Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now located in East Africa as a freelance journalist, where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring, based on eyewitness experience working in the Persian Gulf as an editor of a business magazine and subsequently as a freelance news correspondent. The author was deported from Bahrain in June 2011 because of his critical journalism in which he highlighted systematic human rights violations by regime forces. He is now a columnist on international politics for Press TV and the Strategic Culture Foundation.
– S Arabia frets, threatens to torch region (PressTV, Dec 19, 2013):
by Finian Cunningham
Within hours of Saudi Arabia warning its Western patrons that it would “act alone” in pursuing its regional interests, three Iranian Revolutionary Guards were killed in a roadside bomb blast in the country’s southeast province.
Is this Saudi Arabia delivering on its veiled threat to sabotage recent Western diplomacy and to torch the Middle East?
The three Iranian soldiers killed on Wednesday are the latest victims in a spate of covert military attacks to have hit the Sistan-Baluchistan Province bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan.
At the end of October, 14 Iranian border guards were killed in an attack near the city of Saravan. Two weeks later, the provincial prosecutor, Ebrahim Hamidi, and his driver, were shot dead in a hit-style assassination in the regional capital of Zabol.