Another instance of the Iranian endeavour to safeguard Arab territorial integrity was Iran's undertaking in eradication of threats to Oman's territorial integrity in the early 1970s. Within three years Iranian soldiers defended with their lives Oman's territorial integrity in Dhufar Province in the face of a fierce communist separatist movement that British forces could not eradicate in twelve years.
Currently a visiting professor at George Washington University, Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh is a renowned Iranian political geographer and historian. He is a prominent Iranologist and an internationally respected expert on inter-state territorial and boundary disputes, especially those in the region of the Persian Gulf, as his well detailed and richly documented academic contribution to the adjudication process of the Bahrain-Qatar disputes at the International Court of Justice (judgment delivered in March 2001) proved to be a decisive factor. Professor Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh has obtained his Ph.D. degrees in political geography and geopolitics from the universities of Oxford and London. He currently teaches geopolitics and political geography at the universities in Tehran area. He has been an advisor of the United Nations University and has published more than 20 books and book-chapters and about a hundred articles and encyclopedic entries in English, some of which are translated into other languages. His publications in Persian include more than 30 books, ten book-chapters as well as about five hundred articles, research papers and encyclopedic entries. He is a member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature and a number of other national and international academic societies. He retired from Chairmanship of the Urosevic Research Foundation of London in the year 2011.