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Iran has banned women from dancing, cycling, watching soccer matches, listening to certain music and now Zumba.

Thats right. The Islamic Republics Shiite leaders announced this week that, under religious law, the 17-year-old Colombian dance aerobics craze is forbidden.

Ali Majdara, the head of public sports in Iran, issued a statement Sunday banning Zumba and any harmonious movement or body shaking instruction. The ban applies to public and private gyms, clubs and classes. The announcement came just days after Majdaras Iran Sport for All federation provoked an outcry on Twitter by calling for the ban.

Critics took to Twitter as well, but to express displeasure and dismay using the Persian language hashtag #Zumba. Has Colombia summoned the Iranian ambassador yet? one Twitter user joked.

Unbelievable, said Zumba teacher Sepideh Abozari. The authorities are worried about a Zumba pandemic?

Tehran-based cleric Hossain Ghayyomi explained the reasoning behind the ban.

Any harmonious movement or rhythmic exercise, if it is for pleasure seeking, is haram, forbidden under Shiite leaders interpretation of Islam, Ghayyomi said. Even jobs related to these rhythmic movements are haram. For instance, since Islam says dancing or music is haram, then renting a place to teach dancing or cutting wood to make musical instruments is haram too.

While some have tried to justify teaching or listening to music as legal under Islamic law in Iran, he said, They could not change the mainstream of the clerical establishment.

Theres also the fear among religious leaders that Zumba is corrupting Iranian men, who can watch videos of classes posted online. Some Iranian Zumba instructors videos already have been deemed pornographic and blocked by authorities since the ban.

As Zumba has spread to more than 180 countries, it has been banned by other conservative Muslim leaders for being un-Islamic, including by a fatwa, or religious edict, in parts of Malaysia.

But Irans ban comes at a time when the dance fitness trend has gone mainstream here. In Tehran and other large cities, most public and private gyms offer womens Zumba classes. Many women, whose exercise opportunities already have been curtailed by the state, were aghast at the Zumba ban.

Abozari said the classes are incredibly popular, not just among wealthy women, but also among the middle class and the poor.

Even in low-income areas on the outskirts of Tehran where I live ... women pay as much as a month cash subsidy to participate in Zumba class to keep fit in body and mind and tune in to the happy rhythm, said Abozari, 38, who teaches Zumba in her spare time to children too poor to pay for lessons.

At issue isnt just womens rights, she said: Its about the economy. She noted that middle-class and wealthy women in north Tehran often pay for private Zumba classes at home, and those jobs where pay is negotiable and usually generous will now disappear.

Malihe Agheli, 38, a mother of two who works at a bank in Tehran, said the gym at her office already refused to offer Zumba or other rhythmic workouts. She has been paying a steep price, $50 for eight private classes a month. While Zumba classes still may be offered underground, she said, After being banned, it will be more expensive.

Zohre Safavizadeh, who has taken Zumba classes at her Tehran gym in the past, likes the music and the ambiance.

I feel wonderful the body rhythm and the music in background are fascinating, she said.

But as often happens in Iran, theres a political element, even with Zumba. Safavizadeh sees the ban as a backlash by hard-liners to the reelection last month of moderate President Hassan Rouhani.

The hard-liners want to undo what was promised by President Rouhani, she said, and as a result, We as women are deprived small happiness.

Rouhani won after promising to unite Iran. But terrorist attacks by Islamic State militants in the capital this month that killed 17 people gave hard-line Shiite leaders an opening to crack down. Some analysts said the Zumba ban may be the beginning of efforts by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other hard-liners to reexert influence and sideline Rouhani.

Tehran-based analyst Nader Karimi Juni wasnt optimistic that Rouhani will make much headway against the supreme leaders bans, including Zumba.

For the supreme leader, America and Israel are archenemies, the eternal foes, Juni said. So whatever lifestyle, tastes or athletic activities are associated with what he calls corrupted Western culture is haram and should be banned.

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Iran bans women's Zumba aerobics classes - Los Angeles Times

BBC News

Why Iranian women are wearing white on Wednesdays BBC News A new social media campaign against a law which forces women to wear a headscarf is gaining momentum in Iran. Using the hashtag #whitewednesday, citizens have been posting pictures and videos of themselves wearing white headscarves or pieces of ... and more »

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Why Iranian women are wearing white on Wednesdays - BBC News

"That (the) US arms a terrorist group is what causes instability," Khameini wrote on Twitter Monday. "Who created ISIS? The US!" He added that while US President Donald Trump accuses Iran of supporting terrorists, "terrorism in this region has American roots."

Those attacks, which left at least 12 people dead, were claimed by ISIS.

Qatar's Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said Monday that the country's government still has "no clue what are the main reasons behind all these measures."

"There is no more trust," he said, adding, "it is time for cooler heads to restructure Qatar's approach on foreign policy."

Gulf leaders have also been critical of Qatar's relatively neutral stance on Iran, which they view as a prime destabilizing force in the region.

The diplomatic rift came two weeks after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt blocked several Qatari media outlets, including Al Jazeera, over comments allegedly made by Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

Al Thani reportedly hailed Iran as an "Islamic power" and criticized US President Donald Trump's policy towards Tehran. Qatar said the official news agency which reported the comments was hacked -- and on June 6, US officials told CNN that US investigators believe Russian hackers were behind it.

But al Thani disputed that Monday, saying that "if the problem is Iran, why have those measures been taken against Qatar, why not taken against Iran?"

Al Thani praised French President Emmanuel Macron Monday for being "very active" in attempting to find a "solution to the problem."

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who is currently in the Gulf for a series of meetings, on Monday "urged all sides (to) refrain from any further escalation and to engage in mediation efforts."

Johnson encouraged Qatar to "take seriously their neighbors' concerns" but also expressed alarm at the blockading of the country and called for it to be eased.

"Qatar is a partner of the UK in the fight against terrorism but they urgently need to do more to address support for extremist groups, building on the steps they have already taken," Johnson said.

CNN's Katie Polglase and Katie Hunt contributed reporting.

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Iran blames US for creating ISIS amid worsening Middle East tensions - CNN

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The way the United States government is treating Iran is an absolute disgrace. At a time when Iran has been, on balance, behaving with relative moderation and decency, America has responded with vile callousness and additional sanctions.

The worst, of course, comes from President Trump, who responded to a terrorist attack in Iran by blaming it on them for their support of terrorism. But Senate Democrats, who voted overwhelmingly to impose additional sanctions on Iran, mainly to hit Russia, are nearly as bad.

For the last several years, Iran has been involved in a tense standoff with Western powers, most of all the United States, driven by ethno-nationalist hatred and religious fanaticism on both sides. In Iran, conservative religious hardliners and belligerent warmongers argue for maximal aggressiveness and confrontation; in the United States, a virtually identical group of people argue for the exact same thing (up to and including a nuclear first strike, in the case of one notable plutocrat). The mutual dependence of both groups is so obvious that sometimes they don't even bother to disguise their advocacy of the other's political success.

But up through the Obama presidency, open war was avoided through strenuous effort by peace-favoring factions in both countries. After some initial problems most notably when conservative elites (probably) stole the 2009 Iranian presidential election and installed the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the 2010 Stuxnet cyber-assault on Iran's nuclear program tensions were slowly ratcheted down. The 2013 Iranian election was not stolen, and returned the moderate reformer Hassan Rouhani. The 2012 American election replaced the hawkish Hillary Clinton as secretary of state with moderate John Kerry, who pursued a diplomatic bargain to restrict Iran's nuclear deal with a fervent intensity.

Iranian elites have long been suspicious of American intentions, for completely justifiable reasons, but the government grudgingly engaged with the multi-party diplomatic talks, which eventually produced the nuclear deal supported by a huge super-majority of the Iranian public. It was the best news to come out of the Middle East in decades a possible route for an influential partly-democratic Muslim nation to rejoin the community of nations on an equal footing, with the rights and responsibilities that entails.

American hardliners were infuriated by the deal, because it seemed to rule out their next planned war of aggression. Since it passed, they have yowled like cats in heat about Iran's support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and other such factions. And while one might criticize Iran for such behavior, the Middle East is a rough place, and it's easy to imagine nations thinking that supporting terrible groups simply can't be avoided. For another example, look no further than the United States, which supports the brutally repressive Saudi dictatorship (and their quasi-genocidal war in Yemen) and has armed extreme Islamist factions all over the globe (most notoriously the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s).

Whatever Iran has done, when it comes to arming and supporting morally odious nations and factions in the Middle East, the United States simply doesn't have a leg to stand on. And now we have elected President Donald Trump our very own Ahmadinejad, except more inept. Worse still, many of the economic benefits for Iran predicted by the nuclear deal have failed to materialize, in part due to business worries that American hardliners will clamp down again.

Remarkably, the Iranian public did not respond to these developments by electing their own conservative hardliner in the May elections this year. On the contrary, they returned Rouhani to office again and by a larger margin than his first term. It's a triumph of willful optimism.

Only a couple weeks later, the Iranian parliament and its most sacred national shrine were attacked by terrorists, apparently ones linked to ISIS. In response, the Trump administration sent a two-sentence memo containing a pro forma expression of sympathy and a piece of absolutely vile victim-blaming: "We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote." On the very same day, the Senate voted 92-7 to impose new sanctions on Iran, ignoring warnings from Kerry that they risked undermining the nuclear deal. Because Iran has upheld its side of the deal, the supposed justification that the state continued to violate human rights and supports terrorism only thinly disguised a desire to land a blow on a Russian proxy.

Iran is fighting ISIS on the same side as American forces in several countries. Anti-American hardliners could ask for no better gift than American politicians acting with such grotesque callousness after an ISIS attack.

The balance of evidence strongly suggests that the vast majority of ordinary Iranians, and a significant fraction of Iranian elites, favor reduced tension with America. After the 9/11 attacks, ordinary Iranians responded with a massive outpouring of sympathy, and the Iranian government tried a back channel outreach to help American forces root out al Qaeda and concede on various points. For their trouble they were labeled part of the "axis of evil" by George W. Bush and his speechwriter David Frum.

It's not surprising that belligerent, dimwitted warmongers like Bush or Trump mistake Iran for Germany circa 1942. But Senate Democrats are if anything more intellectually and morally debauched. I believe that with a bit of effort and good faith, Iran might be peeled off the Russian orbit, at least into relative neutrality and at a minimum, it's worth trying.

Instead, Democrats are risking President Obama's finest diplomatic accomplishment to strike a tiny blow against a completely different country. I don't know what it will take for the party to gain a bit of good sense on foreign policy, but nearly two decades of constant failure of just this sort of omnidirectional belligerence apparently isn't enough.

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America is treating Iran disgracefully - The Week Magazine

A soldier aims an automatic rifle through a peephole in a wall at Raqqa, Syria, on June 11, 2017.(Photo: Youssef Rabie Youssef, European Pressphoto Agency)

WASHINGTON New efforts by Iranian-backed militias to control supply lines in southern Syria highlight an alarming trend in the war-torn region: Militias and their foreign backers are accelerating their rivalry for power as the U.S.-led coalition shrinks the Islamic States territory.

You can see everyone maneuvering frenetically, said Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The problem surfaced in recent weeks when Iranian-backed militias maneuvered close to a U.S. outpost in southern Syria. The outpost at al-Tanf is a base for several hundred coalition advisers and the local forces they are supporting.

Last week, U.S.-led coalition aircraft struck the militias for a third time to warn them away from U.S. forces. An American warplane also shot down an Iranian-built armed drone operating in the same area after it fired at U.S. advisers and their partner forces.

Analysts say the primary objective of the Iranian forces is not to threatenU.S. forces. Instead, the militias are defending Irans supply routes to Lebanon that go through Iraq and southern Syria.

The Islamic State, or ISIS, "was always destined to be defeated, and now the U.S. and its allies have to contend with an emboldened, belligerent, and more powerful Iran, which has cultivated more proxies than ever, saidAli Khedery, a former special assistant to five U.S. ambassadors in Iraq.

The Pentagon sees the Iranian-backed militias as a potentialdistraction from the fight against ISIS.

The coalition calls on all parties in southern Syria to focus their efforts on the defeat of ISIS, which is our common enemy and the greatest threat to the region and the rest of the world, said Col. Ryan Dillon, a Pentagon spokesman.

Analysts say the array of militias and foreign powers in the region have differing objectives, which are coming to the forefront as ISIS is pushed out of its strongholds in Iraq and Syria, leaving a power vacuum.

For countriessuch as Iran and Russia, defeating ISISwas never themain objective. Both countries are the principle backers of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Turkey, a NATO member, has supported opponents of Assadbut mistrusts the Syrian Kurds, who are backed by the United States and are among the most effective fighters against ISIS.

ISIS is almost an afterthought, Knights said. Theyre a speed bump.

Other developments suggest that rival powers are positioning themselves for the defeat of ISIS. In Iraq, powerful Shiite militias, some supported by Iran, have moved close to the Syrian border, raising concerns about their objectives.

The militias, called popular mobilization forces, have helped Iraqs military cut ISIS supplylines during an offensive in Mosul. With ISIS nearly defeated in that key city, some analysts fear the Shiite militias now want to spread their influence by trying to control Iraq's border with Syria.

I dont want the popular mobilization forces to be part of any regional political game. But it looks like they are, said Ismael Alsodani, a retired Iraqi brigadier general who served as a military attach in Washington.

The maneuvering has intensified as ISIS' grip on territory has diminished since the militant groupswept into Syria and Iraq three years ago.

U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces are close to clearing militants from Mosul, the countrys second-largest city. In Syria, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have launched an offensive in Raqqa, the Islamic States de facto capital.

Nearly three years of bombing has devastated ISIS'leadership and destroyed much of the militant group's weapons and equipment.

Everyone knew ISIS would be defeated, said Lukman Faily, a former Iraqi ambassador to the United States. We see now that many of the powers in the region, and locally, are trying to strengthen their position for when ISIS is gone.

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