magnitude of the quake have ranged from 7.3 to 7.8 on the Richter scale, but it has consistently been cited as the worst in Iran in 40 years. According to the U.S. Geological Survey the epicenter was in southeastern Iran about 53 miles from the city of Khash, and it had a rare depth of nearly 9.7 miles. It was felt as far as Islamabad and Karachi in Pakistan; New Delhi, India; and in the Persian Gulf states. Causalities are expected to be high as the most severely hit area is home to nearly 2 million people, living mostly within the cities of Zahaedan, Saravan, and Khash. Tuesday’s earthquake came just days after a 6.3 magnitude quake struck southwest Iran near the Bushehr nuclear power station killing at least 37 people and wounding 850 others. A 7.8 magnitude earthquake is extremely powerful, on par with the 2008 quake in China’s Sichuan province that killed an estimated 68,000 people.

Syria

The heads of five U.N. agencies have made a joint call to the international community to take action to end the "cruelty and carnage" in Syria. In an article in the New York Times as well as a video, leaders from the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Food Programme (WFP), as well as the Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Valerie Amos, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, said their agencies are working overcapacity to assist those affected by the conflict in Syria but insisted on the need for a political solution to end fighting. Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has issued a general amnesty for "crimes committed before April 16, 2013" according to state news agency, SANA. With the decree, "the death penalty will be replaced with a life sentence of hard labor." People convicted of joining the rebellion will receive a lighter sentence, however the amnesty does not apply to those who avoided conscription. It also does not apply to people convicted of smuggling weapons or drug related crimes. Syria’s pro-regime al-Ikhbariya television announced it conducted an interview with Assad, which it will broadcast on Wednesday night. Assad has issued multiple amnesty decrees during the past two years of conflict, but has failed to appease the opposition. Opposition leader Moaz al-Khatib said, "We want an amnesty on crimes and the release of all innocents of which there are more than 160,000. Most importantly among them are women and children. If this happens we will say it is a token of a Syrian solution."

Headlines

• Police fired tear gas and clashed with students at the Jabreya boys school in Bahrain’s capital Manama as tensions grow ahead of Sunday’s Formula 1 Grand Prix.
• An Egyptian court ruled that former President Hosni Mubarak should no longer be held over his alleged involvement over the killing of protesters in the 2011 uprisings, but will remain in custody on recent corruption charges. 

Arguments and Analysis

Syria’s Forgotten Front (David Pollock, The New York Times)

"AS the civil war in Syria rages on, the risk that Israel will be drawn into the fray is rising.

Just last Friday, shells fired from Syria again hit the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and Israel fired back. It’s not the first time tensions in the area have flared.

On Jan. 30, Israel staged an airstrike on a weapons convoy in Syria, reportedly destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon. On March 6, jihadist rebels kidnapped 21 Filipino peacekeepers in the Golan Heights. The risk that Israeli retaliation for cross-border fire could spiral into a major skirmish, or even a larger Israeli intervention to set up a buffer zone in Syria, is real. To prevent it, the United States should broker a tacit agreement between Israel and moderate elements of the Syrian opposition.

Israel and the Syrian opposition don’t have much in common, but they do share some important mutual enemies, namely Hezbollah and Iran, both of which are fighting furiously to save Bashar al-Assad’s government."

Iraq Ten Years Later: A Different Country in a Different Region (Marina Ottaway, Wilson Center)

"Ten years after the U.S. invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains a deeply troubled country, rent by internal dissensions and caught in the maelstrom of the increasingly sectarian politics of the region. Together, domestic and external factors call into question, once again, whether the country can survive as a unified entity. Under the present conditions, the debates about the intervention that caused so much angst in the United States are increasingly irrelevant to understanding Iraq. The question now is where Iraq is headed and what impact the country’s possible disintegration would have on the region. The U.S. intervention is history. Iraq is now being shaped by forces over which the United States has limited influence and certainly no control: the increasing authoritarianism of the Nouri al-Maliki government and its sectarian nature, underlined by the close relations with Iran and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria; the resentment of the Sunni population, which enjoys neither the benefits of economic growth nor the advantages of autonomy; the growing self-assertiveness of Kurdistan, bolstered by major oil discoveries; and the turmoil in the region, which provides each Iraqi faction with external allies and support."

–By Jennifer Parker and Mary Casey