By summer it was quiet most every hour of the day in the Tehran gold bazaar. War and recession had extinguished much of the market’s customary bustle. Then one morning, in late July, the hush in one of its passageways was broken by shouting.

A group of customers had gathered outside a gold shop. For months, they had been handing over their modest savings to the dealer, a little at a time, under an arrangement increasingly promoted on Iranian social media: you did not need enough money to buy a bracelet, a necklace, or even a tiny gram bar of gold outright. You could deposit whatever you had, and your petty tomans would, as if alchemically, accumulate as gold. Eventually, when you had saved enough, you could take home the real thing.

Now the shop’s shutters were down. There was space enough between them to see that the establishment had been emptied out. The cries for the proprietor to show himself were angry and hopeless.

“They fell for these social-media ads offering advance purchases of gold with any amount of money,” a Tehran gold-market source told Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s economic unit. “And now they have nowhere to turn.”

No official account of the case had yet been made public. The market source estimated that the dealer had taken in deposits amounting to the value of four or five kilograms of gold (well over half a million dollars at current prices) and that perhaps 70 or 80 people had come to the bazaar after learning of his disappearance. The full number of victims remains unknown.

In Iran, variations of this story play out with remarkable regularity. A business collects people’s savings, over time, while openly advertising the arrangement. The official apparatus to monitor and verify the legitimacy of such transactions exists, but yet, in case after case, the state steps in only—if it all—after the money has vanished.

The appeal of the gold schemes is easy to understand. For many Iranian families, years of high inflation have turned gold into a refuge for savings whose value would otherwise invariably drain away. The advertisements exploit the anxiety directly.

“The biggest mistake when buying gold is waiting until you have all the money,” one gold dealer says in a social-media promotion for a similar arrangement. Bring whatever you have, the ad promises. Invest it. When your accumulated savings equal the price of the gold you want, choose it from the display. There is no need, the dealer boasts, to pay tax or a manufacturing fee. Any amount will do.

Different commodities have featured in similar pitches—and scams. In the first weeks of 2024, Kourosh Company, formally Kourosh Pardazan Aysa, became one of the most notorious examples. The company offered iPhones for about 20 million tomans (approximately $350 USD at the time), roughly half their prevailing market price, claiming that it could do so by eliminating middlemen. It advertised heavily, retaining celebrities to participate in its promotional efforts. Thousands of customers reportedly paid in advance. Then, in February 2024, the company’s chief executive fled Iran, and the business collapsed amid enormous unpaid obligations and crowds of customers trying to recover their money.

Before Kourosh, there were financial and credit institutions such as Caspian and Samen al-Hojaj, which attracted deposits by promising unusually high returns and then imploded, due in part to giant loans made to regime insiders that were never repaid. Modest depositors numbering in the tens of thousands lost their entire life savings.

While the details differ from case to case, for the victims the sequence is painfully familiar: an enticing offer, an aura of legitimacy, aggressive advertising, cash—sometimes huge sums—collected in plain view of regulatory bodies, and then the vanishing act.

Iran now has a word dependably associated with such episodes: malbakhtagan, the people who have lost their money. They appear outside government buildings and courthouses demanding repayment, sometimes through years of petitions and protests. In the political vocabulary of the Islamic Republic, they constitute both a legal problem and a potentially dangerous social constituency. Once there are enough of them, their private losses become a challenge to public order.

At sea among the “sultans”

The persistence of these scandals might suggest a simple explanation: Iran does not have the laws to stop them. Hossein Raisi, a human rights lawyer and professor whose legal practice has included business transactions, commercial law, and the oil sector in Iran, argues the opposite. “We do not have a legal vacuum,” he told Resanegar.

Iran, in fact, has accumulated a formidable architecture of anti-corruption law. There are statutes against fraud and money laundering; restrictions on taking deposits without authorization from the Central Bank; consumer-protection provisions; asset-declaration requirements for officials; transparency rules; whistleblower protections; and severe criminal penalties for certain forms of economic disruption.

The country has also created special courts for economic crimes. To Raisi, their very existence is less evidence of a functioning anti-corruption system than of the depth of the underlying disorder.

“When every day someone is called the ‘Sultan of Coins,’ the ‘Sultan of Dollars,’ the ‘Sultan of Cars,’ and people are executed while corruption does not decline,” he said, “it means these measures are not effective.”

The Islamic Republic has long been fond of personalizing systemic failures. Periodically, a sensational corruption case produces a spectacular villain. The culprit is assigned a title grand enough to match the offense—some new “sultan” of a distorted market—and the state presents his punishment as proof that the system is policing itself.

But removing a corrupt actor does little to eliminate the conditions that made his rise possible. It is much easier to imprison an individual beneficiary of a distorted market than to interrogate how the market was distorted, how he gained access to it, who protected him, who failed to monitor him, and why opportunities of the same kind keep recurring.

Iran’s problem, as Raisi sees it, is rooted not in the absence of official prohibitions, but in a political economy in which great swathes of money move through establishments and relationships that are rarely more than semi-transparent, and where access to power always matters more than formal rules.

Sanctions have deepened the problem. Oil revenue and other state funds often convey through intermediaries, ostensibly private companies, informal channels, and networks whose opacity is in part a consequence of Iran’s isolation from the international financial system and in part entirely calculated. The less transparent the movement of money, the easier it is for political access and private enrichment to become entangled.

At the same time, Iran hosts massively wealthy institutions that occupy an ambiguous space between public and private power. Raisi cited Astan Quds Razavi, the vast religious and economic conglomerate centered on the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, as an example of the parallel structures that complicate ordinary mechanisms of accountability.

“There is no serious will to confront corruption among those close to or dependent on power,” he said. “There is no will to make these wealthy parallel institutions transparent and subject to law.”

A former member of parliament who spoke to Resanegar describes one potential step to address the institutional mire as the enactment of a law Iran still does not have: a comprehensive conflict-of-interest statute.

A conflict-of-interest bill has circulated for years among presidential administrations and parliamentary committees without advancing. Its provisions would nominally disentangle the intricate fabric of patronage: regulators with private financial interests, officials appointing relatives, people simultaneously occupying public and private positions, and interested parties exerting influence over government decisions.

“One of the most important laws for fighting corruption still has not been passed,” the former MP said, “because there is no will in the establishment or in parliament to pass it.”

The reason, in his telling, is hardly mysterious. “They themselves have interests,” he said of legislators and the networks around them. “The law would restrict them.” Or would it?

Raisi doubts that another statute, however carefully written, would actually alter much without a major shift in the Islamic Republic’s approach to governance. A conflict-of-interest law assumes the existence of institutions capable of enforcing it impartially. In a judiciary wide open to political influence, even a perfectly worded law can become merely another instrument of corruption, wielded against those out of favor, ignored for the insiders’ deals.

“Such a law can matter when you have an independent judiciary,” Raisi said. “When people connected with the judiciary, including Akbar Tabari, or Ayatollah Sedighi, can spend years using their positions to fix deals or engage in land-grabbing without being held accountable, a conflict-of-interest law is not enough. Relationships within the centers of power are so intertwined that they prevent enforcement.”

The void behind the statutory curtain

Every state is home to corrupt actors and every market is vulnerable to fraud. The crucial distinction between systems that function and those that fail is what happens when wrongdoing encounters the people in a position to reveal it—whistleblowers, journalists—and the institutions equipped to stop it: regulatory agencies, prosecutors’ offices, the courts.

In early 2021, the country made permanent its Law on Promoting Administrative Integrity and Combating Corruption, which requires public bodies to increase transparency around regulations, licenses, contracts, procedures, and information affecting citizens. In late 2023, it adopted a law intended to protect people who report corruption, including provisions for confidentiality and legal protection. A broad freedom-of-information law followed in 2024, covering the executive, parliament, the judiciary, municipalities, state broadcasting, state-owned companies, universities, and other public institutions.

Iran also has an anti-money-laundering law. It has legislation requiring senior officials to declare their assets and those of their spouses and dependent children. On paper, it all looks impressive. In reality, the legal architecture is little more than a façade, at best.

Take the case of Yashar Soltani, an investigative journalist who in 2019 published documents connected to the so-called “astronomical properties” scandal, involving the improper transfer of valuable Tehran municipal real estate during Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf‘s tenure as mayor.

Far from turning Soltani into a hero of Iran’s vaunted anti-corruption regime, his exposé made him a target of the state. He was prosecuted and sentenced to five years in prison on charges including collecting and publishing classified information, publishing falsehoods, and defamation. Pardoned after ten months, he was arrested again in June 2024 and incarcerated for another four months. Neither Ghalibaf nor any of his associates were ever charged as a result of the scandal.

Were the whistleblower law actually enforced, said the former MP, “many of these instances of corruption might never have occurred. But not only is the law not enforced, people who expose corruption continue to be threatened.”

He observed, as well, that “once the identities of these corruption whistleblowers become known, their access to information is restricted and efforts are made to prevent information from reaching them.” Like the whistleblower law, the freedom-of-information law is on the books that few in authority care to reference.

“In such an environment,” the former MP said, “fighting corruption is little more than a slogan.”

There is another reason that cases of collective fraud are proliferating. The former MP described a government so consumed by political instability and daily economic crisis that ordinary governance itself has begun to weaken. Even among relatively diligent regulatory officials, supervision slips as concern about one’s own future rises.

“Many people now see self-protection, accumulating wealth, and transferring it abroad as their priority,” he says. “They are trying to save themselves.”

In such a climate, swindlers’ success is less reliant on systemic corruption and specific collaboration. Institutional exhaustion is a fine facilitator. A regulator that is corrupt and a regulator that is absent may produce the same result for the person standing outside a shuttered gold shop.

This leaves the Iranian state to play its peculiar role in the recurring dramas of the malbakhtagan. The feigned monitor and occasional co-conspirator also steps in from time to time as redeemer.

The government often gets involved only after a scheme has collapsed and the number of victims has become politically significant. The state faces a new calculation: whether anger over the losses could metastasize into something graver. Government funds can then become the instrument for containing a crisis that purported government oversight wasn’t there to forestall.

Fleecing the weak

Raisi describes this as still another destructive feature of the familiar cycle. When the state compensates victims, it may relieve immediate suffering—along with its primary purpose of defusing protest. But it also transfers the cost of weak regulation from the people who benefited from the scheme to a society at large already under severe economic strain.

The proper approach, he argues, is to require businesses taking money in advance to provide guarantees before they are allowed to collect it: segregated funds, proof of financial capacity, insurance or other mechanisms capable of protecting customers if the business fails.

The principle would seem obvious. Before allowing someone to take ordinary citizens’ money, make sure the money can be paid back. Instead, Iran repeatedly does the reverse, permitting the collection of funds without anything close to effective oversight.

The stakes grow larger as new forms of fractional investment appear. Tehran Municipality has recently begun promoting the sale of tiny shares in residential projects, a scheme described in the Iranian press as a kind of “meter-by-meter” or even smaller-scale path into housing for people who cannot afford an apartment.

Such projects are not inherently fraudulent, and they should not presumptively be conflated with a gold dealer plotting to disappear with his customers’ deposits. Advance sales, pooling small investments, and fractional ownership can all be legitimate. But their legitimacy ultimately depends on there being answers to a set of questions whose crucial nature Iran’s recent business history should make clear.

How, precisely, is the buyers’ ownership recorded and registered? Where are their deposits secured? Who monitors construction? Can developers use the funds for something else? What happens if the project stops halfway through? Who stands behind the obligation? What recourse does an investor have?

To the guileless or foolhardy, these questions can seem tediously technical until the day the shutters come down. Beyond that point, it’s often too late for the answers to make a difference. And in the case of the “meter-by-meter” scheme, those answers have yet to appear.

Even the most effective government cannot prevent every financial deception or catch every con artist in the act. But when businesses openly collect “prepayments” in giant sums while regulators do nothing; when warning signs prompt no intervention; when journalists who uncover corruption face greater risks than those they expose; and when the public treasury is habitually bled to redeem private losses, the deprivation of governance is blatant.

Iran suffers no shortage of laws, but rather the will and fitness to constrain the exploitation of financial and social precarity. Such a country can continually inveigh against corruption, legislate against it, while entirely failing to check it. That requires consistent application of the rule of law, application totally lacking in today’s Iran.

Since the founding of the Islamic Republic, the state’s anti-corruption apparatus has become increasingly elaborate even as corruption turns ever more pervasive and its victims multiply. Each new scandal, each mass swindle generates investigations, pronouncements, maybe arrests, perhaps compensation, sometimes yet another statute. The gears of justice start up, briefly grind, then return to their deliberate, quiescent state, while the culture of the confidence game flourishes and the dealers feast. It’s boom time for the rackets.

The post Fraud and Fool’s Gold: Iran’s Culture of the Con appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

They came at night—not to arrest anyone, nor to seal yet another café. Without warning, they smashed the curbside planters and ledges, eliminating any surface on the sidewalks of Sanai Street where people might sit for a while and shoot the breeze. Closed down for a week or so, the cafés have since reopened, but the street is no longer the same.

Sanai Street runs for about fourteen blocks through central Tehran, from Karim Khan Zand Boulevard north to Shahid Motahari Street. The area’s residents are generally middle-class and upwardly mobile—to the extent that’s possible in the current economy. Many well-established publishing houses have their offices and bookstores in the neighborhood, which is close to the University of Tehran, the Amirkabir University of Technology, and the historic Alborz High School.

What happened on Sanai Street a few weeks ago is more than a story about a handful of coffeeshops having to temporarily shut down. It is about a seemingly endless struggle over control of public space.

On July 21, the Iranian Labour News Agency reported that unidentified individuals, in an overnight operation, used sledgehammers to destroy the raised concrete structures that double as seating areas on lower Sanai Street, leaving behind piles of debris and extensive damage to the sidewalk. Some see the destruction as part of an ongoing effort to eradicate informal gathering places (patoughs) from the city’s public spaces, settings where people can linger and converse.

The incident came only days after the government had ordered the closure of several cafés on the street. When they were allowed to reopen, many owners decided not to set up their usual outdoor tables and chairs for fear of further action. 

To explore what is happening on Sanai Street, Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s Persian-language website, spoke with a local resident. Saman, whose apartment is right next door to a café, was born in the late 1980s. As is increasingly common in urban Iran, in part due to the rising age of marriage, he lives alone. He spends his days working in the bazaar and his evenings and weekends on Sanai. For Saman, the street’s shops and cafés are not simply places to buy books or drink coffee. They are vital escapes from his often solitary existence, places to mingle and chat, to experience the hum of life going on around him.

Why did you choose Sanai Street as a place to live?

Because life flows through this street. My home is now surrounded by the bookstores and cafés where I like to spend my time. As someone who finds it difficult to talk and connect with family, acquaintances, and friends, it was very important for me to live somewhere that gave me easy access to the things that fill my solitude. That is how I feel about Sanai Street now, and I am happy to live here.

But didn’t they close the cafés on this street?

We are used to this kind of harassment. For about a week, they began closing the cafés on this street one by one. One afternoon, they came in from the top of the street and shut them down one after another.

Coming up Sanai Street from the lower end, the first café is Sam Café. A little farther up is Café 1401, which belongs to Ali Mosaffa, the film actor. Above that is Joe Café, followed by Café Ravello, Hamaan Café, and Do Bar Café.

From the beginning, Café 1401 had placed tables and chairs all along the pavement, and everyone sat outside. Joe Café had also become a very busy hangout on this street. Sanai Street has generally become very crowded because of these cafés and has turned into an important gathering place for young people in the area.

Apart from the cafés, there are also several older restaurants, such as Ciao, an Italian restaurant that is always very busy. When they began closing the cafés, they shut down all of them except Café Ravello. I don’t know why they left that one open, because there is no obvious difference between it and the others. They did not interfere with the restaurants either.

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Which authority closed them?

As always, it was the police’s Public Places Supervision Department that closed the cafés.

Did they stop at closing the cafés?

No. Two days later, they came and destroyed the curbs and every place where young people used to sit, so that no one could sit there anymore. Just yesterday, they poured cement and asphalt over all the garden beds and levelled them, apparently to change the space completely.

Hamaan Café had a small garden in front of it. Inside the garden, they had built something like a box that people could sit inside. They destroyed the entire thing. Now the only place left to sit is the ledge beneath the café window.

Was the destruction also carried out by officers from the Public Places Department?

I don’t know, because they came during the night, destroyed everything, and left.

Are the cafés still closed?

No. The closures did not last longer than a week. First they reopened Sam Café, then Joe Café, then Do Bar Café, and finally the seals were removed from Café 1401.

Did it ever become clear why the cafés had been sealed?

No one knows exactly what their problem is. Apparently, they do not want anyone sitting outside on this street or turning it into a gathering place.

It certainly had nothing to do with traffic, because the real traffic on Sanai Street is farther up, near Ciao Restaurant. There is not much traffic on the lower part of the street. They also did nothing to the restaurants farther up, even though those places are crowded too.

What do the café owners say?

From what I have heard, apparently every so often they close the cafés, take some money, and then allow them to reopen. But I don’t think that is the only reason. There must be something else going on behind the scenes.

Could it have been because the customers or café owners were not observing the hijab?

I don’t think so, because nothing changed in terms of hijab before and after the closures. Not wearing the hijab has become almost normal. Many people walk along this street without one.

There are many children’s clothing shops here, and most of their customers do not wear the hijab. Many people come here just to take a walk, and they walk through the street without covering their hair.

Besides, if hijab were their only concern, Iran-Shahr Street, a little farther down, is a much larger and busier gathering place. Iran-Shahr has completely turned into a hangout for young people. Everyone sits on the pavements, and many women are not wearing hijab, but they did not interfere with the cafés there. There must be some other reason besides hijab.

Don’t you think they may have decided to eliminate these gathering places altogether and have simply started with Sanai Street?

They can’t. How could they eliminate them? If they shut down one neighborhood, the young people will simply turn up in another one. This is the only pleasure young people have left. How could they take even this away from them?

What happened when they closed the cafés on Sanai Street?

Nothing. The street became quiet for a week. The people who normally came here went to Iran-Shahr Street instead. In fact, Iran-Shahr became even more crowded.

From six or seven in the evening, girls and boys bring whatever they have made and set up stalls to sell it. The whole street has become a lively recreational gathering place.

It used to be mostly a center for shops selling printers and computer equipment. Now nearly all of those businesses have disappeared, and cafés have taken their place.

Karim Khan [Boulevard] has changed in the same way. The ground floors of the buildings have become cafés or restaurants, while the upper floors are used for selling accessories, handicrafts, and similar things.

Sanai and Iran-Shahr streets are completely different from the rest of Tehran, both in the way people dress and look and in their streetscape. They provide a cozy environment for people who want to escape the stress and anxiety of Tehran’s turbulent days.

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Did the customers protest against the café closures?

No. No one did. Everyone passed by indifferently. They were only thinking about where else they could go if they could no longer come here.

What did the system gain from it?

Honestly, I don’t know. They destroyed every place where people could sit, but the café owners will certainly come up with another arrangement so they can keep their customers.

Don’t you think this project may be part of a strategy to take the streets away from protesters? Perhaps they do not want protesters to have any presence in the streets, even in the form of a nighttime gathering place.

I spent all forty days of the war in my apartment on Sanai Street. I did not go anywhere. Nothing unusual happened here.

They would only make the street a little darker than usual from around five or six in the evening to discourage people from going out. But there were no government rallies, displays of self-sacrifice, or anything of that sort here.

From inside our apartment, I would only see groups of government supporters passing through on their way toward Takht-e Tavous Street, and from there toward Valiasr and Vanak.

On Valiasr Street, they would close off one side of the road. They had religious stalls and tents, chanting, and organised gatherings. But nothing like that happened on Sanai Street. They only set up a checkpoint for a few nights.

From the beginning of the war, ordinary people did not use the city’s main streets and major squares. Those areas were completely controlled by government forces. But they were not present in the smaller side streets and alleys around places such as Sanai, where there are many cafés. People came and went sporadically. Many people came out to walk their dogs, and no one bothered anyone else.

What did you do when the cafés were closed? How did you feel?

I usually come home from work at around five or six. I take a shower, change my clothes, and go out. First, I visit the bookstores and stand there reading a few pages of a book. Then I go to Hamaan Café, sit down, and have something to eat or drink.

Late at night, I go home, play with my cats for a while, take care of them, and then go to sleep. On some evenings, I have an art class, and I spend my time with the people from the workshop.

But when they close the cafés and darken the streets, it means that life has been shut down. I have to sit at home and watch the silence of the city through the window, although I do so with the hope that one day these people will no longer be here.

Is it the same for everyone else?

Some people go to another hangout when one closes, but I don’t like going into just any environment and seeing unfamiliar faces.

There are many cafés in the side streets and alleys around Sanai that they did not interfere with. I don’t know what their problem is with the main street.

What are the café owners doing?

Even under normal circumstances, with prices rising like this, their situation is not good. These poor people have to pay monthly rents of 400 or 500 million [tomans; roughly $2,100–2,625 USD]. I don’t know how they manage to come up with that money every month.

All I know is that when they close the cafés, they deprive many people of their livelihoods. Recently, they were closed for ten days because of Muharram, then for another ten days because of the Leader’s funeral ceremonies. After that, the authorities came and sealed them for no reason.

How is a café owner supposed to pay the rent at the end of the month and pay the workers? That is why so many cafés close voluntarily after a year. In the current situation, it is extremely difficult to keep a business going.

How do you see the general mood of society after the war, or perhaps we should say under the present circumstances? Have people returned to ordinary life, or are they living in fear and uncertainty?

There is a distressing sense of uncertainty hanging over everything. Almost everyone I encounter at work or at the art school complains about it.

No one knows what will happen tomorrow, so no one has any plans for their life. Nearly all plans have been put on hold. Some people have become so exhausted that all they wish for is a return to the conditions before the war.

At the same time, many people, including me, still hope for change and are waiting to see what happens.

Just a few minutes ago, I was speaking to two people in the café. They were waiting for the main event. They said the situation could not remain like this.

Nothing is more painful than imagining that the blood shed during all of this may have been wasted. Society has already lost so many people. All that blood could not have been shed for nothing.

You can see a contradictory atmosphere. Some people are still hopeful, while others have completely lost hope and believe that these people will never leave, whatever the cost.

Someone in the café said, “As long as they are here, they want us to live in misery. At least this war has forced them to live under the same conditions as us. The fact that they do not know where they can safely sleep at night is enough to make them understand the condition of the people a little better. Let them live in fear and terror for a while. Let them taste misery too.”

Are there signs that the government is governing from a position of fear?

Yes. The fact that they have wanted to raise the price of gasoline for some time but have not dared to do it is a sign of their fear.

They can no longer make a decision overnight, as they did in the past, and suddenly increase gasoline prices. Although, in practice, they have already raised the price by reducing people’s subsidised gasoline quotas, forcing them to use more gasoline sold at the higher, non-quota price.

Before the war, the government and parliament were fighting over the implementation of the hijab law, and in the end the government refused to implement it. Don’t you think they may now try to enforce that law?

I heard that cafés in Mashhad were closed because of the hijab issue. But in Tehran, hijab enforcement has slipped completely out of their control. Hijab is not their main concern at the moment.

Perhaps, once they are no longer worried about the war, they will start harassing people over it again. But for now, they do not have an opportunity to intervene in the hijab issue, at least not in Tehran.

Even in the Tehran bazaar, you can see how much people have come to accept the situation. You see women and girls, some wearing hijab and others without it, walking and shopping together. It has actually created a very beautiful atmosphere.

During the war, convoys of pro-government motorcyclists would pass through Sanai Street shouting. Sometimes they threatened women who were not wearing hijab. You could hear them from inside the apartment, or see the hatred they felt toward unveiled women on their faces.

But at least it has not yet become the government’s priority to confront women over hijab. Once they regain their footing, however, they will probably revive the compulsory hijab policy.

First, they will try to force girls and women back into compulsory hijab by cutting off employment and financial opportunities and taking away quotas and privileges. Then they will resort to arrests and crackdowns.

What do you think would need to happen for people to begin feeling a little better?

Under present conditions, when hope for change has faded, I genuinely believe that an improvement in the economic situation could provide some relief.

But as someone who has some involvement in the market, I believe the economic situation will become worse rather than better, because there is no rationality in this government.

Neither its foreign policy nor its domestic policy is based on rational decision-making. The decisions are emotional, and you cannot put an economy in order through emotional decisions.

Another point is that people would feel better if they sensed that the government had become even slightly more flexible.

Even if people felt that the government was fighting this battle in defence of their interests, they would feel better. But many do not feel that way. Many believe the government does not make decisions for the well-being of the people, but starts fires in pursuit of its own interests.

So you think people do not believe the government’s account of the confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz?

Apart from the government’s own supporters, who believe whatever it says, no one pays attention to these claims.

People’s knowledge, even their military knowledge, has increased tremendously. It is no longer easy to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.

At the art class I attend, I see students using international websites to monitor the routes of aircraft, ships, and other movements around the Strait of Hormuz from moment to moment. They know what is happening.

Everyone has become an analyst. People follow the news in such detail that they have developed the ability to analyze it. They put different reports together and understand which accounts are closer to reality.

The only exception is the segment of society that wants the government’s account to be true and therefore repeats it.

When do you think society will reach its breaking point?

People have already had enough. Their patience has run out.

To get through everyday life now, you have to eliminate some of your needs so that you can meet the others. In order to afford daily necessities, you have to postpone medical tests and doctors’ appointments. That is the situation for many people.

The government understands this very well, which is why it is making a very calculated effort to control the situation. Its entire effort is directed toward preventing another protest movement from taking shape. But no one knows how long it will succeed.

The post A Sledgehammer to the Hangouts appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

The Kooy-e Daneshgah protests of 1999 were among the largest instances of Iranian student activism since the 1979 Revolution and are widely regarded as a turning point, the first in what built into a flood of at least 60 major episodes of unrest, from local and regional protests to nationwide uprisings, during Ali Khamenei’s last 27 years as Supreme Leader. Campus demonstrations were nothing new; what was unprecedented in July 1999 was the level of violence deployed by the regime against university students and, triggered by that violence, young people’s demands for fundamental transformation of the Islamic Republic.

The initial motive for the protests involved Salam, a leading reformist newspaper that had provided crucial support for Mohammad Khatami’s successful 1997 presidential campaign. On July 6, the paper published a leaked confidential letter written a year earlier by Saeed Emami, a senior Intelligence Ministry official, to the ministry’s chief, Qorban-Ali Dorri-Najafabadi. The letter called for tighter controls on the press and identified several journalists as threats to national security, including Mohammad Mokhtari, who was murdered a few months after the letter was written, in December 1998. His killing was one of what became known as the Chain Murders, a series of assassinations of intellectuals and dissidents that also claimed the lives of other prominent figures such as Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar. Emami was arrested in February 1999 and died under suspicious circumstances in prison on June 20, 1999.

The day after the publication of his letter, July 7, the Majles approved a legislative amendment granting judges broader powers in cases involving the media and news coverage, while making juries’ role largely advisory. The amendment was widely seen as part of a broader crackdown on the reformist press—a view confirmed when Salam was closed the same day by court order. Students at the University of Tehran responded by staging a protest on July 8, a Thursday, against both the newspaper’s closure and the general tightening of press restrictions.

In the predawn hours of Friday, July 9 (18 Tir), security forces, including military and paramilitary units as well as plainclothes agents, raided the University of Tehran dormitory complex, known as Kooy-e Daneshgah. They beat, injured, and arrested many students and set fire to several buildings. One student, Fereshteh Alizadeh, visiting from Alzahra University in north Tehran, disappeared during the raid. She was never heard from again. A second, Saeed Zeinali, was arrested in its immediate aftermath. Aside from a single phone call to his family, three months later, he was never heard from again.

Following the raid, the protests swiftly escalated, with students barricading themselves in the dormitory, holding mass rallies on campus, and clashing with security details and regime-aligned thugs on the streets. They became the first major protests in Iran to call explicitly for the ouster of Supreme Leader Khamenei. On July 11, the unrest spread to Tabriz, where students gathered to protest the regime and what was taking place in the capital. After several days of chaos in and around the University of Tehran, the intensity of the regime forces’ violence and students’ recognition of how incapable President Khatami’s nominally reformist administration was of restraining it brought an end to the uprising.

Two years after the Kooy incident, a number of individuals who participated in the dormitory attack were tried on various charges; all were acquitted except Oroujali Babarzadeh, a conscripted soldier who was convicted of stealing an electric razor during the raid. Despite this mark on his record, he was later employed by the police force, where he rose to the rank of colonel.

As part of an ongoing Tehran Bureau oral history project, journalist Pezhman Tahavori, who gained access to Kooy-e Daneshgah on the morning of July 9, describes what he witnessed there, on the rest of campus, and at nearby scenes of unrest over the following four and a half days; he also reflects on Khamenei’s lengthy reign. A lead reporter for Iran, the official government daily, Tahavori began covering parliament for the newspaper in 1998 and resigned seven years later, after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president.

Ahmadinejad’s involvement with the Basij, the militia that operates under the aegis of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has long been rumored. Between 1997, when he was replaced as governor of Ardabil province by Khatami, and 2003, when he was elected mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad received his doctorate in traffic and transport engineering from the Iran University of Science and Technology in northeast Tehran, lectured there, and twice ran unsuccessfully for public office.

In Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic, Michael Axworthy describes Ahmadinejad during this period as having “close connections to the Ansar-e Hezbollah street fighters who periodically broke into offices or disrupted meetings of the reformists…enforce[d] hejab…[and] reprimand[ed] couples holding hands in parks. Many of them were present or former members of the Basij.” The extent of those “close connections” has not previously been clear. Tahavori’s eyewitness account of the future president leading an attack by motorcycle-riding brawlers on the offices of the Islamic Republic News Agency on July 12, 1999, is the first such account on the record.

I was the first one to arrive at Kooy-e Daneshgah and the last to leave. When I got there, I was the only reporter on the scene. I stayed there from Friday until Tuesday night, when it was all over. I was there around the clock. When they attacked the Kooy on Thursday night, there were no reporters there, and no one really knew what had happened. But by Friday night, the place was crowded with journalists from all the media outlets because the news had reached everyone by then.

In Iran, [newspaper] journalists have Thursdays off and work on Fridays. We usually went into the newsroom around noon on Fridays to put together the Saturday morning edition. I usually went hiking on Thursdays. But unlike my usual routine, I went hiking early that Friday morning. When I came down from the mountain, I thought, I might as well go to the office, get my reports ready, finish up, and head home early. I didn’t want to have to stay until seven or eight that evening.

When I arrived at the Iran newsroom at around 9:30 a.m., Mr. Bolouri, a well-respected journalist, was the only person there. I went over to the political desk and noticed that the message light on our office phone was blinking. We had three unheard voicemail messages. The first two weren’t important, but the third was from a young man whose voice was panicked: “Hurry! They blew up Tahkim [Vahdat]’s office last night, and killed everyone there.”

I immediately went to get Mr. Bolouri. He came over, listened to the message, and said, “Go to Tahkim and see what’s going on.”

Before leaving, it occurred to me to call Ali Afshari, who was then the secretary of Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat [Office for Strengthening Unity, a national student organization], and see what he knew.

Tahkim-e Vahdat had an old building in the back streets off Jomhouri Street where they held some of their meetings and gatherings. Based on the voicemail, I assumed that was the building that had been blown up. But when I called Afshari’s home number, he answered. I asked, “Ali, what’s going on?”

“Nothing happened at Tahkim last night,” he said. “They attacked the Kooy-e Daneshgah. Apparently things were pretty chaotic, but I haven’t gone there myself yet. That’s just what I’ve been told.”

I immediately got a car and went to Amirabad [St. and Keshavarz Blvd.]. When I got there, police had completely blocked off North Amirabad. There were a lot of Honda motorcycles there…the ones Basij members are always riding around on. The place was crawling with Basijis.

I started walking toward the dormitory, but the police were not letting anyone pass unless they asked questions and made sure the person actually lived in one of the nearby alleys. I asked a soldier, “Who is your commander?”

He pointed me to a police colonel. I went over to him and did the whole polite routine: hello, how are you, khaste nabashid [roughly, “excuse me, sorry to bother you”], khoda ghovat [roughly, “you’re working so hard”], and so on. I told him, “I’m a journalist. I’m here to cover the news, and I want to go inside.”

He said, “If you have the guts, go right ahead.” Those were his exact words. I said, “Okay, thank you very much.” He opened the gate. As I was about to pass through, he called me back and said, “I don’t think you understood what I said. If you go up there, the students will hit you with rocks. You can go if you want to, but be very careful..”

Back in the day, we all carried a clipboard with brown paper sheets that had the newspaper’s logo on them, which we used as a writing pad. I had that clipboard and the papers in my hands, and my recorder was in my pocket.

As I got close to the Kooy entrance, rocks started flying toward me. I don’t know where they had gotten the rocks from, but the whole area was full of them. Maybe there was a construction site nearby, or maybe they had gathered them from the garden beds … The students were throwing rocks at anyone who tried to approach.

I held the clipboard over my head and shouted, “Stop throwing! I’m a journalist!” I wasn’t afraid. I kept moving forward … A few rocks hit me, but I made it.

When I reached the young men throwing rocks, they started pulling me in every direction, and I kept telling them I was there to cover the news. My impression was that I was the first journalist to get in, because they immediately started debating whether they should let journalists in at all. That initial group that had gathered there hadn’t thought that far ahead. Then one of them shouted, “Only let the reformist journalists in.”

That was the era of reformist newspapers, after all. When I told them, “I’m a reporter for Iran newspaper,” the question became: Was Iran a reformist newspaper or not? I went back and forth with them for quite a while trying to convince them. 

Until that day, there had been a great deal of uncertainty about Iran newspaper. After all, it had long been regarded as [Akbar] Hashemi Rafsanjani‘s platform and had supported [Ali Akbar] Nategh [Nouri], so the public viewed it very differently. But Iran ended up surprising everyone.

When I entered the Kooy, I saw blood everywhere; all the students there were injured. Their bodies were covered with wounds, and their clothes were covered in blood. There were signs of clashes, and the attackers had completely burned down several areas. I noticed there were a lot of young men and women holding bloodied clothes up in the air. They were chanting. There were some highly charged slogans.

Later, when that photo of Ahmad Batebi was published and he was arrested, I always felt, as someone who had witnessed that scene, that he had been singled out. Many other people were holding up bloodied shirts that day. I don’t know whether Ahmad Batebi had already been under surveillance before then, but that photo, and that pose, were not unique to him. Many young men were holding their shirts up like that.

I started asking everyone who the attackers were. The only person whose name everyone knew and whom they had seen was Masoud Dehnamaki. So, in my report that was published in Iran the next day, I wrote that Masoud Dehnamaki had commanded the attack on the dorm. Dehnamaki sued Iran over that report. But he never said, “I wasn’t there that night” in court. He said, “I was there that night, but as an observer. I was not involved in those things. I did not beat anyone.” The court ruled in favor of Iran newspaper, which confirmed that my report was correct.

Around 11 a.m., I was standing in front of the Kooy when Faezeh Hashemi’s car pulled up. She was the first person to enter the dormitory for an inspection. I was a parliamentary reporter at the time and knew her from parliament, and she knew me too. I went over and greeted her. Faezeh asked me what was going on. I said, “You have to see it for yourself. It’s not something I can describe.”

Faezeh and I went through the halls one by one. The police were with us too. One of the dormitories that had been set on fire was for visually impaired students. These poor students were crying. They said they didn’t know what was happening, but they could hear people crying out in pain, people being beaten, and then they could smell something burning.

It was very shocking. It was a very painful moment to see what had happened there.

Some time after all of this, I was at a gathering at the home of a well-known film director. One of the directors there said something interesting, and I really don’t know how credible it was. He said the main reason they attacked Kooy-e Daneshgah that night was not over the Salam newspaper issue. 

The young man who was killed during that incident, Ezzat Ebrahimnejad, was a conscript. He was not actually a student, but he was killed inside the dormitory. He told me that this young man had taken a copy of the actual confession videos of Saeed Emami, which were classified, out of his barracks. They had attacked the dormitory to find that video, and when they couldn’t find it, they set fire to several buildings where they suspected the video might have been.

He was not someone who had firsthand knowledge of it. He said that someone who worked with the security apparatus had told him this and asked him to make a film about it. But he said he was afraid of getting caught up in the rivalries between Iran’s intelligence organizations, because he believed the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] was behind the attack. He said the Ministry of Intelligence wanted this information to come out and wanted a film to be made about it. That director said he was afraid of getting involved in this game, but he said he thought it was an interesting subject to make a film about.

Around 1 p.m. on Friday, two buses pulled up and dropped off a large number of students. They were students who had been beaten and taken away the night before. They all had bandaged heads, their faces were bruised, and some had broken arms that had been wrapped and splinted. You couldn’t tell whether they were being brought back from a clinic or from a detention center, but whatever the case, no one dared to speak. When you tried to talk to them, they refused to say anything. The buses that brought them back were IRGC buses. 

The atmosphere at the university was very tense that day. All the officials started coming one by one. Abdollah Nouri came. [Mostafa] Tajzadeh came. The Khatami administration was doing everything they could to calm the students because they did not want the situation to become more inflamed.

The students were divided into two camps, and you could clearly see this division inside the Kooy. On one side were the Tahkim-e Vahdat students; on the other was the United Student Front, led by [Heshmatollah] Tabarzadi. The United Student Front’s views did not fit within the framework of reformism, nor did its members consider themselves reformists in that sense. 

Tahkim students were trying to bring everyone back inside the Kooy, hold their gathering there, and keep the protests inside the dormitory. But the United Student Front kept trying to move the crowd outside, saying that they had to go toward the Beyt [Beyt e-Rahbari, headquarters of the Supreme Leader].

I remember that Mr. Tajzadeh gathered the members of the Central Council of Tahkim. At the time, that was Afshari…, Akbar Atri, and several others. He told them very firmly not to let students out of the Kooy, and to hold them there by any means necessary.

I heard this directly from Tajzadeh. “The IRGC has warned that if students set foot on Enghelab Street, we will open fire on all of them. No one should even think about going toward the Beyt.”

The United Student Front was viewed as somewhat suspicious. They had managed to find some supporters on university campuses, but they did not have a very strong base, because at that time Tahkim had almost complete dominance over universities across Iran.

The reason I say people were skeptical of them was that Tabarzadi was the one who first promoted “Imam Khamenei” in his magazine. For a period during the Hashemi era, they attacked and criticized Hashemi. Then he started the “Imam Khamenei” thing, and he also published a university magazine that many people considered very hardline. Then suddenly, he switched to this side. Political observers were suspicious of them because they thought these people were working for the security apparatus. But I cannot really say whether those suspicions were correct or not.

One interesting thing I can mention is that a few days after the Kooy events, [state] television aired the confession videos of Manouchehr Mohammadi, his brother, and some other United Student Front members who had been arrested.

Three days before the Kooy incident, there was a gathering at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tehran that I had gone to cover. I don’t remember who the speaker was, but I do remember that the hall was packed. I was sitting in the front row, taking notes, when a student came over and whispered in my ear, “There’s a crowd at the entrance to the University of Tehran. I think you might find it interesting.” That was all he said to me, and then he left.

There were a lot of reporters in that hall, and I felt that if something had really happened at the university entrance, that was more important. So I got up and went to the entrance.

When I got there, I saw that the United Student Front group, Tabarzadi and the others, had gathered at the entrance. The Basijis had also gathered there. They were taunting each other, trading challenges, and chanting slogans when it suddenly turned into a physical confrontation. One of Tabarzadi’s people was making a big scene and causing a lot of commotion. 

I don’t know whether these Basijis were from the Ministry of Intelligence, the IRGC, or somewhere else, but they were people who were clearly security types, the kind who wore their shirts untucked over their pants. I was watching all of this happen right in front of me. Without drawing anyone’s attention, they grabbed this guy from behind, pulled him out of the crowd, put him on a motorcycle, and took off.

When they aired the confession videos of the Mohammadi brothers, I realized that they were showing that same guy and footage from the gatherings at the University of Tehran entrance as footage from Thursday night, the night of the attack. They were passing off the unrest and destruction from that day as if it had happened at the Kooy.

Since I had been there myself, I immediately told the photographer, “I need these photos.” Because wherever I went to cover a story, I took a photographer with me. I had the photography department print all those photos, along with the footage from the video they had broadcast. We put them side by side, and I was right. These gatherings, and the confessions they were showing, none of them had anything to do with the Kooy. They were all from three days before the Kooy incident.

I took all of this to Mr. [Fereydoun] Vardi-Nejad’s office, who was the managing director of the newspaper and also held a media-related position at the Supreme National Security Council. He was very surprised. He said, “This is a very important story. I need to send this to the president’s office right away.” So I handed it to him, and he took it from there.

The university was very crowded on Friday, and the clashes on campus became very intense that night. The next day, there was a gathering in front of the university. A lot of people came. It was one of the largest student gatherings of that decade. Once it ended, the students went back to the Kooy.

On Saturday night, the Basijis came to Amirabad Street. The police had set up a barricade. The Basijis were behind the police, and the students were on the other side. Students were throwing stones, and police were firing tear gas.

Suddenly, an elderly woman, who looked to be around 70, maybe 67 or 68, walked over to the group of students with covered faces who were chanting the most radical slogans. She handed them a container and said, “There’s gasoline in here. Go make Molotov cocktails and defend yourselves. You won’t be able to take them on with rocks.” Those were her exact words.

It was as if they had suddenly discovered a new source of strength. They immediately ran to the dormitory cafeteria, grabbed empty soda bottles, filled them with gasoline, lit them, and started throwing them toward the other side.

Where that woman had come from is a mystery. She appeared, handed them the gasoline, and disappeared. I don’t think anyone else even noticed her. I just happened to be standing there at that moment. This is something I saw with my own eyes.

There were probably things going on behind the scenes. At that time, the reform movement was getting stronger every day and gaining a more serious base of support. The system was afraid, genuinely afraid, because they had completely lost the parliamentary elections. I remember when the election results were announced, the incumbent members of parliament were losing their minds. A group of us parliamentary reporters went to Ayatollah [Mohammad Reza] Faker. I asked him, “What do you think about what happened?” He knocked my recorder out of my hand and threw it aside. He said, “You journalists, these newspapers, you destroyed [everything]…”

That was the atmosphere. They were very afraid of the reform movement and wanted to regain control. This system has always shown that whenever it wants to control something, it resorts to violence because it knows that in a violent confrontation, it has the upper hand.

Everyone was still at the Kooy on Sunday. If I remember correctly, that was the day of the Esteghlal–Persepolis [football] match. The United Student Front people were pushing the idea that we should get the crowds coming back from the stadium to join us and take the gathering out onto the streets. But the Tahkim students were trying to keep them inside the Kooy. They brought Ezzatollah Sahabi to persuade the students not to go out. 

I remember Sahabi’s speech was the most calming speech a political figure could have delivered under those circumstances; he told students not to get drawn into any confrontations. But when Ali Afshari and Ezzatollah Sahabi were tried, they were portrayed as the people who had incited the students. I wanted to go and testify that what the court was alleging against Afshari and Sahabi was completely false. But Vardi-Nejad wouldn’t let me. He said, “You’re a journalist, and you shouldn’t get involved in this.” But I was genuinely prepared to testify in court.

On Monday, we were not at the Kooy. The gathering was on campus. Professors had announced a gathering at the university mosque, so we went there. They announced a sit-in in the university prayer hall after the noon prayers and Basijis attacked that sit-in. The Basijis had a plan. They wanted to turn gatherings violent so they could crack down and bring the situation under control. They abandoned the restraint they had shown during the first day or two, when they had stepped back somewhat and were mostly standing by and watching. After the attack on the prayer hall, the students moved into the street above [campus], toward Keshavarz Boulevard, and the clashes became very intense.

There were also acts of vandalism in the [Tehran Grand] Bazaar and elsewhere to create the impression that there was widespread unrest and chaos. They had simultaneously started [to escalate tensions on multiple fronts to [justify the] crackdown on the students. They bussed obash [thugs] into the bazaar, and they started attacking people’s shops. Ahmadinejad gathered his goons, and they attacked a news agency. 

I was calling the newspaper almost every hour to let them know what was happening and what was going on. That day was pure chaos. I was around Valiasr Square when I heard the news.  When I called, they told me there was chaos in the bazaar but you should go to the news agency. The Islamic Republic News Agency’s office was further up Valiasr Street. You had to go a little farther up Valiasr Street [from the square] to reach it.

Back then, Ahmadinejad was the head of the Professors Basij. We had the Student Basij and the Professors Basij, and he was also a member of the Islamic Society of Engineers, which was headed by [Mohammad Reza] Bahonar. Ahmadinejad was leading the enforcers. He was one of the club-wielding thugs.

I saw Ahmadinejad with my own eyes. He and his motorcycle-riding club-wielders had attacked the news agency. There weren’t just one or two of them; there were at least 50 motorcyclists. Some were carrying clubs, others were carrying flags. The news agency had immediately called the police, who had surrounded the building to prevent [the thugs] from entering or damaging the building and its windows. If someone has access, it’s all in the agency’s wire reports. You can find it in the archives.

I don’t remember whether they had broken any windows or not, but they had created a very tense atmosphere overall. I’m telling you, they were riding motorcycles from one side of the city to the other, wreaking havoc.

Around four or five in the afternoon, when students were leaving campus, they started beating them. I witnessed scenes of direct gunfire. At one point, a bullet struck a tree branch above my head, and it fell right in front of me. They were not firing directly at the students; they were shooting into the air, but it created an incredible sense of fear.

Khamenei’s initial reaction was actually very sympathetic toward the students. He tried to reassure them. He gave a speech and said, “Even if the students tore up my picture, even if they said things [about me], no one should retaliate.” He downplayed it as an incident that had occurred and instructed the judiciary to look into the matter. He adopted a somewhat fatherly stance.

But that fatherly posture was only for show. Despite his public display of sympathy, Khamenei unleashed the Revolutionary Guards on the students and the IRGC attacked the very next day.

On that final night, they had created an atmosphere of sheer terror. Earlier that afternoon, they had opened fire on the students, forcing them to flee. Once it got dark, around dusk, there was not a single student left in the streets. The entire length of Amirabad Street had been taken over by the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij. 

Back then, we didn’t have mobile phones or anything like that. We would call the newspaper from public phone booths near the dorms, read our reports and news updates over the phone, and they would write them down and publish them. The only people going back and forth between the newspaper and the university were the photographers, who delivered rolls of film so they could be developed and printed. That night, I called the newspaper, and [my editor] Nouri said, “I’m coming tonight.”

Before becoming Iran newspaper’s political editor, Mr. Nouri had been in the Revolutionary Guards with Vardi-Nejad, and Vardi-Nejad had brought [a few of] them from the Guards to work at the paper. 

He came, and Mr. Nouri and I went to see what was happening at the dorms. The IRGC had sealed off the area and wouldn’t let anyone enter. There were also vans with metal grills that they had placed throughout the streets. Anyone they suspected was a student or mokhalef [opposed to the regime], they would immediately shove into those vans and take away. I saw a few young people shoved into the vans like that. I remember seeing a woman stop and start shouting [in protest] when she saw this. They beat her with a club, threw her in the same van, and took her away.

After having spent four or five days and nights there, I had started to look like a Basiji myself. I hadn’t shaved for several days, my clothes had begun to smell, and I looked just like them. We even carried a copy of Kayhan newspaper with us, just to complete the Basiji look so they would let us do our job. When we reached the entrance of the Kooy, all the Tehran IRGC commanders were there. Mr. Nouri knew all of them. He stood there chatting with them.

Out of nowhere, a Revolutionary Guard came over and grabbed my wrist, as if he had caught an infiltrator or a spy. He started questioning me: “Who the heck are you? What are you doing here?”

I calmly said, “I’m Haj Mohammad’s soldier.”

He said, “Who’s Haj Mohammad?”

I pointed him out. Mr. Nouri was talking with the commander of the IRGC’s Tharallah Headquarters. Once [the Guard] saw that, he realized I was one of their own and left me alone. 

That night, they kept riding up and down Amirabad Street on motorcycles and in cars, screaming “Heydar, Heydar.” The Basijis had another chant as well: “Where are the sissies? They’re hiding in their holes,” trying to provoke and humiliate the students. You could see some students peeking out from the dormitory rooftops to see what was happening in the street. That was how they ended the protests that night.

Were you really one of them?

I absolutely was not one of them. We were very hopeful about reform in those days. I myself entered journalism [because] I felt there was an opening, a space where we could work and bring about change. We had turned a known conservative publication like Iran into a reformist one. 

Seeing the press gain momentum was itself a sign to us that things were working and that changes were taking place. When the reformists won control of the Majles, we thought that now that we had both the executive and legislative branches, we would certainly achieve some successes and be able to accomplish things. 

We truly did not think the system would resist the reform movement to this extent. We thought the system would eventually accept reforms, yield to them, and that those reforms would lead somewhere. But we later realized that was not happening, because Khamenei showed tremendous rigidity.

I think if you look at the 27-year period between July 9, 1999, and July 9, 2026, when Khamenei was buried, you can clearly see the erosion of his legitimacy. On 18 Tir 1999, Khamenei himself was not yet the focus of popular or student movements. Attention was directed toward military and police officials, or figures like [Ahmad] Jannati. I remember that the main slogan at the University of Tehran at the time was: “Pinochet Jannati, Iran will not become Chile.” But after the Kooy incident, the “Jannati” in the slogans immediately changed to “Seyyed Ali.”

One of the reasons Khamenei refused to remove Jannati until the very end was precisely because of these slogans. A major student demand at the time was Jannati’s removal because of the Guardian Council’s vetting process, the disqualifications during the Sixth Parliament elections, and everything that was preventing the reform movement from moving forward. This was a major issue at the time. Khamenei stood behind this man and refused to remove Jannati until the day he died. Even when it became clear that Jannati was no longer in control of his own body and needed adult diapers, and his mind was gone. It’s no joke; the man is 100 years old. He held on to Jannati’s decaying corpse, but he refused to yield to even the smallest of the people’s demands. This shows that Khamenei simply wanted to defy the public and kept him in place out of sheer stubbornness.

The point I want to make, and I think it is important to pay attention to, is that 18 Tir was the first moment when politicians and domestic critics realized that this system was willing to pay any price and use any level of violence to preserve itself, but it would not accept reform. 

When you look at the period between these two anniversaries, you can see how Khamenei went from someone who publicly apologized to students and even shed a few tears, to someone who, on the eve of January 8, 2026, issued the kill order, and the massacre was carried out with his direct approval.

When he came out and said, “These are undesirable elements, both in the eyes of the people and in the eyes of the Islamic government,” he was, in effect, calling for their elimination. Or when, the year before, he said, “The God of the 1980s is still with us,” he was effectively calling for executions and a crackdown, because the 1980s were the decade of mass executions and repression.

Throughout the years, the more Khamenei’s legitimacy collapsed, the more brutal he became, the more he gravitated toward violence, and the more he turned to repression. It reached a point where, at the end, they carried out a massacre [in January], killing people in that way, firing live ammunition at people in the streets, and shooting young people in the eyes, something unprecedented in the history of the Islamic Republic itself.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf has a film called The President. It is an interesting film. It shows that when a person reaches a certain level of dictatorship, their actions are no longer guided by rationality. Power puts you in a position where all you want to do is keep using that power and constantly demonstrate it to society.

He never once came out and said, “Okay, this is the point where I need to return to the people.” Because he felt he was on a path of no return: a path where, if he took even one step back, he would lose everything. He remained on that path until the very end and was even killed that way, but he was never willing to stand with the people at any point, because he knew that the people no longer wanted him and no longer liked him.

That is why he kept trying to emphasize his ideologies, give more prominence to non-Iranian groups, and build a transnational image of himself. In the end, he destroyed himself and left behind a dark chapter in the history of the Islamic Republic that will not be forgotten for years to come. A government that ruled Iran through five decades of repression has endured, and what its fate will be remains uncertain.

In the beginning, slogans were never directed at Khamenei. They were about much more peripheral issues. I remember going to the 40th-day memorial, or perhaps the first anniversary, of the Forouhars at the Safi Ali Shah Sufi lodge near Baharestan Square. The people who had come were, as Iranians say, “suit-and-tie types”—well-dressed, polished people. They were members of the religious-nationalist movement, the Freedom Movement, and the National Front who had come to attend the Forouhars’ memorial.

Parastoo Forouhar spoke, and then Mr. Sahabi started speaking when suddenly a group of Basijis stormed in and started beating everyone with clubs. They did not care who these people were. Most of them were elderly men and women. They just started beating everyone.

It was a small, enclosed space, and these poor people had no way out. Then [the Basijis started] chanting “Heydar, Heydar” and other slogans. Suddenly, the people there started chanting “Death to Khamenei.” You could say it was out of desperation because they had no escape route and no way to defend themselves. At the same time, they did not want to stand there and surrender, so they started chanting “Death to Khamenei.”

Two or three days later, I had an interview scheduled with Dr. [Mohammad] Mirmohammadi, who at the time was the head of the Beyt’s auditing department. After the interview, I told him about what had happened. I said that a group of people had gathered respectfully to hold a memorial ceremony when the Basijis stormed in, and this is what occurred.

Mirmohammadi’s face turned red. I spoke to him in a friendly manner, like someone offering sincere advice. I told him: “Today, they chanted ‘Death to Khamenei’ inside the Safi Ali Shah lodge, in an enclosed space where no one could hear them. But if this chant reaches the streets, you will no longer be able to contain it. Your behavior has to change a little.”

You won’t believe it, but even hearing this was difficult for Mirmohammadi. He became flustered by what I was telling him.

And well, that is exactly what happened. Not only did people begin chanting “Death to Khamenei” in the streets, they openly chanted: “Our shame, our shame, our disgraceful leader.” Of course, these were among the most restrained slogans that have been chanted in recent years. They went much further than this, with obscene insults directed at Khamenei, his wife, and his children…

My point is about Khamenei’s beginning and his end: that the process through which Khamenei became the figure he ultimately became did not happen overnight. It began on July 9, 1999, when it became clear to him that there was a current inside the country that was moving beyond this structure.

If you recall, during a Participation Front campaign event at Shiroudi Stadium for the Sixth Parliament elections, Saeed Hajjarian gave a very historic speech. It was a very fiery speech which, in my opinion, sealed the fate of the reformists. He explicitly said: “We must throw all of them into the dustbin of history, every last one of them.” Those were his exact words. He said: “We must make the leadership accountable, and we must  place the leadership within the bounds of the Constitution.”

When he heard those statements, Khamenei fully realized that he was dealing with a movement whose reform agenda had no limits. They were seeking to create a different structure within the Islamic Republic. This was Khamenei’s assessment of the reform movement. They realized that if they [reformists] were allowed to continue through the electoral system, if they were not stopped, all of these exclusions and changes would take place.

Of course, these were only the avant-garde elements of the reform movement; not all reformists thought this way. But that speech was a turning point, and members of Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat were among his [Hajjarian’s] supporters.

That year, the Tahkim-e Vahdat was a completely reformist political movement, fully within the system’s framework. Under no circumstances was Tahkim considered an opposition or anti-establishment movement. 

18 Tir lit the first spark within Tahkim-e Vahdat. The generation that came after Afshari and the others, people like Abdollah Momeni, who became known as the Allameh faction, were completely anti-establishment and said, “We are no longer reformists; we are change-seekers.” They joined with the nationalist-religious groups and the Freedom Movement of Iran and created their own change-seeking movement outside the 18 Tir reformist groups.

They could not outright say they wanted to overthrow the regime, because they would not have been allowed to operate. They used the language of change-seeking, but in reality they were looking to overthrow the system. In other words, they began the process of moving beyond the system. 

Of course, the system itself played a major role in this. Instead of accepting their demands, cooperating with them to some extent, and showing some flexibility, they tried to split Tahkim-e Vahdat into two factions and create a pro-government faction within it. They created the Shiraz faction of Tahkim, which was a completely security-driven project directed by the Kayhan newspaper. Unfortunately, Mr. [Mostafa] Moein, who was part of President Khatami’s government, became its executor.

Dividing Tahkim pushed the Allameh faction further toward regime change and turned it into a completely anti-establishment political movement. Gradually, they all ended up in prison, and Tahkim went from being a movement aligned with the system to one that the establishment had lost control of. This was the result of the way the government dealt with them.

If you go back through the history of the Islamic Revolution, you see that Rafsanjani was essentially the person who brought Khamenei into prominence. He took Khamenei under his wing and brought him into the Revolutionary Council.

Khamenei was the only clerical member of the Revolutionary Council whose appointment order Khomeini was unwilling to issue directly. In the order he issued for Khamenei, he did not address Khamenei himself; he addressed Hashemi Rafsanjani. He said: “I am appointing him to the Revolutionary Council based on your recommendation.” For anyone else Khomeini appointed, he issued the order directly and said: “I am appointing this person.” But when it came to Khamenei, he was unwilling to do so.

The major turning point came during Khamenei’s presidency, when he had essentially become a ceremonial figure. Mir Hossein [Mousavi] coordinated all of his plans with Hashemi [Rafsanjani], and Hashemi coordinated with Khomeini. Khamenei did not approve of Hashemi’s approach, but at the same time, he lacked the power to stand up to him.

Hashemi was the one in charge from the very beginning. He helped advance Khamenei within the system. Hashemi was actually the one who made him Supreme Leader.

Naturally, when Hashemi was the person who made him leader, Khamenei was expected to listen to him. And in the beginning, he did. Early on, he coordinated all of his actions with Hashemi, but not because of any affection for him or because he particularly respected him; it was because of Hashemi’s power.

Once Khamenei was able to establish himself, he began restricting Hashemi’s influence. He did not want to be seen as attached to him, but in the beginning he had no other choice. Hashemi was commander-in-chief of the armed forces when Khamenei was president. This man was head of the Defense Commission in parliament, then became commander of the Revolutionary Guards, and later became president. Yet when Khomeini wanted to hand over command of the war to someone, he gave it to Hashemi, not to him. Khamenei was the first commander of the Revolutionary Guards, meaning he had a military background. In fact, at that point Khamenei was more of a military figure than a cleric. But even so, Khomeini did not give him command of the war. In other words, Khomeini held Khamenei in little regard. It was Hashemi’s power that always forced Khamenei to coordinate with him. He could not do anything without Hashemi’s permission.

Look, Khamenei used to be Hashemi’s tenant before the revolution. When he was just a young seminary student, he rented from Hashemi and lived there. Their children were around the same age and grew up together. Hashemi’s wife, Effat, who would lash out at Khamenei like that, did so because she had raised him almost like one of her own children. That was the kind of relationship they had.

When you look at Hashemi’s first cabinet, which coincided with the beginning of Khamenei’s leadership. More than half of its members were figures who later became part of the reformist camp. At the time, they were not called reformists; they belonged to the left faction. Figures like Abdollah Nouri, [Ali Mohammad] Besharati, and other members of the left were part of that cabinet. But when you look at Hashemi’s second administration, you see that the cabinet was largely filled with conservative figures. Javad Larijani replaced Khatami. This showed how much influence Khamenei had been able to exert over the cabinet in just four years, and how much his power had grown compared with before.

In general, Khamenei’s worldview was very different from Hashemi’s. Hashemi was a development-oriented figure; Khamenei was an ideologue. In one of his speeches, he made this point very clear and said: “We are not seeking development. Development is an entirely misguided concept promoted by the West; we are seeking transcendence.”

This was exactly the opposite of Hashemi’s approach, because Hashemi’s government was development-oriented. He strongly believed in development, but it was an authoritarian model of development, not a participatory one. His model was: “We design a system, and everyone must follow it.” Hashemi only thought about development. He used to say: “I am [modern] Iran’s Amir Kabir.” He wanted to build Iran according to the model he believed was right.

But Khamenei fundamentally did not believe in development, and that is why he began to diverge from Hashemi. The one thing Khamenei never thought about, and never did think about until the end of his life, was building Iran. He was only concerned with his own ideology. 

Abdollah Nouri once told me, in a private meeting, that Hashemi had called him and asked whether he should run for president again. This was, I think, in 2005, after Khatami’s second term.

He said: “I told Hashemi: ‘Back when Khamenei did not have power, and you came in and formed your cabinet, before four years had even passed, he forced you to replace your entire cabinet. You did not have the power [to object]. Now that you have no power whatsoever compared with Khamenei, why would you want to run? Even if you become president tomorrow,  Khamenei wouldn’t let you do anything.’”

And that is exactly what happened. After that election, Khamenei openly said on television that his thinking was closer to Ahmadinejad. He made his position explicit.

When the issue of succession gradually came up, the biggest threat facing him was Hashemi. And in my view, that is why he had him taken out. There was a succession crisis. People were saying Khamenei was ill and might die. Under those circumstances, Hashemi’s continued presence was very dangerous for him, because he knew that if he died and Hashemi remained, then even if Hashemi himself did not become Supreme Leader, at the very least Hassan Khomeini could become leader, and that was something Khamenei could never accept.

I am not saying he was necessarily pursuing Mojtaba [Khamenei’s succession], but he was looking for someone who would carry on his ideological line after him. He wanted an ideologue like himself. I do not know exactly whom he had in mind, but in my view, [Alireza] Arafi was a serious candidate.

If you look at Arafi, he was the person closest to Khamenei ideologically. In terms of the ideology of resistance, the expansion of Shiite thought, and these kinds of currents, no one had worked for him as much as Arafi had. Arafi was someone who completely followed Khamenei’s line of thinking. Whatever position Arafi held, his mission was to advance this ideological line.

I think Arafi was also a serious contender, but the IRGC, through the coup it carried out, installed Mojtaba.

The post Storming the Dormitory appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

Nearly half a century ago, just a year after the Revolution, a young Iranian engineer arrived in the port city of Chabahar to work on what was supposed to be one of the country’s great strategic projects. Chabahar sits near Iran’s southeastern edge, on the Gulf of Oman, with unimpeded access to the Indian Ocean. On a map, its advantages seem tantalizingly obvious. It lies outside the Strait of Hormuz, close to major shipping routes and within reach of markets stretching from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. There are few places in Iran where geography appears to offer such evident economic possibilities.

Yet the engineer remembers the project, which had begun under the Shah and which the new Islamic Republic was eager to pursue, as something very different. The port was being developed almost exclusively for military purposes. There was no doubt, he told Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s economic unit, as to the area’s commercial promise. But neither Chabahar nor the coastline around it was seen as the potential foundation of a broader economy in the poverty-stricken province of Sistan and Baluchistan.

For decades, this blind spot has defined much of the government’s relationship with the south. Iran’s southern provinces contain many of the assets on which the country depends. Khuzestan, in the country’s southwestern corner, holds roughly 80 percent of Iran’s onshore oil reserves. Bushehr and its coastline became the heart of the country’s enormous natural-gas and petrochemical industry. Hormozgan has Bandar Abbas, Iran’s principal container port, as well as the shoreline and islands overlooking the Strait of Hormuz. Farther east, Sistan and Baluchistan’s coastline—known by the region’s ancient name, Makran—provides entrée to the open sea through Chabahar.

And yet the wealth generated in the region has never translated into comparable prosperity for the people who live there. Khuzestan, Hormozgan, and Sistan and Baluchistan continue to rank poorly by measures of economic well-being. In the spring of 2025, according to figures from Iran’s National Statistics Center, Khuzestan had the country’s highest level of economic hardship. Hormozgan and Sistan and Baluchistan also performed worse than the national average. Bushehr, fronting most of the northwestern side of the Persian Gulf, was the exception, though only modestly so.

This is one of the central contradictions of the modern Iranian economy. The south functions as the country’s energy base, as well as its strategic gateway, but the wealth it generates is hardly reflected in development within the region itself.

Before the 1979 Revolution, oil revenues extracted largely from the south financed development elsewhere in the country, while major investment inside the region concentrated on refineries, export facilities, and projects such as the Kharg Island oil terminal.

After the Iran-Iraq War, successive governments built petrochemical complexes and expanded the oil and gas chain. South Pars and Asalouyeh became industrial behemoths. Free-trade zones were established. Ports grew, and military investment expanded along with them. Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters—an arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—and the Defense Ministry’s Marine Industries Organization built shipyards and other installations along the coast. In sum, the Islamic Republic was developing the south, but much of what it was developing served almost exclusively the needs of the state: energy exports, logistics, and defense.

Even the heavy industry that was established in the region has been at best of limited benefit to it. According to Iranian media reports, 70 percent of the workers in the south’s vital oil and petrochemical industries are nonlocal. Because these industries are largely state-owned, their managers are political appointees and generally not from the surrounding area. Commonly referred to as “commuting managers,” they reside in Tehran, Isfahan, or other major cities. They typically fly to the work site a couple times a week, for visits lasting a few hours. In hiring, these managers tend to favor applicants from their home regions—especially as there is a dearth of vocational and technical training centers in the south where locals might gain needed skills. Many of the remaining industrial facilities are operated by contracting companies, most of which are based in Tehran and do their recruiting there. Consequently, up to 90 percent of the workforce in privately owned plants is nonlocal.

The result has been a peculiar kind of growth. Enormous industrial complexes rose beside communities struggling with persistent unemployment and inadequate services while facing new industry-related water shortages and pollution. The region is indispensable to the national economy while its people long remained virtually invisible to national policymakers.

The maritime plan

For years, governments paid little more than lip service to the problems in the region. Then came an ambitious idea: Iran would turn toward the sea.

In November 2023, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued a nine-point directive under the title of General Policies on Maritime-Oriented Development. By the time of the Seventh Development Plan, approved by the Majles in June 2024 and put into action by President Masoud Pezeshkian a month later, the concept of a “marine-oriented economy” had become something approaching a national strategy.

The Makran coastline on the Gulf of Oman, adjoining Pakistan, would be developed. Chabahar and Bandar Abbas would expand. Petrochemical plants, steel mills, and other water-intensive industries would move from Iran’s increasingly arid interior toward the coast. The country would finally build out and take full advantage of the North-South Transport Corridor, described by state media as a “sanction-proof route with great economic prospects,” connecting the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean to markets farther north. Iran would become a regional transit hub. In January 2025, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani stated that the Makran region was being seriously considered as a potential site for relocating the country’s capital.

The ambition was extraordinary: not merely to build more ports but to alter the geography of the Iranian economy.

For a country increasingly constrained by drought, the idea had a compelling logic. Much of Iran’s industrial development took place on the central plateau, where water has become dangerously scarce. With advances in desalination, the south could address that problem, while offering ports for international commercial shipping and territory that had never been developed on the scale its location seemed to justify.

The engineer who worked in Chabahar half a century ago calls the region Iran’s “gold mine.” In the 1970s, he said, the extreme heat and lack of modern cooling made large-scale settlement and investment more than difficult. That calculation has changed with greater access to air-conditioning across the country and worsening water scarcity in central Iran.

The question was no longer whether the south had potential. It was whether the Iranian state was capable of turning that potential into sustained civilian development. This question was still unanswered in February 2026 when war arrived. The geography Iran had promised to make the foundation of its economic future became central to the conflict. Ports, coastal defenses, military installations, and logistical networks assumed immediate strategic importance and were targeted in US strikes. The reporting done for this article establishes that civilian facilities, including desalination plants, grain storage, agricultural water systems, and transportation infrastructure, have also been damaged.

As a result, the issue confronting southern Iran now is not simply whether the war will derail an ambitious development program. It is whether the government will respond to the destruction by reproducing the same pattern that has shaped the region for decades: rebuilding the south primarily in accordance with the security needs of the state. That possibility is especially significant because Iran entered the war without the funds needed to carry out many of its development promises.

A Tehran-based journalist and economic analyst told Resanegar that even before the conflict, the government was struggling to finance major projects. The war has only increased the demands on its limited resources. Damaged roads, ports, water systems, and industrial facilities must be repaired. Military installations and other defense capabilities must be reconstructed.

What remains for everything else? The government has given one indication of how it may respond to that question. On July 11, Ali Abdolalizadeh, the president’s special representative for Makran development, told Iran’s Chamber of Commerce that the state intended to retreat from the direct management of the development program, restricting itself largely to policymaking while transferring implementation to the private sector and other nongovernmental actors.

On paper, such a shift might appear to signal economic liberalization. Under wartime conditions, it could mean something simpler: the government does not have enough money.

And transferring responsibility to private investors raises a second problem. The Makran strategy depends not merely on building roads and ports but on persuading people and capital to move toward the coast. Investors need to believe factories will operate. Workers need schools, hospitals, and housing. Families need to imagine a future, while war undermines precisely that sort of vision.

“If the war turns into a prolonged conflict and living and investing in the south is perceived as risky,” the Tehran analyst said, development projects could stall while financial and human capital begins moving in the other direction. That exodus has not happened on a large scale, at least not yet.

In Bandar Abbas, a woman named Leila said friends and relatives repeatedly ask why she has not left.

“This is our home,” she tells them. “Where are we supposed to go?”

The roads remain open, she said, and she had seen no significant wave of departures. In Qeshm, another resident described much the same thing. Explosions could be heard around the island, she said, but daily life continued largely unaltered. There was little evidence even of widespread panic buying.

Their decision to remain might sound surprising from a distance. Up close, it is partly practical. Leaving requires gasoline and money. It requires somewhere to stay. And in a war in which danger is not confined to one front, departure offers no guarantee of safety.

But whether people are leaving today may be merely a footnote to a larger, still unfolding story. People in southern Iran were already being pushed from their communities long before the latest fighting. They were leaving because of heat, drought, unemployment, water shortages, and deteriorating public services. Iran’s Migration Observatory reported tens of thousands of displacements in the south associated with floods, dust storms, and tropical storms in 2021 and 2022, while Khuzestan has ranked among the country’s leading provinces for outmigration.

War adds another layer to pressures that have accumulated over decades. That history is particularly vivid in Khuzestan, where memories of the Iran-Iraq War remain embedded in family life.

Losing a sense of belonging

Samireh was nine when her family fled the Karun Agro-Industry residential complex in 1987. The bombing near the Iraqi border had been getting closer. Then a bomb landed near a school and bus stop as workers and children were returning home. Her family packed a few suitcases and departed for Shiraz, over 300 miles to the east.

In Shiraz, Samireh said, she never felt at home. She made no friends. Returning from school to her aunt’s house, she would climb into a wardrobe, switch on the small lightbulb inside, and sit reading Tintin comic books. Her father lasted only a few weeks before returning to Khuzestan despite the bombing. Samireh, her mother, and her brother followed months later.

“Losing your sense of belonging is much worse than losing your house,” she said.

Today, when she hears reports of attacks in southern Iran, she thinks people should leave. Then she catches herself. Like Leila, she thinks, Where would they go?

During the Iran-Iraq War that began in September 1980, families fleeing Abadan, Khorramshahr, and other southern cities crowded into Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, and towns farther from the front. Shops, industrial buildings, and other improvised spaces were converted into housing for displaced families. By late 1981, according to official figures, there were already nearly 1.5 million war-displaced Iranians.

Displacement, in solving an existential problem, creates many practical ones. People lose jobs. Savings disappear. A family staying with relatives eventually becomes a family that needs somewhere else to live. Children enter unfamiliar schools. Accents mark newcomers as outsiders. Temporary departure can become permanent exile from where one’s roots are and a future was planned.

“If I’m going to die somewhere,” Samireh remembers her mother saying, “let me die in my own home.”

For now, millions of people across southern Iran remain in theirs. But what kind of home does the Iranian state—increasingly within the grip of the IRGC—intend the south to become when the fighting stops?

From Chabahar to Hormuz to Kharg Island, any Iranian government would regard the coastline as strategically important. An economist interviewed for this article argued that Iran’s security could ultimately depend as much on a prosperous coastline as on military installations. Economic opportunity, functioning infrastructure, and public confidence can themselves contribute to stability. Yet in a political system accustomed to viewing everything of consequence through a security lens, civilian investment is easily postponed while military expenditure is seen as permanently urgent.

The current war makes that logic more powerful. Ports damaged in the fighting can be rebuilt as commercial gateways or hardened as strategic assets. Restored roads can connect cities and markets or military supply networks. Coastal development funds can finance housing, water systems, and employment, or disappear into an expanding defense economy. Half-realized plans, like those for the North-South Transport Corridor, first agreed to with Russia and India in 2002, can finally reach fruition or fade away.

These choices are not new. The south did not become economically vulnerable because war suddenly interrupted an otherwise successful development project. It was drawn into the war after decades in which the wealth beneath its soil consistently mattered more to the state than the quality of life above it. Iran never treated the south as a place whose inhabitants deserved to share in the prosperity their region generates.

The maritime-economy project was supposed to change that. It offered, at least in theory, a different relationship between the Iranian state and its coast. Instead of using the south to support the rest of the country, here Iran would build its economic future.

The war may now determine whether that experiment ever really begins. Perhaps the government will rebuild ports, pursue the Makran strategy, attract outside investment, and finally direct resources toward the towns and communities that have existed next door to the country’s most valuable assets with little to no reward. Or perhaps reconstruction will become no more than a rationale for fortification. If so, the war will simply have returned the region to the role it has been assigned again and again: essential to the defense and survival of the Iranian state, crucial to the national economy, and still waiting for development to reach the people who actually live there.

The post The South That Iran Promised But Never Builds appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

The young woman cradles a framed photograph of Ali Khamenei against her heart as she raises her right hand, daubed blood-red. She stands on Enghelab Street just outside the University of Tehran campus, people streaming past her in black mourning wear. The top of her own headscarf is pulled back far enough for the early July sun to illuminate her fair, perhaps dyed hair. She acknowledges that she participated in the January mass protests against the Iranian regime but has since repented. She describes her former views as misguided and says that reading the late Supreme Leader’s words has changed her life. She urges others “to read Mr. Khamenei’s books and letters without prejudice, with an independent and open mind.” 

Her eyes keep shifting down and to the left as if she’s trying to remember something (or signal that she’s obliged to remember something)—perhaps the next line. She continues, “I personally decided to get to know him and listen to his speeches.” Why did she decide this? “Personally,” as if there might be some other way. She offers no explanation, merely the result. “I realized that the image of him that had been created in my mind, to put it simply, that he was a dictator, a monster, or whatever they say, was not true. He was a very unusual person, and coming to know him has become something deeply valuable to me. Even though it ended up costing me ten years, I still consider myself the winner.” Many viewers of this widely shared video commented on the “ten years” reference, which some took as suggesting that she had received a prison sentence for her participation in the protests—perhaps suspended thanks to her public contrition. She divulges no details.

یکی از معجزات عمام کتلت :پروژه جدید، من مخالف رژیم بودم حتی در تظاهرات ۱۸و ۱۹ دی شرکت کردم اما اشتباه میکردم ، چرا اینها هم مثل هم حرف میزنند pic.twitter.com/T6N314eTPh

— Reza Esmailei (@esmailei) July 8, 2026

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s extravagant funeral, intended to project popular enthusiasm and unity, unfolded amid a climate of political repression and an economic meltdown that has left much of the public straining to meet basic needs. Ordinary Iranians were thus especially vulnerable to intimidation, on the one hand, and practical inducements, on the other, as the regime labored to create the appearance of mass support. Rival political factions, meanwhile, sought to appropriate the spectacle for their own ends. The outcome revealed both the cracks within the establishment and the gulf between its manufactured narrative of cohesion and the public’s daily struggle to survive. 

The funeral and farewell procession, long anticipated by Khamenei’s supporters, eventually began 126 days after his death in a US airstrike on the leadership’s central Tehran compound on February 28. The ceremony commenced in the capital on the morning of July 4, coinciding with Independence Day in the US, a deliberate choice in the eyes of many. Footage of the rubbled compound, which had been withheld from the public, was finally released on July 8.

As Khamenei lay in state in the Grand Mosalla, and more than 100 foreign delegations arrived to pay their respects, the funeral became a stage for political theater. The Islamic Republic used the occasion to implicitly, but unmistakably, commend its allies and scold its adversaries, in what has been described as “Qur’anic diplomacy.” As the members of each delegation approached the coffin to pay their respects, a different Qur’an verse was read by a qari (professional reciter)—in some cases, lines clearly conveying praise, as greeted the Houthi and Hamas representatives, while the Saudi delegation, in contrast, was reminded that the early Muslim army (presumably like the Islamic Republic) had prevailed over a “larger army of unbelievers.” 

Even the family of Khamenei’s predecessor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was not spared. The verse selected for the group included the line “those who stay at home are not the same as those who strive in the cause of Allah with their wealth and their lives,” a message that appeared to exalt Khamenei at the expense of the heirs of the Islamic Republic’s founder. Unlike the Saudi representatives, Khomeini’s family members walked out midway through the recitation aimed at them.

Held under tight security and postponed several times because of the war, the ceremony was attended by three of Khamenei’s surviving sons. Notably absent was his designated heir and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since the February 28 attack and his accession as Supreme Leader eight days later. A video that circulated online showing a man filmed from behind at the funeral sparked rumors that it was Mojtaba. The claim was debunked after the subject of the footage identified himself as Reza Mousavi Vaez, director of the Ahl al-Bayt Quranic Institute.

The state granted access to over 80 international media outlets, including the BBC and Washington Post, and invited 500 supportive foreign influencers and social media personalities such as Jackson Hinkle, who attended regime rallies and led chants of “Death to America.” Bushra Shaikh, a UK-based influencer who first came to Iran in May for a state-sponsored visit, also attended the ceremony. She arrived wearing a white headscarf but later adjusted her outfit to conform with the Islamic Republic dress code, telling her followers on X: “I have chosen to report while wearing a hijab and dressing in black as a mark of respect during the funeral period for the late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.”

(Mis)taking attendance

The messaging surrounding the funeral sought to portray it as a nationwide outpouring of love for a paternal figure. State media outlets adjusted their language, increasingly referring to Khamenei as the “father of the nation,” “the most Iranian Iranian” (as opposed to the Pahlavi family, which was referred to as “the most un-Iranian family in history”), and “Aqa-ye Shahid” (literally, martyred Sir), a reverential title more affectionate than “Rahbar-e Shahid” (martyred Leader), which had been standard in the weeks after Khamenei’s death.

Yet the state’s efforts to project an image of widespread public devotion faced scrutiny over one of the most visible elements of the ceremony: the size of the crowd. While the Islamic Republic claimed that there were many millions of participants, with some media outlets and supporters placing the figure at 20 to 24 million, Factnameh disputed the claims, estimating the turnout at between 600,000 and three million. Videos filmed from the top of Azadi Tower also appeared to show that the crowd size was smaller than state outlets reported. In response to the mounting skepticism, at least one regime supporter argued that the nature of the ceremony explained why the crowd numbers appeared so modest, saying: “This was a farewell; people don’t come and stay. People come, pay their respects, say farewell, and leave.”

The issues with turnout were reportedly fueled by multiple changes to the planned funeral procession route made without informing the public. The original route, beginning toward the eastern end of Damavand Street and ending at Imam Hossein Square, was canceled on the morning of the ceremony. A second planned route, from Imam Hossein Square down five kilometers of Enghelab Street to Enghelab Square, was also scrapped. The final, considerably shorter route ran between the Sharif University campus and Azadi Square, extending roughly two kilometers. The changes prompted frustration among some attendees, who accused authorities of leaving many people at the wrong locations.

In Qom, where Khamenei’s body was taken before being brought to the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, the state’s declarations of a vast turnout were punctured yet again. Footage of a slow-moving helicopter carrying Khamenei’s remains arriving at Jamkaran Mosque drew comparisons with the 1989 funeral of Ruhollah Khomeini, when the helicopter carrying Khomeini’s body struggled to land because of the size of the crowds surrounding the site.

A local real estate developer, who offered a significantly lower assessment of the crowd size than the official claims, said he believed large numbers of participants had been bussed into the city for the procession, which stretched eight kilometers from Jamkaran Mosque to the Fatemeh Masoumeh Shrine.

“Organizers claimed that around four million people attended,” the developer said, “but my personal estimate was between 800,000 and one million. Of course, most of them had been brought to Qom from other cities; fewer people from Qom itself took part.”

He also said the scale of supplies distributed suggested organizers had expected a much larger turnout. “Instead of giving people a single bottle of mineral water, they handed out entire cases and told recipients to share them with others along the route.” The cases were marked “not for sale,” indicating that they had been prepared specifically for the ceremony.

To counter criticism over the funeral’s organization and disputed crowd numbers, state media relied on familiar elements from the Islamic Republic’s propaganda playbook, with a well-established cast of recurring figures appearing in its carefully curated scenes of public mourning and devotion: the supporter who traveled thousands of miles from Canada, Germany, and even the US to pay respects; the loyalist overseas who sent a message of grief from afar; the ordinary citizen expressing unwavering devotion; and always the impassioned crowds presented as evidence of popular support.

Redemption or coercion? The born-again women

The coverage also emphasized highly emotional displays of grief: women with loosely worn hijabs wailing as though they had lost a close family member, supporters appearing overwhelmed by emotion, mourners collapsing and being carried away while still clutching their phones and water bottles, and even Red Crescent workers who appeared to break down only after cameras turned toward them.

Alongside the black-clad mourners was another familiar character: the regime’s version of a fashionable, bihejab (loosely, “unveiled”) young woman. Interviewed by the Narm Khabar news agency, one especially stylish speaker in tangerine cat-eye sunglasses, hair cascading in ringlets from under her tasseled headscarf, warned: “If even a single speck of our homeland’s soil clings to an enemy soldier’s boot, this entire nation will wash it clean with its own blood.”

Approvingly portrayed, even while not fully adhering to the state-mandated dress code, such figures have become a staple of pro-government rallies and official messaging in recent years: even those who do not fit the regime’s traditional image of a devout supporter can still be loyal to the Revolution and its leadership. By the same token, they are employed in attempts to discredit anyone who draws attention to the harassment and violence to which women caught at the wrong time without proper hijab are still routinely subjected.

State media highlighted, in particular, young women who appeared to embody the regime’s newly preferred narrative of redemption, like the one on Enghelab Street who inexplicably became fascinated by the literary output of a Supreme Leader rarely acclaimed by even his most fervent devotees as a compelling rhetorician. Government-controlled and -aligned outlets eagerly featured these erstwhile unbelievers who had recognized their mistakes, returned to the fold, and were seeking forgiveness—even if they struggled at times to keep their chadors in place.

The appearance of such figures has drawn skepticism from rights groups, who have long questioned the authenticity of some pro-government displays and alleged that detained protesters and their relatives have been pressured to participate in official events or provide supportive interviews in exchange for leniency.

The carefully constructed images of spontaneous public grief were accompanied by other scenes that raised questions about the extent to which attendance was voluntary. Photos and videos showed municipal street cleaners (pakbans) in uniform holding pictures of Mojtaba Khamenei at the funeral, prompting allegations that some had been compelled to attend at the risk of losing their jobs.

Factional frictions and “super-revolutionaries”

Despite all of the effort to project unity during the funeral, the ceremony also exposed deep factional tensions within the regime and its camp. On the sidelines of the event in Tehran, President Masoud Pezeshkian was met with chants of “death to the compromiser.” The state-aligned Tabnak media outlet described those berating the president as “super-revolutionaries.” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was chased by an angry mob of regime supporters, whom Iranian media dubbed “radicals,” hurling stones and insults and seemingly ready to tear him apart. The confrontation was not entirely unexpected: hardline true believers had been calling for Araghchi to be executed for his participation in negotiations with the United States over the past few months.

In Mashhad, where Khamenei’s body was brought back from its Iraqi sojourn for interment in the Imam Reza Shrine, officials including Majles speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf faced similar chants and demands for “revenge,” prompting state television to cut its audio feed at times. The incidents forced officials to publicly warn against internal divisions. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani addressed the incidents, saying, “In such circumstances, any attempt to undermine unity is not only a violation of fairness and basic decency, but also squanders this great asset and goes against national interest.”

The minister of culture and Islamic guidance, Seyyed Abbas Salehi, called for those responsible to be held to account, while comparing the Araghchi incident with a 2013 attack in which a group of men launched shoes and prayer stones (mohrs or turab) at the late principlist politician Ali Larijani at the Fatemeh Masoumeh Shrine in Qom. “It has not been long since martyr Larijani was pelted with prayer stones, and yesterday we witnessed similar scenes. Is history destined to repeat itself?” Salehi wrote on X. “Put the perpetrators and those who issued the order in their place. Is that such a difficult thing to do?”

Former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—whose supporters state media had held responsible for the 2013 assault on Larijani—also made an appearance at the Khamenei funeral. Once a central figure of the Islamic Republic’s hardline camp, Ahmadinejad has become increasingly estranged from the establishment. The New York Times reported in May that US and Israeli officials had considered him as a potential leader of Iran in a regime-change scenario.

An enormous price tag

Beneath the ideological battles over who represented the true revolutionary path and who was branded a traitor lay another question: the vast public resources required to stage such an event.

Khamenei’s funeral was perhaps the largest state-sponsored event in Iranian history. A funeral of such scale required a vast logistical operation. Authorities mobilized thousands of government and municipal workers, security personnel, emergency responders, and volunteers in Tehran, Qom, and Mashhad. They procured thousands of tons of food supplies, millions of loaves of bread, bottled water, fuel, medical supplies, and transportation services.

Tehran Municipality alone deployed thousands of city workers, arranged free round-the-clock public transportation, installed temporary facilities, prepared accommodation for millions of visitors, and covered extensive citywide decorations, banners, and advertising campaigns to promote the ceremony. Additional costs included nationwide security operations and elevated utility outlays—none quantified by officials.

Behind the images of a massive public turnout was a significant campaign aimed at encouraging participation. Some social media users shared screenshots of push notifications from the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology and Hamrah-e Aval, the country’s largest mobile service provider, informing participants they would have access to cell phone repair services, healthcare services, and other amenities during the ceremony.

Hamrah-e Aval had also set up media centers where content creators and members of the press could access free internet, charging stations, and editing desks. Each center featured a “data analysis section” designed to help users produce “content more easily and increase their visibility.”

While attendees received bags containing potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and paper visors, videos circulated showing officials and invited guests being served hot, prepackaged meals from Hani Restaurant, which operates a lucrative ready-meal business.

The committee organizing the funeral, chaired by First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref, has not disclosed the budget allocated for the ceremony or the source of the funds. However, social media users and commentators have speculated that the ceremony alone cost around seven trillion tomans (roughly $44–47 million). When the broader impact of the costs of shutting down much of the country for a week is included, some estimates have placed the total drain on the Iranian economy as high as $1 billion, which, if even close to accurate, would make it the most costly funeral in Iran’s modern history and among the most costly anywhere in the world.

The reported expense prompted widespread criticism online. Some Iranians who lost their homes during the recent wars contrasted the funeral’s spending with their own travails, saying promised government assistance had not been delivered and that they were struggling to cover medical expenses, housing, and basic household needs.

“How is it that people like us, whose homes were destroyed in the war three months ago, had to get a security deposit and a voucher for household items from the municipality because the government didn’t have the budget? Not a single item in our home survived. Just four basic plastic household items cost us 60 million tomans,” said one Instagram user. “In the middle of this economic crisis, you’re throwing away seven trillion tomans while many people displaced by the war in other cities are still living in tents, and many in Tehran are still in hotels. So when are they actually going to release the funds they promised and do what they’re supposed to do?” 

The funeral was meant to project strength and solidarity. But for many of those whose livelihoods or entire lives have been turned upside down by war, the event highlighted a widening gap between the regime’s ideological priorities and the everyday concerns of the people it governs. While the state was able to organize a massive funeral operation, the country’s countless economic problems remain unresolved. With muted hope, the Qom developer said, “I hope that now that this is over, our situation will also change, because you cannot do business in this environment.”

The post Last Rites for a Theocrat appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

For decades, Iranians saw the real estate market as a safe haven for their investments. Unlike liquid assets such as stocks and foreign currency, whose value is especially difficult to predict in the Islamic Republic, where political and geopolitical crises routinely reshape market expectations, property prices in the country long appreciated at a steady rate. That changed last summer, when the 12-day war with Israel caused a general panic. Investors shifted their capital toward the gold and currency exchanges, while demand in the housing market plummeted.

“Real estate buying and selling came to a near standstill, and many construction projects were either halted or slowed down,” Rasoul Ghorbannejad, CEO of Saba Naft Engineering, recently told the state-aligned Tabnak news site. “The volume of property listings across Tehran dropped by about 95 percent.” 

While construction activity rebounded temporarily later in the year, the on-again-off-again war that began on February 28 has imposed new constraints as the government extracts additional taxes and fees from the real estate sector to prop up the country’s faltering economy. In combination with the escalating costs of building materials and utility hookups, new housing construction has dropped precipitously as prices soar.

Mohammad, a semi-retired doctor who lives in north Tehran with his wife and their two children, had been hoping to downsize. The family currently owns and occupies one floor of a five-story building with a footprint of around 250 square meters (2,700 square feet), in a condominium-style arrangement. Mohammad listed the home just before the outbreak of war this year radically altered the market.

“I wanted to sell this place and buy two smaller units, one for us and one for the kids,” he says, “but we haven’t been able to find a buyer because property values have risen so much, even though this property is in a relatively good area and could be used for either commercial or residential purposes.” Months have passed with little prospect of a sale. Mohammad concludes, “The situation is even worse now.” 

Property developers attribute the construction sector’s stagflation to a combination of eroding household purchasing power, rising building costs, and war-related risk aversion. In Tehran, prices have surged by 80 percent year-on-year, while the government reports a 12 percent jump tied directly to the ongoing conflict. As a result, the cost of homeownership has become too high for the kindred support networks that traditionally financed it. “In the past, young people could rely on financial help from their families to buy a home,” says Mohammad. “But now families are struggling too and can’t help.”

A major factor behind the recent price hikes are supply-side pressures on developers, who face a crippling cost burden for new housing starts. Nationwide, the construction cost of a five-story  building like the one in which Mohammad and his family live now exceeds 50 million tomans per square meter (approximately $26 USD per square foot), an increase of at least 30 percent over the past year, according to state-aligned economic daily Donya-e Eqtesad. Electricity charges for construction operations have more than doubled in that span.

Taxation models have also shifted. Developers now pay 25 percent of project profit as tax, a far higher outlay than the previous flat fees. Additionally, the Social Security Organization, a channel for off-budget funding of the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus, collects 27.5 percent of municipal charges as cash insurance premiums. In some regions, developers of projects exceeding 200 units are further required to build schools.

Meanwhile, labor and materials are increasingly scarce. The mass deportation of Afghan workers following last year’s 12-day war sparked rising wages in the construction sector. Energy rationing has further impeded production, as cement factories face an 85 percent power curtailment during the summer months. Major facilities like the Mobarakeh Steel complex, a target of air strikes early in this year’s war, are operating at severely reduced levels, with steel industry executives warning that output is on track for barely 30 million tons of the country’s installed annual capacity of over 50 million.

Halted momentum and hidden players

The impact of these pressures is clear in the capital, where average housing prices rose by about 80 percent between January 2025 and June 2026, according to Touraj Sarbaz, a member of the Realtors’ Union board of directors. The impact is no less apparent in areas just outside the city, where house prices increased by nearly 100 percent, according to Ghorbannejad. Developers attribute the gap to the declining purchasing power of urban residents, which has pushed demand outward into cheaper suburban markets, accelerating price growth there.

Before the current war with the US and Israel, the real estate market was showing signs of a revival, with rising buyer inquiries and increased listings in many urban districts. However, the outbreak of war brought that momentum to a halt and effectively froze market activity.

Banks have also emerged as “hidden players” in the housing market, exacerbating a decline in public confidence. In December 2025, Samaneh Moharrami, vice president of the Realtors’ Union, described Iranian banks as wielding outsized influence through their often non-transparent control of properties acquired through repossession and other means. Because so many bank transactions are opaque, they can manipulate recorded comparables and valuations. They can list properties above established comparable standards, and because they control a substantial share of sales, those asking prices become the new benchmarks. Favoring speculation over expeditious liquidation, banks have also been holding repossessed properties off the market, reducing supply while their holdings appreciate in value. “As key players,” said Moharrami, “banks must be held accountable to curb such profiteering.”

Moharrami’s observations were echoed this June by real estate consultant Touraj Sarbaz, who noted that banks exploit market fluctuations to funnel liquidity into real estate through intermediaries. This practice has further inflated prices and intensified volatility within the sector.

Analysts agree that a housing market recovery hinges on restoring public confidence and stabilizing the broader economy. With household wealth often diversified across gold, foreign currency, stocks, and vehicles, potential buyers are waiting for signs of predictability before committing to property purchases.

“Once the economy stabilizes, individuals can make informed decisions about consolidating those assets to purchase a home,” said Mansour Gheybi, founder and CEO of Damico Real Estate. He cautioned against expecting an immediate rebound even if the war ends for good in the coming months, describing the return of market confidence as a gradual process unlikely to produce significant results in the short term.

Tehran’s growing property divide

Recent property price increases have not been uniform across Tehran’s 22 districts, instead deepening the persistent divide between the affluent north and the overcrowded, infrastructurally underserved south. While the north has experienced the steepest growth, the southern districts have recorded much slower appreciation, leading to a market where apartment prices in northern Tehran are currently 3.5 times higher on average than in the city’s southern areas.

District 22, in northwest Tehran beside the Alborz Mountain foothills, recorded the largest average price increase over the past half-decade, with housing prices rising 135 percent compared with 2021, followed closely by the districts to the east that define the rest of the city’s northern border: District 5, at 130 percent; District 2, at 128 percent; and District 1, at 125 percent. Conversely, districts 17 and 18 in the city’s southwestern corner recorded the smallest increases, both at 80 percent.

This disparity underscores the broader failure of affordable housing initiatives, long a central tenet of the postrevolutionary regime. Since the early 2000s, multiple administrations have launched elaborate subsidized home-building schemes, yet these have largely failed to provide a viable alternative to the capital’s core. Instead of moving into half-built satellite towns with limited infrastructure, many lower-income Tehranis have chosen to remain in the city, buying small apartments in the south when they can and renting when they cannot. (Home—i.e., apartment—ownership has long been far more common among lower-income urban Iranians than it is in the United States, where members of the analogous group are overwhelmingly renters. As ownership has become unattainable for a growing share of lower-income Tehranis, long-term renting has become more prevalent than it was a generation ago.)

As Saeed Moradi, a real estate agent in District 17, told the Borna News Agency, “In southern Tehran, many prospective homebuyers can no longer afford to buy homes. As a result, despite rising prices, the market remains weak in terms of transaction volume, and price growth has lagged behind that of the northern districts.”

The financial chasm between these areas is further illustrated by the asking prices recorded in recent surveys. Average asking prices in District 1 and its more central neighbor District 3, home to the Tehran Art Garden and Taleghani Forest Park, currently stand at 446 million tomans per square meter, compared to just 126 million tomans in Districts 15 through 21. (For context, 126 million tomans is currently worth $696 USD at free-market exchanges, per Bonbast.com, and is slightly more than seven and a half months’ worth of the national minimum base wage.) Within District 1, the city’s highest in both wealth and physical elevation, prices vary dramatically; the top asking price in recent weeks was 840 million tomans per square meter for a one-year-old, 149-square-meter apartment in the Mahmoudiyeh neighborhood, while a nine-year-old apartment in the Evin neighborhood was listed at 310 million tomans per square meter.

Looking beyond the extremes of the north and south, older eastern neighborhoods like Districts 8 and 13 show that class history, urban design, and social appeal play major roles in determining value. In traditionally middle-class District 8, asking prices averaged 210 million tomans per square meter in June 2026 for apartments averaging five years in age. However, specific listings reveal a wide range, with 143 million tomans per square meter for a ten-year-old apartment in Vahidieh compared to 330 million tomans for a two-year-old apartment in Madaen and 299 million tomans for a newly built apartment in South Narmak. Similar divergences exist in District 13, a working-class area known for its historic military barracks and active air base, where prices range from 140 million tomans per square meter for apartments in Safa and Zahed Gilani to 280 million tomans for a three-year-old apartment in Emamat.

While the details vary from neighborhood to neighborhood, real estate transactions across the capital are nearly paralyzed. As the ripple effects of war, policy failures, and supply-side constraints amplify each other, the housing market has shifted from a dependable store of value to a source of deep uncertainty for buyers and sellers alike. Mohammad, the north Tehran homeowner, captures the present reality for most Iranians: “In this market, and with the economy in its current state, no one can make a move.”

The post Hard to Find a Home appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

As the Islamic Republic of Iran’s national football team began its 2026 FIFA World Cup campaign on June 15, a group of Iranian Americans in the SoFi Stadium stands was preoccupied with an unusual sewing project. A month earlier, the world’s governing body for the sport had made clear it would accede to the IRI regime’s demand that it enforce “respect for the Iranian flag” by banning the prerevolutionary Lion and Sun flag from tournament venues. A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court seeking a temporary restraining order against the ban was rejected by a judge just hours before the Iran–New Zealand kickoff. Well prepared, the sewers in the stands had crafted an oversize Lion and Sun flag divided into parts for clandestine entry and were now reassembling it to make a defiant display.

In previous World Cups, football served as a singular, apolitical point of agreement for Iranians under flags of three stripes or 13. In cities across Iran, fans would pour into the streets in solidarity after every match, as in 2014, when even a loss to Argentina saw massive crowds celebrating the team’s performance. In 2018, when Iran defeated Morocco on a last-minute own goal, there were cheers from Los Angeles to New York to Washington, DC, including from more than a few waving or wearing the Lion and Sun. Those days now feel distant.

Most Iranians, both at home and abroad, were once willing to overlook players’ political affinities and accept football as separate from politics. But the divisions that deepened after the September 2022 killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the Islamic Republic’s morality police for improperly wearing her hijab, which set off months of intense protests, are increasingly unbridgeable. The mass protests this past January and the regime’s ferocious crackdown, in which thousands of defenseless Iranians were killed, have become a hard dividing line for many, splitting them into opposing camps and fundamentally altering their relationship with Team Melli, as the squad is known (melli, national).

In different ways, two long-time professionals chosen to play for Team Melli in years past articulated the transformation in the national spirit. “Football is like life,” said midfielder Soroush Rafiei, still active in Iran’s top-flight league. “When people in a society aren’t doing well and their spirits are low, football without supporters—football played in an empty stadium—has no pleasure, no passion, no soul … A wise man once said that small pains leave you with few words, great pains leave you speechless. I’m speechless now.”

On February 24, former goalkeeper Mohammad Rashid Mazaheri, who retired in 2024, held then Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei personally responsible for the bloodshed, warning that “Khamenei, the Islamic Republic, and their mafia will pay for this.” He disappeared the following day. (On May 20, authorities confirmed what many suspected: Mazaheri had been seized and imprisoned on charges including “propaganda activities against national security.”)

The divisions deepened further after the war with the US and Israel began on February 28, meaning the World Cup for Team Melli would involve competing not only on the pitch but in a high-stakes political conflict. As Hossein Yekta, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) plainclothes operations commander and mobilization strategist, proclaimed at a rally for the squad: “Our Team Melli boys, our young men, are going into an arena that is itself a battlefield.” For decades, the regime could count on football as a space for releasing or distracting from social tensions. Now, with players vetted for political allegiance and the Islamic Republic’s participation in the tournament exploited in state propaganda, that space has effectively disappeared. The quadrennial global competition exposed the widening rift in public sentiment toward not only the government but national identity as well, with many one-time fans no longer willing to compartmentalize sports as a realm outside of politics.

Team Melli’s squad selection process intensified divisions, with some labeling the team a “retirement home” due to its reliance on older players in their mid- to late 30s. Critics argued that merit was sidelined in favor of political loyalty, pointing to the exclusion of emerging talents like Alireza Koushki and Allahyar Sayyadmanesh, as well as the omission of Sardar Azmoun, a proven world-class player reportedly expelled from the team for political dissent. Azmoun ran up against the regime’s red line with an Instagram post on January 8, the day the government massacres began, that reads: “As an athlete, I will always stand with the people of my country. I hope and pray that my people’s hearts find peace.” He crossed it on March 17, when he posted a photo in which he appears with Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, where Azmoun plays club ball and which, though a non-belligerent, was repeatedly targeted by Iranian drones and missiles during the 40 days of open war. 

Backers of the regime castigated any Iranians, whether domestic or diasporic, who might dare oppose the team. Among the most prominent was Alireza Dabir, an Olympic wrestling champion in 2000 and current head of Iran’s wrestling federation. Four years ago, he and a group of federation members were barred from entering the US for a competition after he opined on state media, “We always chant ‘Death to America,’ but [what’s] important is showing it in action.” In early June, before the World Cup began, he declared that since last year’s 12-day war with Israel and the US, Iran no longer has “reformists and fundamentalists, but only patriots and traitors.” According to Dabir, “Anyone who does not wish success for the national football team is a traitor to the homeland.” His description of Iranians, wherever they might live, as treasonous if they opposed the regime and the team picked to represent it was echoed by IRGC-controlled Fars News and former football federation chief Ali Kafashian, who asserted before the tournament, “It would not be surprising if certain opposition groups and traitors attempted to disrupt Team Melli … Iran’s players must confront these distractions with focus and determination, like soldiers on the battlefield.”

The behavior of players welcome on the squad further deepened the rift. Most conspicuously, center back Shoja Khalilzadeh openly identified as a “soldier of the Islamic Republic,” participated in state propaganda, and even promised to dedicate any goals he might score to the late Ali Khamenei. Other team members drew the ire of regime opponents for making aggressive gestures toward Iranian Americans in the World Cup stands or dismissive comments regarding the January crackdown. For the most part, the players have simply refused to address the mass murder of their countrymen by Revolutionary Guard and kindred regime forces. For many former supporters, this silence and compliance constitute unforgivable betrayals of the Iranian people.

The consequences were visible as the team played its three World Cup games, two in Los Angeles County, one in Seattle: it was met with street protests, in-stadium booing of its national anthem, and watch-party chants of “dishonorable” from members of an increasingly angry diaspora. And alongside the intrepid sewers of SoFi, many additional spectators managed to evade the FIFA ban and smuggle in flags and other items featuring the Lion and Sun emblem. Still, there were unambivalent fans of the team in attendance as well. Those opposed were especially indignant about the women, as one Angelina put it, “who are not allowed into stadiums in Iran, yet used American freedoms to attend matches but still supported the Islamic Republic.” (Western viewers who have seen Jafar Panahi’s 2006 film Offside are familiar with the plight of female football fans under Islamist rule.)

Meanwhile, Iranian state media amplified coach Amir Ghalenoei’s complaints that the team was the “most oppressed” in the tournament, framing it as a victim of American mistreatment. High on his list of grievances, many of those named to the team’s traveling executive staff had been denied visas to enter the US—Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that “almost half” of Iran’s intended delegation outside the playing squad were directly linked to the IRGC.

The 2026 World Cup officially ended for Team Melli on June 27, when Austria and Algeria played to a draw in the group stage’s final game, advancing both to the knockout rounds—had either won, or had the result in either of two games earlier in the day broken Iran’s way, Team Melli would have progressed. Afterward, Alireza Dabir blamed the letdown in part on the behavior of Iranians living abroad, who he said should be “taught a lesson.” Where pride in the team’s strong effort (three matches without a loss) and disappointment in its failure to advance would once have been near-universal, public reaction to its participation in the tournament was instead the most polarized in Iranian history. 

To map the complexities of the polarization among those who don’t hesitate to identify as Iranian yet don’t feel obliged to parrot the regime, Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s Persian-language website, interviewed four fans typifying three divergent viewpoints, highlighting the deeply personal and often conflicting stakes of following Team Melli in the current political landscape.

1. The Compartmentalist: Putting Football First

Pezhman, an émigré who now lives in Massachusetts, remembers a time when the national football team served as a powerful rallying point. He cites the historic World Cup match against the US in 1998, when he still lived in Iran, as a moment when political tension fueled a sense of collective fighting spirit that brought Iranians together, regardless of how they viewed the regime.

“When Iran won that match,” he recalled, “I think that political atmosphere may even have contributed to the victory, because it created a different sense of fighting spirit among the players, and it does create that kind of feeling … When Iran won, a lot of people were very happy.”

From his perspective, expecting players to take political risks is unreasonable, particularly in a post-2022 environment where dissent carries severe professional consequences. He argues that players like Voria Ghafouri, a prominent footballer blacklisted for his support of the Mahsa Amini, or Woman, Life, Freedom, protests, are exceptions who paid dearly, while most footballers remain focused solely on their professional ambitions.

“You cannot have such an expectation from a footballer, someone who has devoted his entire life to football,” they said. “His only concern has been to play football, to join a proper club, then reach the national team, then go and play for a European club and reach a better place. Then, in the middle of all this, a movement emerges and you tell him to come and join that movement. He does not even understand what this movement is. Right now, if you ask half of these footballers what the [2022 protests] were about, they cannot say two sentences about it. I say this with absolute certainty, because I have seen these players up close, I have been to stadiums a thousand times, and I have spoken with these players in the locker room many times.”

Pezhman rejects the idea that Team Melli is a monolithic political entity, pointing instead to internal football logic and coaching decisions as evidence that selections are performance-driven rather than ideological. 

Referring to winger Mehdi Torabi, who has played over 50 times for Team Melli, but made only a single appearance as a substitute in the World Cup, Pezhman remarked,  “If Iranian football were political, Ghalenoei should have put him in the starting lineup, because he is both a top-quality player and, politically speaking, the most pro-establishment, the most political, and the most religious. Yet he was not in the starting lineup; he was not even on the bench. Why? Because the coach decided that he is not needed for that match. In my view, the coach does not make politically driven decisions in his selections.”

He believes football should remain a space for spectatorship rather than political judgment. “When I sit down to watch a match, I no longer care who Mehdi Torabi supports politically. How is it possible that we applauded Mehdi Torabi for all these years and today suddenly say we are no longer going to cheer for him? Come on, Mehdi Torabi has been political from the very first day he entered football. We admired him; he has scored historic goals for Persepolis and for the national team, and every time he scores, the entire stadium rises to applaud him.”

For Pezhman, his position ultimately rests on the belief that the role of public figures at moments of political rupture is often overstated. He argues that movements tend to gain broad traction only when the risks of participation are low and the expectation of successis high—which hardly characterizes current conditions in Iran, where reports of arrests, asset seizures, and disappearances of dissidents abound.

Pezhman said he expected more from Team Melli because, unlike previous World Cups, when national team coaches had only limited time to work with their players, this time the war led to the suspension of Iran’s domestic league. As a result, the squad was able to hold a training camp in Turkey, where they had access to good facilities and an extended opportunity to practice together.

“National team coaches always complain that they don’t have enough time to work with their players because the players are with their clubs and are only available on FIFA days. That leaves them with very little time to prepare. But this time…the national team coach had the players for nearly three months. For the first time, he had enough time, just like a club coach, to get his ideas across in training and build a well-organized team.”

He attributes the team’s disappointing World Cup campaign to the head coach’s reluctance to take risks and to the intense psychological pressure the players were under.

“Coaches have never been willing to take the risk of putting young players in the game … Even the one or two relatively younger players on the team…were not given a chance. The pressure on the players was so intense that they felt they had to prove people were wrong about them; that they were playing for the people and wanted to make them happy. They really did try, but when you’re psychologically shaken, you can’t achieve the result you’re aiming for.” 

2. The Accountability Advocate: Fandom as a Social Contract

California resident Mahyar views the relationship between supporters and footballers as a reciprocal social contract. From this perspective, players owe the public, whose ticket purchases, viewership, and emotional commitment sustain their fame, income, and status, a basic level of acknowledgment and accountability.

Drawing comparisons to international figures such as British footballer Marcus Rashford, who used his platform to address public hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic, Mahyar argues that silence in the face of widespread tragedy constitutes an abandonment of the audience. Many athletes, he notes, “raise awareness about political issues and stand up against racism, sexism, and homophobia” because fans “don’t want to support someone who sees people suffering and ignores them.”

For supporters like Mayhar, those who provide the emotional and financial foundations of the sport deserve recognition when they themselves experience hardship. They don’t insist that footballers become spokesmen for political reform, let alone radical change, but only that the players pay due respect to the suffering of the people who have backed them for years.

“You don’t have to come out and talk about revolution. You can just acknowledge that [thousands] of your fans, football viewers, were killed,” he said. “You can raise awareness. You can talk about how a protest is an expression of opinion and people shouldn’t die because they are expressing their opinion. You can like a post on social media. There are a lot of ways you can express it. You don’t have to rile people up and get them to the streets. You can just let them know you see them and acknowledge them.”

Mahyar also argues that the national team’s roster is no longer selected on merit. He points to players such as forward Ali Alipour and, from an angle very different than Pezhman’s, Mehdi Torabi, contending that they have been retained not because of their performance, which he finds underwhelming, but because of their perceived political alignment with the regime.

“Alipour shouldn’t be invited [to the team],” he said. “He has millions of chances, but he misses way more than he scores. This is not the type of guy you want to take to the World Cup.”

Fans like Mahyar, who lived in Iran until 2016, believe the basic demands they make of their footballers are well earned. Having faithfully filled the stands despite poor infrastructure and conditions, he argues that supporters have every right to some appreciation of their concerns from the players they helped turn into stars.

“It’s not like we have good stadiums in Iran. They are not standard, and many don’t have seats,” Mahyar said. “People literally have to sit on concrete blocks…with nothing to shield from the weather when it rains or when it is sunny and hot. So people have to endure a lot, but they do it because they care, so they expect to at least have some acknowledgment from the people they have supported and brought to fame.”

Mahyar watched Iran’s World Cup games to see what would happen but said that he resisted the urge to celebrate. “It’s one of those things. You think you don’t care, but when they score, you feel like [cheering], but you don’t.” People still want to support their team, he explained, but they want that support to be reciprocal.

He said the Iran-Egypt showdown was a fascinating viewing experience because it was a match in which the audience—at least that portion with sentiments similar to his—could find reason to cheer any outcome.

“It was one of those games where, as a spectator, it was a win-win,” as far as he was concerned. “If your team won, that’s what you would normally want as a football fan, but if your team lost, that’s also what you wanted. So it was a very interesting watch for me.”

3. The “Traitors”: Wrath Ignited by a Moral Betrayal

Some former supporters, like Tehran residents Anousheh and Miaad, have completely turned on Team Melli. They view the team members’ silence on the January protests as a profound moral betrayal, arguing that athletes who enjoyed public support as they rose from modest backgrounds have an obligation to stand with the people. From this perspective, players’ failure to acknowledge the suffering of protesters constitutes an unforgivable abandonment of their roots.

“If people had not supported them, they would not have succeeded,” Anousheh said. “If they had gone to play football and the stadiums had been empty, they would not have had the motivation to come and play. If society had not acknowledged them, they would not have been able to get sponsorships. In other words, everything they have is due to the love that people have given them, and their duty is to support the people and stand with them.”

Anousheh expresses particular disdain for what she perceives as the opportunism and “nouveau riche” attitudes of figures such as coach Ghalenoei, whom she criticizes for alignment with the regime and tasteless displays of wealth. She and Miaad contrast such figures with “angelic” athletes like Olympic wrestling champion Rasoul Khadem, who used his own money to establish a charity that provides assistance to underprivileged communities and operates care homes for orphaned and neglected children, while frequently spearheading efforts to aid natural disaster victims, and Ali Karimi, one of the most honored Asian footballers of all time, who faced professional repercussions for wearing a green wristband during a match in symbolic support of the 2009–10 Green Movement.

For Iranians like Anousheh and Miaad, their estrangement from Team Melli was only deepened by players’ overt hostility toward expressions of opposition to the regime, exemplified by Mohammad Mohebi, who ripped down posters of Mahsa Amini from the Manhattan Beach hotel where the team stayed before its two Los Angeles area games and performed a less-than-subtle murderous pantomime directed at a cheerless corner of the stands after he scored in the team’s opening match against New Zealand. 

“In the past, when there were games with [veteran Iranian footballer] Khodadad Azizi, who is now a regime supporter, on TV, we would all watch, feel stressed, and pray for them to win,” Anousheh said. “When they scored, there would be celebrations in the streets, horns, and all of that. Now everyone dislikes them.”

For fans like Anousheh and Miaad, the joy of the game has been replaced by a desire to see the team humbled on the world stage, viewing the players’ failure as proper justice for their silence during the January protests and continued participation in state-orchestrated narratives. These fans seek to hold the athletes accountable for what they see as a cynical appropriation of national identity to launder government violence, insisting that those who will not stand with the people deserve no support in return.

“We wanted them to lose in the worst possible way,” Anousheh said of Team Melli’s matches against New Zealand, Belgium, and Egypt. She said she doesn’t consider them Iran’s national team, but rather the “Islamic Republic’s national team,” adding: “Good players were dropped from the squad…while players who were essentially [regime] loyalists and flatterers were called up instead. These players, in one way or another, were promoting Islamic Republic propaganda. So we generally supported whichever team was playing against Iran.”

Miaad did not watch any of the games and said he is happy that Iran was eliminated. ”We were worried Iran might win … Statistically, Iran had a very good chance of advancing, because if even one of the three key matches had produced a different result, Iran would have gone through. That was what made it so remarkable.” 

Indeed, Iran’s final group stage game ended in a draw with Egypt that still gave it an excellent chance to advance. But after two matches the following day produced results that imperiled Team Melli’s odds, famed football commentator Javad Khiabani made an impassioned plea to the Algerian team in Arabic, asking them to go all out for a win against Austria—guaranteeing that Iran would join them in progressing to the round of 32—rather than settling for a draw that would allow both opponents to advance at Team Melli’s expense: “I hope we do not witness injustice. We believe in your fighting spirit, and I am sure you will take to the field to win.”

Miaad said he was delighted when he later learned that Egypt’s goal at the five-minute mark had come thanks to a shot conceded by Iranian goalkeeper Alireza Beiranvand through his legs—a “nutmeg” spiced with embarrassment. “That made it even more satisfying. The day before, when Beiranvand and Amir Ghalenoei were getting off the team bus, people had approached them and asked, ‘Mr. Beiranvand, Mr. Ghalenoei, do you have anything to say about the January killings?’ They just kept their heads down and walked straight past without saying a word.”

In stark contrast, he observed, there is the case of ace forward Sardar Azmoun, who has earned 91 caps with Team Melli, featured in the last two World Cups, and commanded the second-highest transfer fee ever by an Iranian player (and, just two years ago, the fifth-highest such fee). “They say football is not political,” Miaad said, referring to IRI state media and those who echo it, but “Azmoun, who posted about the January massacre, was left out of the squad. If football is not political, then why would the order come from above to exclude him?”

Regarding the impending grand funeral ceremony for Ali Khamenei, Miaad continued, “I was also very happy that Ghalenoei and his awful team are forced to return home instead of staying in [North America] for another week. They had wanted to remain there longer and avoid attending their leader’s funeral, but now they will have to come back and attend it alongside the loudmouth arzeshis [regime loyalists].”

Miaad said he was elated to see so many people mock Shoja Khalilzadeh, as vocal an arzeshi as featured in the World Cup squad, for his untimely exertions of self-praise after an apparent last-minute goal against Egypt—a celebration that came too soon, as the seeming score was disallowed for offside. Khalilzadeh, however, was not left empty-handed: his premature exultation was so over-the-top that he was penalized with a yellow card for his pains.

“These players deserved to be humiliated and demeaned in the worst possible way,” said Anousheh.

The post Football Forfeits Its Common Ground appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

Near the intersection of Nastaran Alley and Jaleh Street in the affluent Salarieh district of Qom, the deeply religious Yekta family once lived. Haj Abbas, the patriarch, was a well-known merchant in the Qom bazaar. The father of Mohammadhossein (born November 1967), another son, and several daughters, he moved his family to Salarieh in the mid-1980s as the neighborhood was undergoing a massive transformation.

Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had purchased much of the undeveloped land in Salarieh from Qom’s primary religious endowment trusteeship, or toliyat, in the 1970s. After the 1979 revolution, he started a construction company and built a couple hundred upscale residences in the area. Rafsanjani went on to gift many of these to members of the emerging power elite to develop and cement his political-religious network in the new Islamic Republic, even as others bought in to enjoy, and perhaps benefit from, the neighborhood’s blossoming cachet.

From the family of Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, head of Iran’s judiciary for most of the 1990s, to members of the Assembly of Experts and Guardian Council, to the family of Seyed Mehdi Hashemi, one of the founders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who was later executed for leaking information about the Iran-Contra affair, many powerful figures lived in the district. Brigadier General Mohammad Saeed Izadi, commander of the Palestine branch of the IRGC’s Quds Force, responsible for arming and training Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members, was killed in his Salarieh home by Israeli missiles during the 12-day war in 2025. Families tied to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq—from the family of Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi to that of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim—lived alongside prosperous, devout merchants like Haj Abbas Yekta. (To distinguish the family’s generations-old, rather common surname of Hosseini, Yekta—”unique” or “peerless”—was at some point appended to it and in time became primary.)

Even after the toliyat sold much of the area to Rafsanjani, it retained a sprawling garden bordered to the south by Yasaman Street, one block over from Jaleh, where Qom’s only amusement park was built, a major attraction for people from around the city. In 1984, at the direction of Supreme Leader Khomeini, Iran’s largest women’s seminary was established, occupying about half of the garden’s footprint, and the amusement park shut down.

Among Salarieh’s most distinctive features, every street was named after a flower (nastaran, wild rose; yasaman, jasmine) or other garden motif (jaleh, morning dew). Later, the streets were officially renamed for martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, but the new appellations were ignored by residents, who continued to use the traditional flower names. The entire neighborhood was filled with fragrant acacia and jasmine trees.

Despite the elegant villas and charming atmosphere, most residents did not resemble the affluent classes of other major cities in their visual appearance. Where in tony north Tehran, the residents—including the families of wealthy IRGC commanders—looked modern and stylish, the primarily religious beneficiaries of the revolution’s patronage system in Salarieh appeared much more traditional: men with beards wearing black-and-white clothing, women in black chadors.

Unlike Haj Abbas, who maintained a low profile in the neighborhood, on the far side of the city from the bazaar that consumed his attention, his son Mohammadhossein in the early 1990s began to play a prominent role in the district’s religious and political events. Soon earning the same honorific by which his father was long known, Haj Hossein cut an intimidating figure at first glance: stern-faced, with a glass eye—he had lost his right eye while serving as an IRGC officer in the Iran-Iraq War—and a thick black beard. But in fact he was warm, approachable, and, as people from working-class neighborhoods might say, down to earth (khaki) and honorable (looti maslak). He spoke in the slang of street toughs and loved joking around. Only when angered did he become truly frightening.

Mohammadhossein eventually became so renowned that Haj Abbas himself was identified through his son’s reputation. When the patriarch died in January 2023, around the age of 80, media outlets were flooded with condolences from political and military officials addressed not to him, but to his son, Haj Hossein Yekta.

Cultivating loyalty

The geographic enclave of Salarieh is linked to three ideological institutions of the Islamic Republic: the Meysam Cultural Center, which operates out of the neighborhood’s Al-Nabi Mosque; Masoumiyeh Seminary, about a mile and a half northeast, whose entire leadership for years lived in Salarieh, including its principal, the Al-Nabi imam; and, just steps from the seminary, the Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute, founded by Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi. Key figures from the institute, among them Morteza Agha-Tehrani—who currently presides over the Iranian parliament’s Cultural Commission—were frequent participants in the gatherings at the Meysam Center.

Within this set of institutions, a circle of influential figures play various roles in developing and executing communications strategies to maintain the regime’s popular base, ensure it is continually replenished with youthful recruits, and mobilize them on demand to display their support for the regime—and sometimes more aggressive actions. Agha-Tehrani and Mehdi Aboutalebi, who like Hossein Yekta reached adulthood in Salarieh, are among the “producers of meaning,” developing ideological frameworks and maxims, then disseminating them in media appearances and at religious gatherings. Meanwhile, figures in the leadership circle of the Meysam Center such as Abbas Mohsen and Mojtaba Vafi are primarily responsible for direct outreach to prospective supporters and their subsequent training and mobilization. 

Hossein Yekta has played multiple roles. He spent years working out of the Meysam Center to recruit and indoctrinate teenagers and young adults, becoming known especially as a teller of stories about the war against Iraq, drawing on his own extensive combat experiences. With the passage of time, his influence expanded well beyond the center, as he gradually emerged as a leading institutional administrator and strategist in his own right. Whatever its members’ specific roles, the circle’s collective aim, in Yekta’s words, is to “build human beings for the New Islamic Civilization.”

Almost this entire network, whose members met as young neighbors in Salarieh, came of age attending events at the Meysam Center. According to one local resident, “the center’s function was patron cultivation—transforming the wealthy religious youth of the neighborhood into devoted followers of the Supreme Leader and promoters of the ruling ideology.” They pursued their clerical studies at Masoumiyeh Seminary—some, like Hossein Yekta, briefly; others, such as Mehdi Aboutalebi, more comprehensively. They are ultimately of one mind in promoting an unswerving worldview: loyalty to the Supreme Leader and dedication to revolutionary activism.

Claiming the mantle of a discourse centered on alleviating hardship, these figures, almost all from backgrounds of relative privilege, speak repeatedly of “saving the deprived.” Yet they place far less emphasis on the economic empowerment of lower-income groups than on their ideological and identity-based organization. Their so-called jihadi work is increasingly directed at recruiting ardent followers into the burgeoning jan-fada movement, the Islamic Republic’s “devotees unto death,” a process that involves the crucial step of pledging allegiance to the doctrine of Velaayat-e Faghih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist—the principle by which the Supreme Leader exercises absolute authority.) 

War stories and “Travelers of Light” 

For most of the 1980s and early 1990s, Iran’s leading storyteller—or, in the Persian idiom, narrator (ravi)—of the war with Iraq was documentary filmmaker Morteza Avini. Across more than 80 films made during the war and its aftermath, he took his camera to communities near the front lines, focusing on how ordinary citizens participated in and were affected by the conflict. For years, his films aired every Friday night on Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. After Avini’s death in 1993, members of the Meysam Center engaged in intensive discussions about his legacy. To fill the void of inspirational war narrator, a quiet competition developed among the center’s members, including Haj Hossein Yekta. As an officer in the IRGC’s Habib Battalion, he was a veteran of many of the war’s fiercest battles, including Valfajr 3, 4, and 8, Operation Badr, and Karbala 1, 4, and 5. After the war, he remained a core member of the Habib Battalion network, which evolved into a coterie bringing together some of the Islamic Republic’s most hardline intelligence and security figures around Mojtaba Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s most influential son and eventual (if perhaps only nominal) successor as Supreme Leader. Yekta ultimately won recognition as Avini’s successor, though he employed a methodology very different from the filmmaker’s.

The campaign he led tasked school administrators and guidance counselors around the country with selecting religiously devoted students and sending them to cultural-military camps along the Iran-Iraq border, in the operational zones of the “Sacred Defense.” Known as Rahian-e Noor (Travelers of Light), these student excursions, which might last anywhere from two to ten days, have been described by critics as meant primarily for ideological indoctrination. Whether voluntarily or under pressure, thousands of teenagers and young adults were sent to listen to Haj Hossein recount war stories, including vivid tales of grassroots resistance and martyrdom.

Over the course of more than 20 years leading the Rahian-e Noor camps, Hossein Yekta’s war narratives earned him recognition among religious youth and Basij militia members who would also visit the camps to hear his presentations. But the regime’s interest in cultivating loyalists willing to give their time at a moment’s notice to pro-regime rallies and marches and even carry out acts of repression required deeper recruitment—particularly from lower social strata—and Yekta’s role evolved to provide it.

A new society

For two decades, Iran’s leading nongovernmental aid group addressing the needs of marginalized communities was the independent Imam Ali Society. Founded by university students in 1999, the group—formally, the Imam Ali Popular Students’ Relief Society—focused on empowering vulnerable children, youth struggling with addiction, and those affected by poverty and violence. In 2010, it achieved special consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council, and a decade later it was operating more than 40 facilities in disadvantaged areas across Iran, supported by more than 10,000 volunteers. 

According to Sharmin Meymandinejad, one of the Imam Ali Society’s founders, officials in the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus tried to bring the organization under ideological control after it received UN recognition—even as they praised it publicly. When those co-optation efforts failed, the security forces moved in 2017 to establish a parallel structure: the Imam Reza Society, with Haj Hossein Yekta as its public face. The following year, Yekta’s war narratives were collected and published as Red Squares, further boosting his reputation; the collection has been reprinted 11 times. By this point, he was also a member of the central council of the Ammar Headquarters, an internal propaganda think tank, and a senior commander of the IRGC’s internal plainclothes operations.

The Imam Reza Society initially presented itself as a humanitarian group providing relief to earthquake and flood victims. Maintaining that it received no funding from any government or state-affiliated institution, the society announced that it was created to step in where the government and traditional charities had been unable to solve problems and try to fill the gaps. 

As the Imam Ali Society continued to defend its independence, on June 21, 2020, IRGC operatives shut down its Tehran headquarters, confiscated all of its computers, phones, and archives, and arrested Meymandinejad and two colleagues. The accusations against the trio, who were held incommunicado for 48 hours, involved transgressions against national security and insults to the country’s religious leaders. Meymandinejad’s colleagues were released on bail following two months’ imprisonment.

Meymandinejad, who later left Iran after he was incarcerated for four months under brutal conditions, told Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s economic unit: “In Rahian-e Noor, they couldn’t recruit soldiers or create ‘fire-at-will’ forces. That program mostly drew from the regime’s base of middle-class ideological supporters. But with the Imam Reza network, they went after marginalized children—kids who, in my experience, were sometimes susceptible to [committing] violence and repression.”

Human rights documentation suggests that the Islamic Republic systematically draws from lower-income and marginalized populations in its repression apparatus. While not officially declared policy, this pattern is visible in institutional design, socioeconomic incentives, and security planning. The Imam Reza Society appears to be part of this structure.

The society today is involved in an expansive range of activities, many of which give it access to the demographic Meymandinejad describes. It provides vocational training and life-skills education for young people, organizes local markets where farmers and other small producers can sell directly to consumers, distributes free charitable meals (nazri), campaigns for the release of prisoners, and participates in school construction and flood-control projects.

At the same time, it also engages in overtly political and ideological functions. The society has marshalled teenagers to participate in public pledges of allegiance to Mojtaba Khamenei, organized pro-government street rallies, and arranged pilgrimages to Shiite holy sites.

While Hossein Yekta is widely believed to be the society’s founder, Meymandinejad claims that it was actually established by a former Imam Ali Society member who was later revealed to have been an infiltrator planted by the Revolutionary Guards. In his view, organizations like the Imam Reza Society “don’t have a public audience—they serve the state. Security structures cannot organically attract volunteers; they must infiltrate existing social networks.”

Identity-based mobilization

In political economy studies, the use of force combined with the allocation of resources—money, jobs, privileges—to maintain political control is known as the “economy of repression.” Its inputs include official defense and intelligence budgets, unregulated revenues from institutions tied to the Supreme Leader’s office, and informal income streams such as rents and smuggling—areas where entities like the IRGC and Bonyad Mostazafan (BM) play key roles.

Lower-income populations are often more easily drawn into such systems due to economic incentives, access to patronage networks, and susceptibility to identity-based mobilization. The Islamic Republic has long structured recruitment around this dynamic, from the Basij to newer entities like the Imam Reza Society.

In effect, the system transforms poverty into loyalty and a capacity for repression. Not all participants come from disadvantaged backgrounds—ideology also plays a role—but economic leverage remains central.

Budget transparency is limited, making it difficult to arrive at precise figures. In 2023, Deutsche Welle estimated the cost of Iran’s repression apparatus at 557 billion tomans (then approximately $11.2 million USD) per day, based on official budgets for the IRGC, intelligence ministry, and security police. This figure does not include many off-budget funding streams. For example, around the same time he became head of the new Imam Reza Society, Hossein Yekta was also appointed by Ebrahim Raisi—Iran’s future president—to launch another charitable body, the Karamat Foundation, under the aegis of Astan Quds Razavi, one of the Islamic Republic’s wealthiest religious-finanical entities.

With a putatively humanitarian mission similar to that of the Imam Reza Society, the Karamat Foundation’s operations include a comprehensive counseling center, a women and family affairs center, the Razavi volunteer service network and service centers, the Pilgrim Endowment Institute, and a sports and physical education institute. While these projects are ostensibly focused on assisting disadvantaged communities, critics argue that their ultimate objective, again like that of the Imam Reza Society, is to identify vulnerable Iranians, organize them into structured networks, and transform them into dependable supporters of the regime, ready for mobilization.

Meymandinejad argues that recruitment into such networks builds on years of ideological conditioning among poor youth: “They first make children anti-social, because someone raised that way can more easily commit violence. They invest heavily in shaping them.” He traces such efforts in recent years to the IRGC’s recruitment of Afghan migrant children as young as 14, living in Iran mostly without legal residency, to fight the Islamic Republic’s proxy war in Syria. Further back, he points to the regime’s formative era, when the use of child soldiers in the Sacred Defense against Iraq became normalized.

Repression as ritual

On January 8, 2026, amid mass protests against the regime, Hossein Yekta released a video online in which he openly threatened violence, urging Basij forces to take action and warning families not to complain if their children were harmed. The video was picked up by state television and broadcast repeatedly, gaining widespread attention and leading to Yekta’s sanctioning by the EU and multiple European countries. In the next 48 hours alone, thousands of Iranians were killed by regime forces and followers—IRGC, Basij, eager jan-fada, all freed to “fire at will.”

More recently, during the months-long fraught ceasefire with the United States and Israel, the signals that Yekta’s Imam Reza Society serves as a mobilization arm for repression have grown louder as well. The society has organized a series of mass street events in which jan-fada occupy and overwhelm public space in a way meant to intimidate any observers opposed to the regime. The participation of children and teenagers in a rally pledging allegiance to the Supreme Leader on April 29 underscored that the Imam Reza network’s true commitment is to state security goals rather than grassroots charity.

The Imam Reza Society and Karamat Foundation, under Hossein Yekta, are vital exponents of the Islamic Republic’s broader economy of repression. Through training, jobs, privileges, and tangible goods, the state cultivates a loyal force capable of suppressing protests, enforcing social surveillance, and on occasion, wreaking vengeance.

For participants from affluent backgrounds, this system is not merely ideological—it is also economic. It offers access to contacts, contracts, and institutional power. Dismantling such a system is beyond difficult, as it requires replacing the entire structure of incentives that sustain it. And as long as this economy of repression persists, meaningful change will remain elusive.

Reflecting on the jan-fada movement and Hossein Yekta’s role in organizing and galvanizing it, Sharmin Meymandinejad argues that the regime supporters who storm demonstrations chanting “Heydar, Heydar” have already been invested with a sense of epic heroism, casting them as protagonists in a historic, almost mythic struggle. Once convinced that they alone represent righteousness, they are able to carry out the most extreme violence with remarkable ease. He puts it starkly: “They have turned repression into ritual. Ritual is powerful—it mobilizes emotion. Where we gave poor families bags of rice, they deliver black body bags.”

The post The Recruiter: Haj Hossein Yekta appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

The unchecked inflation and mass layoffs currently endured by ordinary Iranians are only the most obvious economic effects of the war with the US and Israel, which amplified the corrosion caused by years of governmental mismanagement. The most pressing second-order effect is that basic groceries are turning into luxuries for millions of Iranians. The urban consumer price index marked an increase in May of 77 percent year-on-year, close to the highest recorded in the Islamic Republic era, according to Central Bank data. The result is a sharp decline in household purchasing power and worsening food insecurity nationwide.

Just over a year ago, in the spring of 2025, one million tomans (then roughly $10 USD) could purchase a kilogram’s worth of veal shank, two kilos of chicken meat, one liter of cooking oil, one liter each of whole and low-fat milk, 400 grams of cheese, and a half kilo of sugar. As spring 2026 comes to a close, “you can barely buy anything,” Nasrin, a mother of two from Tehran, told Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s economic unit. One million tomans is now just “enough for two cartons of milk and a pack of cheese.” (Iran’s monthly minimum base wage, as set in March, is 16.6 million tomans. With state-mandated housing, food, and other allowances, the minimum compensation package for private-sector workers is 21.8 million tomans per month—currently $140 at free-market currency exchanges, per Bonbast.com.)

The government has sought to contain public anger by distributing food vouchers while making assurances that, despite the cutoff of most imports due to the war, domestic supply chains remain intact. Regardless, the surge in prices is pushing nutritious foods beyond the reach of many households and amplifying concerns about hidden hunger.

Since internet access was restored after a regime-imposed blackout that lasted almost 90 days, social media has been filled with videos documenting the rapid rise in food prices and the growing strain on household budgets.

In 2019, a five-kilogram household tin of cooking oil cost about 36,000 tomans. Earlier this week, according to one Instagram user, the same size tin cost 2.35 million tomans, more than 65 times higher than seven years ago. A commenter reported recently paying 2.7 million tomans for the same item.

Ten years ago, an eight-kilogram of oranges cost 10,000 tomans at wholesale. Today, a single kilo sells for between 95,000 and 148,000 tomans, putting the wholesale price of eight kilos at between 760,000 and 1.18 million tomans.

In a video posted on April 29, one Iranian user told his followers that instead of investing in foreign currency or gold, they should invest in food. He noted that the price of a can of tuna had risen from 200,000 tomans in Farvardin (March–April) to 235,000 tomans in Ordibehesht (April–May).

Ultraprocessed foods are hardly immune. A supermarket worker on the night shift, who has documented rising prices for months on Instagram, in a May 31 post expressed outrage that a Magnum ice cream bar, “not even as long as one of my fingers,” now cost 200,000 tomans.

On June 1, a shop owner reported on Instagram that the price of a liter of Pepsi had jumped from 65,000 tomans to 115,000 tomans in just two months. He said a company representative had warned him that prices would likely rise again with the next delivery.

“The war is over, but missiles are still targeting people’s dinner tables. People are being crushed under economic pressure. Whatever you buy today costs double tomorrow. You can’t blame this on other countries,” he said, gesturing toward rows of soda bottles. “This is your mismanagement.”

Iranians were suffering runaway grocery inflation even before the war. A typical tray of 30 eggs that cost 70,000 tomans last September reached 300,000 tomans in December and passed 500,000 tomans in January.

Soaring food prices are increasingly becoming a public health concern. Dairy consumption has fallen from approximately 55–60 kilograms per person per year to just 40 kilograms, around one-quarter of the global average, according to Ali Ehsan Zafari, head of the Dairy Cooperatives Union. He cites inflation as the unequivocal cause, with dairy products becoming roughly 90 percent more expensive over the past year after the government raised the price of raw milk from 46,000 tomans per kilogram to 61,000 tomans.

If prices continue to rise, Zafari warned, purchasing dairy products will “no longer make economic sense” for a large segment of the population. Beyond deepening the economic crisis and threatening small and medium-sized producers, there are concerns that the decline in dairy consumption could lead to increases in malnutrition, osteoporosis, and developmental problems.

Choosing what to cut out next

To contain growing economic discontent, the Islamic Republic has rolled out an electronic food voucher program targeting lower-income households and the families of military personnel. The scheme was first announced on January 5, one week after nationwide protests erupted over the cost of living and a day before security forces launched a deadly crackdown on demonstrators.

The Ministry of Welfare said four million tomans each had been deposited into the accounts of 80 million Iranians to cover the final three months of the Persian year 1404 and the first month of 1405 (which began on March 21). Rather than continuing subsidies for importers and producers of essential goods, the Pezeshkian administration and parliament agreed to provide direct monthly support of one million tomans per person, according to state news media.

Officials said the vouchers could be used to purchase staple foods including chicken, eggs, red meat, legumes, sugar, cooking oil, pasta, rice, milk, yogurt, and cheese from 260,000 participating stores. Alternatively, recipients could choose a fixed package of basic food items.

But as inflation accelerates, the value of the vouchers has rapidly eroded. Conflicting reports continue to circulate over whether the monthly allocation will be increased. On June 3, Welfare Minister Ahmad Meydari said June vouchers would be distributed “in the same manner as previous months,” indicating that there would be no immediate increase. Two days later, the government announced that the upcoming round of vouchers would include a 10 percent discount on dairy products from one leading producer. On June 8, government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani acknowledged that while “the government would like to increase the value of the vouchers,” doing so was “not currently feasible.”

For many families, the support no longer covers even a fraction of their monthly food needs.

“With two million tomans, which is the subsidy for two people, you can buy maybe 750 grams of meat, and part of that is fat and scraps you have to throw away. That’s enough for maybe two meals,” Nasrin told Resanegar. “And food isn’t just meat. You still need herbs, vegetables, eggplants, and everything else.”

“We’re constantly thinking about what we can cut out next,” she added. “A lot of people have practically eliminated meat because they genuinely can’t afford it anymore. Even if they manage to buy one kilo with their subsidies, that has to last them the entire month. A tray of eggs costs 850,000 tomans. Yesterday I bought two cartons of milk for 400,000 tomans.”

The Great Depression Cookbook

As prices continue to rise and wages fail to keep pace, more households are being pushed into a permanent state of economic survival. Life under the Islamic Republic has become an endless cycle of adaptation, hardship, sacrifice, and decline. For many households, non-essential goods and services such as travel, restaurant meals, new clothes, and cultural activities are gradually disappearing from family budgets. Major life decisions, from buying a car or upgrading a home to getting married or having children, are being postponed indefinitely. As food, housing, and utility costs consume an ever-larger share of household income, little remains for discretionary spending. 

On social media, the growing appetite for “depression-era” recipes is a sign of how strained household finances have become. Influencers and ordinary users share recipes that eliminate or drastically reduce costly ingredients such as oil, meat, eggs, and butter. Videos for oil-free cookies, “economic” eggless biscuits, “10,000-to-20,000”-toman homemade cheese puffs, kids’ snacks made with a few tablespoons of flour and a pea-sized amount of cooking oil, and meatless stews regularly attract large audiences. The trend reflects a society searching for ways to maintain daily routines while spending as little as possible on food.

To preserve a semblance of normalcy amid crushing postwar inflation, many people now share a single drink or snack at cafés as a cost-cutting measure so they can still afford to go out, Resanegar recently reported. Life goes on, but with great difficulty. 

According to the latest data from the Statistical Center of Iran, lower-income households are bearing the brunt of economic pressure. The data show that year-on-year direct cost-of-living inflation for the second decile of income earners reached 96 percent in April–May (Ordibehesht), while it stood at 81.6 percent for the tenth decile, the highest-earning income bracket.

Many families were already struggling to keep up with expenses before the recent price hikes. A recent investigative report by Shargh newspaper found that even two-income households, who previously used one income for bills, rent, and loan repayments and the other for daily expenses, now use up their money within two weeks of the end-of-month payday. 

“I’m constantly worried about running out of money,” Nasrin, the mother of two, told Resanegar. “I keep asking myself, ‘What if the money runs out before the end of the month?’ I’m genuinely terrified of not making it to the end of the month financially. God knows what people who have to pay rent are doing.”

More people are drawing down their savings or selling their gold coins and jewelry, assets they had counted on for a measure of financial security, simply to cover daily expenses. Many Iranians who, under normal circumstances, might have taken out loans to buy a house, pay for a child’s education, or invest in a business are now relying on loans to finance their day-to-day survival.

Ice cream on credit

As household buffers disappear, attention is turning to income. But with layoffs in almost every line of work across the country, many workers say they are afraid to ask for raises even as inflation steadily erodes the value of their wages.

“We have to constantly worry about what will become more expensive tomorrow. Our incomes are fixed, and we may not even be able to afford what we have today tomorrow,” Farideh, a bank teller, told Resanegar. Food that a year ago might have constituted a single meal, Tehranis now “stretch into two or three meals. The situation is really very difficult.”

The cost of some medications has also become prohibitively expensive, forcing people to go without them, Farideh added. “People are cutting costs everywhere they can.”

Arvand, an office worker from Tehran, said his two eczema creams have increased from 220,000 and 250,000 tomans before the war to 447,000 and 780,000 tomans, respectively. “One of my friends had a serious condition; he had to pay seven million tomans for his medication.” For context, in his peer group, he explained, monthly “salaries are generally around 30 million tomans.” For his family of three, ”basic food and everyday household expenses alone come to about 50 million tomans per month.”

Nasrin said that when she had guests over recently, she could buy only a half kilo each of cherries and apricots, “and it still came to 950,000 tomans. Even the transport to the market and back costs nearly 120,000 tomans. I have not yet turned to buying on credit, but I feel I may soon have no choice.”

Buying food on credit has become increasingly common, while reports of petty theft and the gradual disappearance of even basic items from household shopping lists point to a broader deterioration in living standards.

One young woman said she was forced, for the first time since moving to Tehran, to buy cooking oil on credit. She and her roommates now divide grocery purchases between them, each putting a different item on their tab to avoid drawing attention from the local shopkeeper.

“I understand people’s situation. When I see someone who is truly in need taking bread or canned food, I don’t react and let it go. But the number of these incidents increased so much that it was no longer financially viable for me either,” a shopkeeper in eastern Tehran told Shargh. “I had to collect all the canned tuna and move them behind the counter, out of customers’ reach. But I still keep bread outside the shop so that if someone is truly hungry and has no money, they can take it.”

A baker, meanwhile, said even some office workers have started asking for “half a bread” because they can no longer afford a whole sangak. A fruit vendor told the paper that customers increasingly ask for a single apple or orange instead of buying fruit by the kilo.

Arvand, the office worker, observed that “installment payments have become common across almost every business. Shoes, clothes, gold…even healthcare services. You can now buy ice cream on credit.”

The post Bank Loans for Groceries: Iranians Strain for Daily Needs appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

A grand, three-day funeral ceremony for the former Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic is planned for the middle of Muharram, first month of the Islamic lunar calendar (beginning June 16 this year), with foreign dignitaries joining domestic devotees in attendance. Additional ceremonies will follow in the holy city of Qom and finally in Mashhad, where the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will be buried at the Imam Reza Shrine.

Preparations for the events are being led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), sending a clear message to both the Iranian people and the world at large. “It is not just about planning a funeral,” an economist affiliated with the University of Tehran’s Institute for Economic Studies and Research told Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s economic unit. “This ceremony provides a mechanism for reinforcing the IRGC’s position of power.”

After engineering Mojtaba Khamanei’s succession to the post of Supreme Leader, demonstrating its readiness to extract fees from ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, and solidifying its control over foreign policy, the IRGC is emerging from the war with the United States and Israel possessed of greater capacity than ever to direct Iran’s fortunes. 

A few months ago, the corps was facing open criticism for its opaque, yet immense role in Iran’s economy, fueled by years of discontent—not least among its rivals within the regime. Emboldened by the war and Ali Khamenei’s sudden demise, the IRGC has altered the equation and positioned itself to play a more visible role in both business and political decision-making. Alongside its assertion of control over the Khamenei commemorations, another clear sign is the shift in the leadership of Iran’s international negotiating team. Before the war, such delegations were headed by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi; the current negotiations with the Trump administration, however, are being led by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. His position as Majles speaker is less relevant than the fact that he served for two decades in the Guards, ascending to the position of commander of the IRGC Air Force.

Complementing its accumulation of political power and vast network of companies and often cloaked holdings, the IRGC also enjoys special dispensation to feast from the nation’s coffers. While 20 percent of oil revenues are allocated directly to the armed forces, the Guards also have privileged access to the National Development Fund, a sovereign wealth fund created by order of Ali Khamenei and financed by Iran’s oil revenues—likewise 20 percent of the total under the 2026–27 Majles budget. This arrangement has further entrenched the security establishment’s ability to exploit the country’s most important source of wealth.

The IRGC’s 47-year rise to dominance has not gone unchallenged. During the 2010s, in particular, as the Guards’ control over national security policy tightened and its sprawling business and financial structures encompassed an ever larger part of the Iranian economy, multiple figures in the regime sought to check its power—including more than one who had played important parts in its expansion.

“Neither sound economics nor privatization”

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office as the Islamic Republic’s sixth president in August 2005, he was known to have long been closely aligned with the IRGC—to the extent that there were widespread, though erroneous, reports that he had been a member. He launched a sweeping, so-called privatization campaign among whose greatest beneficiaries was Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the Guards’ massive engineering firm. In 2006 alone, Khatam al-Anbiya landed over $7 billion in contracts across sectors from transportation to oil and gas. As a rift grew between the Supreme Leader and Ahmadinejad during his second term as president, he also began to rebuke the IRGC, in particular for its shadowy economic activities. At a government conference in July 2011, he referred to powerful actors surreptitiously moving goods through ports while avoiding customs supervision as the regime’s “smuggler brothers“—a reference to the Guards so thinly veiled that IRGC commander-in-chief Mohammad Ali Jafari felt compelled to reject the allegations. 

Not unlike Ahmadinejad, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who served as president for eight years in the aftermath of the war with Iraq and first opened the door for the Guards’ involvement in economic activities, reportedly came to regret it. When he took office in August 1989, the IRGC was still a relatively new institution. Many of its members were young, highly motivated cadres who, during the war, had been involved not only in combat operations but also in extensive engineering, logistical, and reconstruction work, developing impressive operational capabilities. Rafsanjani thus gave the Guards a lead position in rebuilding the country’s war-damaged infrastructure. As a result of this decision, the IRGC would gradually transform into a massive state-backed contractor and, over time, a formidable competitor—and obstacle—to the private sector. According to an account published by the Saham News website, in an April 2013 meeting with a group of associates encouraging him to run again for the presidency, he rued how the Guards had gone far beyond the rebuilding mission he gave them and said that “now the IRGC has the economy, foreign and domestic policy in its grip and is not satisfied with anything less than the entire country.”

The following year, in December 2014, Ahmadinejad’s successor, Hassan Rouhani, then in office for four months, implicitly criticized the transfer of state-owned companies to the IRGC while addressing an anti-corruption conference attended by the heads of all three branches of government, saying, “If you gather intelligence, guns, money, capital, websites, newspapers, and news agencies all in one place, it would even corrupt Abu Dharr and Salman” (companions of the Prophet Muhammad renowned for their probity). While many observers regarded this as an obvious reference to the corps, IRGC chief Jafari insisted that “the president’s relationship with the Revolutionary Guards is very good” and that Rouhani’s remarks were not directed at them.

In October 2015, the Islamic Republic agreed to a nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA) that left in place broad US sanctions against the IRGC and many of its affiliated business entities—suggesting that the larger the Guards’ role in the national economy, the more vulnerable that economy would continue to be. Rouhani, having won a second term in office in the May 2017 elections, now launched a concerted political effort to rein in the Guards’ economic sway. This campaign culminated in a widely reported speech referencing Ahmadinejad’s privatization campaign to an iftar banquet on June 22, 2017, that drew an explosive reaction. “We handed part of the economy from a civilian government to a government with guns; this is neither sound economics nor privatization,” the president declared. This time the Guards’ response was fierce. Jafari publicly castigated Rouhani, charging that “a government without a gun is humiliated and ultimately forced to surrender.” In a meeting the following month, Jafari, Qasem Soleimani, and other senior IRGC leaders directly excoriated the president. Aerospace Force commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh reported that they told Rouhani, “If you say these things, it will not be tolerated. You object every day. Defending the revolution, and the nation, and the system, and the Leadership, is our red line. Do not assume you’ll always be able to say these things, and we’ll be silent.”

Rouhani evidently continued his campaign more quietly. In January 2018, just a few weeks after massive protests had shaken the Islamic Republic, his defense minister, Amir Hatami, announced that the Supreme Leader had issued a directive to the General Staff of the Armed Forces ordering the divestiture of non-military business enterprises. IRGC commanders dismissed the announcement, asserting that all of their business dealings were military related, and Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in May 2018 weakened Rouhani’s position to the point that he was effectively sidelined for most of his second term. Nonetheless, in October 2018 the IRGC’s Sepah Cooperative Foundation divested its shares in the Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) and Mobile Communications Company of Iran (MCI; also known as Hamrah-e Aval). Since then, there has been little to indicate that anyone in the regime cared to expend political capital trying to reel back the Guards’ economic activities—until early this year, when an old idea was revived and repurposed with exactly that aim.

The merger idea

On the afternoon of March 22, 1989, Tehran’s northern Jamaran neighborhood received a frequent visitor, one who arrived this time with a particularly important agenda. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who had served as commander-in-chief during the final months of the Iran-Iraq War, arrived at the residence of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, carrying a folder of documents laying out a consequential proposal.

Few enjoyed the trust of the leader of the Islamic Republic as Rafsanjani did. As he later described in his memoirs, he raised the issue of the dual structure of Iran’s armed forces and the high costs associated with maintaining parallel organizations and overlapping military units, arguing for the merger of the IRGC and the Artesh, Iran’s regular military. The Guards had been officially founded on May 5, 1979, per a Khomeini decree, to “fulfill the momentous task of the Islamic revolution”—an ideological enforcement mission he did not trust to the Artesh, whose officer corps was a legacy of the Shah. Iraq invaded a year and a half later, and the IRGC became essential to Iran’s defense.

Khomeini accepted the proposal in principle but was concerned that merging the Guards and the Artesh would provoke resentment among their personnel and trigger clashes between the two forces. He stated that while he did not object to the idea of the merger, the timing was not right.

Khomeini’s lack of opposition to the concept was enough for Rafsanjani to pursue it by establishing a merger committee headed by Abdollah Nouri, who would later serve as interior minister under both Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. Khomeini did not live long enough to see its outcome. He died on June 4, 1989, just two months after the meeting in Jamaran, and—thanks to a selection process manipulated by Rafsanjani—was succeeded by Ali Khamenei, then in his eighth year as Iran’s president.

Unlike Ayatollah Khomeini, who had no military background and largely entrusted national security affairs to Rafsanjani, Khamenei began his career in the newly established Islamic Republic as deputy minister of defense and went on to serve as acting commander of the IRGC. He resigned from that position in February 1980 to run in the first parliamentary elections under the new regime, ultimately winning a seat and becoming chairman of the Majles’s Defense Committee.

His military background and maintenance of close ties with IRGC commanders led the new Supreme Leader to take a continued personal interest in national security matters. In his first days after taking office, he ordered the dissolution of the IRGC-Artesh merger committee and declared the anticipated union unnecessary, tasking the General Staff of the Armed Forces with establishing a clear division of everyday responsibilities and strategic missions between the two institutions.

During Ali Khamenei’s tenure as Supreme Leader, the IRGC’s authority and scope of responsibilities steadily grew—first on now President Rafsanjani’s initiative, later owing to the Supreme Leader himself, who saw the Guards as his essential power base against the reform movement after Khatami became president. Among the earliest examples was the Guards’ consolidation and expansion of the Basij militia, and then its internal deployment against Iranian citizens during the Mashhad riots of 1992 and Qazvin unrest of 1994. The IRGC’s political presence grew as well. As the share of Majles seats won by clerics dwindled from a high of 55 percent in 1984 to less than 15 percent in the early 2000s, former Guards began to enter the legislature in growing numbers—first slowly, then with a rush in 2004 when many reformist incumbents were disqualified. With greater numbers came greater influence: by 2020, former IRGC or Basij members comprised a majority of the parliament’s presidium and held at least 16 committee chairs or similarly powerful positions. The wall between Guard and government service is thin at best, and many of these legislators will return to active duty as soon as they exit the formal political scene.

Under Khamenei and Rafsanjani, the IRGC was also granted a much broader role in economic affairs. Its budget expanded significantly, and it inaugurated a vast network of subsidiary businesses, including the Khatam al-Anbiya conglomerate—which itself owns at least a half-dozen engineering subsidiaries and a controlling stake in the country’s largest shipbuilding company, among many other interests—and an array of financial and credit institutions. Through Khamenei and Rafsanjani’s support of the Guards’ economic activities, the IRGC grew into a pillar of Iran’s shadow economy.

“Costs borne by the public” 

After Rafsanjani’s failed bid in 1989, there is no evidence that an Artesh-IRGC merger received serious consideration in regime circles for the next three-and-a-half decades. That changed—though for reasons much different than organizational efficiency—after January 28, 2026, when the European Union placed the IRGC on its terror list, significantly expanding a global sanctions program that targets the corps’ assets and revenue streams. Due to the IRGC’s outsized role in the shadow economy, the international pressure threatened Iran’s economic system as a whole.

Just nine days after the EU decision, Jomhouri-e Eslami newspaper—founded as the mouthpiece for the Islamic Republic Party, Iran’s sole ruling party under Khomeini, and whose views generally echo those of the regime’s conservative clerical core—published a front-page editorial championing “cohesion” and “unity, efficiency, and strength in the country’s defense structure.” Merging the IRGC and the Artesh was the only solution to save Iran’s economy, according to the editorial—an argument with special significance given that Ali Khamenei had been the paper’s license holder since its founding in 1979, according to the current managing editor.

Explicitly invoking Rafsanjani’s decades-old effort to merge the Guards and Artesh and Khomeini’s lack of objection to the idea, the newspaper blamed a systemic “misalignment of institutional roles“ for a “significant part of our problems today, from the economy to foreign policy.” It described the IRGC as entering “fields for which it was neither designed, nor equipped to handle the consequences,” and in response advocated “a rational consolidation of power and the return of each institution to its defined legal mandate.” 

“Such a return to the logic of law and institutional division of labor could both facilitate the containment of a formidable enemy and reduce the accumulated costs borne by the public,” the editorial stated.

Jomhouri-e Eslami’s advocacy of an Artesh-IRGC merger might have served as a prelude to consequential deliberation over the prospect in policy-making circles. Then the war changed almost everything.

An unchallenged protagonist

The United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, 2026. Regardless of their stated objectives, the ensuing war has so far had one unmistakable effect on the power dynamics within the Islamic Republic. The IRGC, which had been sanctioned by the EU as a terrorist organization for the first time a month before the war and whose economic activities and institutional autonomy were being called into question by a regime mouthpiece very close to the Supreme Leader, has now become the main actor on the Iranian stage.

“Current political and military conditions suggest that everything is effectively in the hands of the IRGC. The Guards appear to be making the key decisions,” the University of Tehran economist, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to safety concerns, told Resanegar. “The most likely scenario is that the Islamic Republic will remain, with the difference that the IRGC’s presence in the economy will be strengthened as a result of the two recent wars.”

After Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, there was still popular sentiment in favor of curtailing the Guards’ power. They were able to deflect it with significant support from Ali Khamenei, who never made a single public statement about the divestiture directive announced in his name. While the Guards’ institutional position was strengthened, the Supreme Leader retained ultimate authority, with “both oversight of the decision-making process and the ability to control and contain the IRGC,” a veteran security analyst, political scientist, and former University of Tehran faculty member told Resanegar.  

Khamenei’s assassination meant the elimination of that oversight, said the analyst, as the succession of his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, to the post of Supreme Leader was entirely orchestrated by the IRGC. “The succession crisis in the Islamic Republic could not have been resolved so easily without IRGC involvement,” explained the security analyst, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. “It can therefore be said that, in the new configuration of the Islamic Republic, the IRGC has gained a far more important, prominent, and influential role.”

In the absence of any restraint Ali Khamenei might have imposed, the war also freed the corps to flex its muscle in the Strait of Hormuz. While the US blockade has temporarily thwarted the IRGC’s profitable protection racket in the strait, Majles representatives closely aligned with the Guards have introduced a bill under a fast-track, “triple-urgency” mechanism that envisions permanent transit tolls and a new legal framework for the waterway that would make the IRGC the strait’s de facto gatekeeper, dramatically expanding both its revenues and geopolitical influence. “Who would actually collect those fees?” the economist asked rhetorically. “Customs authorities? No—everything would have to be coordinated through the IRGC.”

The conflict has reinforced the Guards’ primacy in foreign policy more broadly. When President Masoud Pezeshkian attempted to reassure Arab neighbors early in the war, military officials swiftly overrode his message with threats of regional escalation. The incident highlighted how, in the new order brought on by the conflict, the IRGC has become the ultimate arbiter of Iran’s external messaging, relegating civilian leaders to a largely symbolic role.

“On the third day of the war, President Pezeshkian apologized to the Gulf states. Five minutes later, Khatam al-Anbiya issued a statement effectively retracting his remarks,” the economist said. “This means that the decision-maker is none other than the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

He described one of the war’s first major consequences as the normalization of the Guards’ economic role. “If yesterday the IRGC was the emperor of Iran’s hidden economy, today it is becoming the central authority within the formal and visible economy,” he said, foreseeing “that no major protocol or policy will be written from this point forward without the IRGC playing a role. Everything will require its approval and coordination.”

Many hopeful observers expected the 2026 war to debilitate the Islamic Republic or even precipitate its collapse. Instead, the conflict appears to have facilitated a large-scale transfer of power from the Supreme Leader’s office and broader clerical establishment to the security apparatus. If the current trajectory continues, the war may be remembered as the event that, far from bringing down the Islamic Republic, consolidated the IRGC’s dominance over it.

The post Not Satisfied With Less Than the Entire Country: The IRGC’s Rise appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

Doctors lining up for food handouts at hospitals, well-heeled office workers buying groceries on credit, university students begging for bread at the bakery. These are just some of the examples of the daily struggles of Iran’s middle classes. After years of economic mismanagement, only compounded by the current international conflict, an entire social stratum is in danger of becoming structurally poor—or already there.

A highly educated generation raised on middle-class consumerism is facing economic deprivation, and knows it. As a result, Iran is confronting a redefinition of class and the rise of a new kind of political subject, one that the regime can neither placate with cash handouts nor silence without consequence. 

As state-controlled media attempted to make sense of the gruesome massacres that followed January’s nationwide anti-government protests, an op-ed in Eghtesad News by entrepreneur and digital rights activist Nima Namdari pointed to an increasingly visible reality: Iran is no longer a society featuring a fairly clear and fixed division between the poor and middle classes. A liminal category of over 12 million people—what sociologist Asef Bayat has called the “poor middle class”—has become central to understanding the breadth and intensity of social unrest.

Around 8 million people have dropped below the poverty line since 2023, according to data from the World Bank and the Statistical Center of Iran. Add the country’s 4.5 million university students with precarious economic prospects to this group, and nearly one in every seven Iranians may be seen as falling into the poor middle class, even under a relatively narrow understanding of the term. In fact, many more people who might once have felt secure from economic hardship now routinely face it.

At the beginning of the 2010s, the middle class accounted for roughly 65 to 70 percent of the population. Over the past 15 years, however, its share has steadily declined due to economic sanctions, the lack of wealth redistribution, and the resulting persistence of high inflation and stagflation, falling to around 50 percent—about 47 million people—in recent years, according to state media. Interviews, media analyses, and reviews of social media accounts conducted by Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s economic unit, suggest that the majority of this group is struggling to pay for daily basics.

In total, roughly 37 percent of Iranians now live below the poverty line, including 2.5 million people whom the World Bank projects have fallen into this bracket just in the past year. The regime’s own experts acknowledge that the chronic stagnation of the past decade and a half has failed an entire generation. “There are about 12 million young people living in our country who are neither studying nor employed,” economist Masoud Nili wrote for the Islamic Republic News Agency in February. “That approximately 14 percent of the country’s population is inactive for exactly 24 hours” every day is contributing to the risk of “an uncontrollable explosion at any moment” in Iranian society. The number of employed Iranians has essentially been flat since 2019, he observed, “while more than 4.4 million people have been added to the population of the country aged 15 and over.” 

Meanwhile, inflation and corruption are visibly exacerbating socioeconomic inequalities. Plunging oil revenues and tightened sanctions have led to the loss of welfare subsidies, while state funding for bonyads, opaque kleptocratic conglomerates posing as large charities, continues to flow. As a result, middle-class precarity, borderline poverty, and deep poverty all expand even as the wealth of the rich increases at a pace that not only matches but surpasses the extreme inflation rate, according to Nili. 

More voices join chorus of economic grievance

The number of people living in poverty has increased in several stages since 2018, according to the Statistical Center of Iran. About 10.5 million people fell into poverty in 1397–1398 (March 2018–March 2020), and around 5.5 million more in 1402–1403 (2023–2025), bringing the total population below the poverty line to approximately 32 million people. By the end of 1403 (March 2025), net per capita income was 20 percent lower than in 1390 (2011) and 12 percent lower than in 1396 (2017).

The tangible result is a drastic decline in the quality of life, turning food items such as meat, dairy, and fruit into luxuries while imposing “serious limitations in access to medication and medical care for conditions that some people require urgently,” according to Nili.

And the lived contradictions go beyond the difficulty in meeting basic needs. Echoing Bayat’s analysis of the eruption of mass protests in December 2017, contentious politics in Iran are being redrawn by young Iranians who move fluently through Tehran’s cafés, universities, and online spaces, yet remain economically marginal. They access global culture digitally and know what life outside the Islamic Republic looks like, but they cannot access it. They aspire to have successful careers, stable homes and families, and the ability to travel, yet instead face violent repression and downward mobility.

“We are literally suffocating,” Mani, a Tehran-based film editor, told Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s economic unit. “[The regime] deliberately keeps people poor so their only concern is earning their daily bread, and they have no time to think about protesting or anything else … Refrigerators are empty, people don’t have enough money to afford their daily food, rents are unpaid … Leisure, travel, everything has been cancelled.”

Despite their marginalization in an increasingly dysfunctional economy, the poor middle class wields the tools to reshape sociocultural boundaries. Scholars of contemporary Iran have often distinguished between protest movements led primarily by urban middle-class demands for political and cultural reform and those driven by lower-income groups mobilized around economic grievances. That distinction is now breaking down. 

“When we were young, less educated people would become day laborers and construction workers, while educated people held important positions in the country. That is why parents used to place so much emphasis on education,” says Roya, a retiree from Tehran whose son earned a master’s degree in Canada. He now works as a delivery driver, Roya says, because he was “unable to work within the framework of this regime.”

Fault lines among the dispossessed

The poor middle class has helped reshape collective action, broadening participation across social strata while also intensifying the stakes. As Namdari’s op-ed suggests, recent demonstrations brought together millions of Iranians from across the lower, middle, and poor middle classes, only to be brutally suppressed. Yet the underlying pressures—economic malaise, political frustration, and social descent—remain unresolved. 

“There was a time when you walked down Valiasr Street, the street vendors had a certain look about them, and you could tell they had come from small towns. Now you go there and see an artist painting right on the sidewalk, displaying their work for sale. Many of the vendors are well-dressed, respectable people. You can tell they are there simply to support their families,” says Roya. “It is like a capsized boat: people are drowning at the bottom, struggling to stay alive, while the scum rises to the surface.”

A common perception among the poor middle class is that the regime is exploiting the country’s woeful situation to co-opt people from the lowest social classes into the security apparatus, rewarding them with access to the few available employment opportunities. 

“[Regime officials] think these people will become…mercenaries. They think [the traditionally poor] will fight for [them], report on others to [them],” says Roya. “All the mediocre, uneducated people who were willing to sell themselves for cheap have moved up, while educated people have ended up in low-level jobs.” 

The resulting sense of injustice, amplified by the poor middle class group’s sense of superiority to the traditionally poor class, is likely to cause further political friction in Iran’s streets.

“The Islamic Republic will repeat its cycle,” Mani, the film editor, predicts. “Every ten years, it carries out a large-scale massacre, each time with a higher death toll. Every few years, someone from Iran wins the Nobel Peace Prize as a so-called opposition figure, but only the scale of killings grows larger, and people become poorer and more desperate.”

The post Iran’s “Poor Middle Class” Swells, Seethes appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

According to rumors circulating in Tehran in recent weeks, Mehdi Khamoushi, head of Iran’s Endowments and Charity Affairs Organization, is set to be named as chief of staff to Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s newly installed Supreme Leader. Already a member of the board of trustees of the Islamic Revolution Cultural Research Institute, responsible for preserving and publishing the works of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khamoushi also has a close familial connection with one of Iran’s oldest surviving political organizations.

Taghi Khamoushi, Mehdi’s father, was for decades one of the leading figures of Motalefeh (the Islamic Coalition Party). Founded in 1963 with roots in the traditional bazaar merchant class, Motalefeh was closely aligned with the clerical establishment that helped bring the Islamic Republic to power in 1979. In the Iranian political context, Motalefeh is a foundational coalition of principlists (osoolgarayan)—ultraconservative supporters of whoever holds the office of Supreme Leader and the doctrine of Velaayat-e Faghih by which he exercises absolute authority.

The party’s religious, traditionalist, and bazaar-based members played a significant role in Iran’s economy from the outset of the 1979 Revolution and controlled a substantial share of the country’s non-oil exports during the Islamic Republic’s early decades. Under the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami, these figures were pushed to the political margins.

As the economic and political power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) grew during the Ahmadinejad era, Motalefeh was sidelined even further, and it ceased to be a major player in the economy. Mehdi Khamoushi’s rumoured appointment as chief of the Supreme Leader’s Office raised the question of whether he might restore Motalefeh to a position of political influence and economic strength.

This past week, Tehran Bureau’s economic unit, Resanegar, put this question to a veteran Iranian economist affiliated with the Institute for Economic Studies and Research of the University of Tehran. With extensive connections across Iran’s business circles (which overlap considerably with its political circles) and a deep understanding of the country’s markets and commerce, he offers an unusually well-informed perspective on the issue.

In analyzing possible shifts in Iran’s power dynamics over the coming months, he downplays the prospect of Motalefeh having the new Supreme Leader’s ear. Instead, he argues that the IRGC—whose economic grip had become less certain in the years before Donald Trump regained the US presidency—is now positioned to be Iran’s true locus of power. The war that began in late February, he argues, has expanded the Guards’ influence in Iran’s economy and politics alike.

Recently, unofficial reports have circulated suggesting that Mehdi Khamoushi may be appointed head of the Supreme Leader’s Office. While the news has not been confirmed, the decision would not be entirely unexpected. His appointment could be significant for Motalefeh, potentially providing it a bridge back from political marginalization. How much could Khamoushi’s arrival at the Leader’s Office affect Iran’s economy? Meysam Khamenei [Mojtaba Khamenei’s youngest brother] is married into the Lolachian family, another prominent Motalefeh-linked family. Even if power is not distributed among [Ali] Khamenei’s [four] sons, it seems unlikely that Mojtaba Khamenei’s brothers would be left without influence. Could some share of power also return to Motalefeh?

Current political and military conditions suggest that everything is effectively in the hands of the IRGC. The Guards appear to be making the key decisions. Yesterday, I watched footage of President Masoud Pezeshkian meeting with managers from the state broadcaster. It seems they are still holding meetings in secure locations. During the meeting, Pezeshkian said that “we do nothing without the Leader’s permission,” yet he had recently stated that he only met with Mojtaba Khamenei two months after [the Supreme Leader’s appointment]. This suggests that affairs have not necessarily been managed directly through the Leader’s authorization.

Whether power will be distributed among the Leader’s sons, or whether Khamoushi becoming chief of staff would alter economic policy, are questions that remain speculative. If we assume for the sake of argument that Seyyed Mehdi Khamoushi does become head of the office—though there is no confirmed information yet—the real question is how much influence he could have over the economy.

In my view, the Leader’s Office exerts its greatest influence by engineering elections in ways that bring to power individuals who will pursue its preferred economic policies. Until we know their electoral plans and what political strategy they intend to implement, we cannot know what economic program or structure they intend to pursue.

Based on Mehdi Khamoushi’s background, it is difficult to determine whether Motalefeh itself would return. If his thinking resembles that of his father, Seyyed Taqi Khamoushi, then his focus would be on the bazaar—not in the liberal economic sense, but in the traditional jurisprudential sense.

This is a conception of the market that is largely insulated from competition. Motalefeh was among the first groups to oppose the establishment of the Refah chain stores. If they truly supported free markets and limited state intervention, they would not have reacted that way. In reality, they have generally opposed modern market structures unless they themselves are incorporated into them.

Ali Naqi Khamoushi [Mehdi Khamoushi’s uncle] chaired Iran’s Chamber of Commerce for nearly thirty years. If you look at the people around him—for example, one of his close associates, who was known as the “father of Iran’s plaster industry” and owned the Semnan plaster business—you find individuals who never worked to modernize the Chamber of Commerce or attempted to integrate Iran into the global trading system.

They made no meaningful effort to bring Iran into the World Trade Organization. In many cases, they showed little interest in or understanding of such institutions. Their primary concern was practical self-interest: if they were importers, they wanted a lower exchange rate to increase profits; if they were exporters—even of raw materials—they sought higher returns. They were not interested in serious competitors or partners.

Given this, does it seem that whether Motalefeh returns or figures like Babak Zanjani remain influential, Iran will continue to follow the same closed, rent-seeking economic model?

Iran’s economy is fundamentally rent-based. It has never operated on meritocracy. Those connected to power receive a share of economic opportunities.

Everyone seeks access to political power because that is how economic benefits are obtained. This differs from developed countries such as Britain or the United States, where individuals generally become economically successful first and then enter politics in an effort to influence policymaking.

Babak Zanjani himself emerged from this system of rent-seeking. Could figures like him become even more influential?

If the Wall Street Journal report is correct and Babak helped transfer roughly $850 million into Iran through cryptocurrencies, then yes, people like him could gain greater influence.

Their expertise lies in sanctions evasion. As long as sanctions remain in place, such individuals continue to serve a practical function for the system.

Returning to Motalefeh: is it fair to say that the party has been marginalized in recent years, and that Mehdi Khamoushi and a new leadership arrangement could bring it back to prominence?

Motalefeh began losing influence when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power, although the process actually started during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency through efforts to take control of the Chamber of Commerce away from them.

Their supporters fought hard to retain influence. At one point, the election of the Tehran Chamber of Commerce chairman was invalidated and he was removed so that Motalefeh could maintain control. They succeeded temporarily, but eventually lost their position as Chamber elections progressed.

During Ahmadinejad’s administration, they were pushed almost entirely to the margins. Even in the petrochemical sector, cases were opened against some of them and they faced considerable pressure.

Even if Khamoushi became chief of staff, that would not necessarily mean Motalefeh’s return. The traditional bazaar economy no longer exists in the form it once did. There is no old-style economic order to restore, nor can they simply oppose modern distribution networks as they once did.

These individuals are deeply embedded within Iran’s economic system and would likely return with a new image. They have tried to adapt to changing circumstances. Their children are now entering positions of influence, and some of them are even frustrated with Iran’s current economic policies. One of them, whom I know personally, openly supports reconciliation with the United States.

The internet and social media have changed too much. This is no longer the era of Motalefeh.

But doesn’t this network still control a significant portion of Iran’s exports?

Iranian exports have changed dramatically. Traditional exports such as carpets, pistachios, and agricultural products no longer play a meaningful role in the country’s trade balance.

At one time, these products accounted for more than 60 percent of Iran’s non-oil exports. Today they represent less than one percent. Carpets, pistachios, legumes—none of them have the importance they once did.

Today, roughly 70 percent of Iran’s non-oil exports consist of petrochemical products and steel.

Doesn’t that still make them influential in the petrochemical sector?

Not particularly. They have interests in companies such as Amir Kabir Petrochemical and Sadaf, but these do not represent a major share of exports.

The Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries Holding Company alone accounts for roughly half of Iran’s petrochemical exports. Therefore, it would be inaccurate to say that Motalefeh controls the pulse of petrochemical exports.

Assuming the current political system remains in place, what do you think will be the most important economic change in the coming years?

If the system survives, the most significant change will be continuity in the direction established by the recent conflicts. Iran’s economy will increasingly become an economy dominated by military institutions.

The IRGC and Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters will expand their influence. Any meaningful change in economic policy would require a change in the IRGC’s outlook.

The Guards will likely gain even greater freedom of action. More state contracts will be awarded to them.

There was an interesting article in Foreign Affairs written by one of the American negotiators involved in the Obama-era nuclear talks. He argued that the nuclear agreement had been structured in a way that effectively discouraged the IRGC from economic involvement. According to him, the Iranian government itself had shown an interest in reducing the IRGC’s role because sanctions targeting the Guards also harmed the broader economy.

But what Trump did effectively reversed that trend and made the IRGC central to the economy once again.

The IRGC will likely gain even more authority. Consider the idea of asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz and collecting transit fees. Who would actually collect those fees? Customs authorities? No—everything would have to be coordinated through the IRGC.

On the third day of the war, President Pezeshkian apologized to the Gulf states. Five minutes later, Khatam al-Anbiya issued a statement effectively retracting his remarks.

Trump ended up giving the IRGC everything it wanted. What he did ultimately strengthened the organization. From now on, the IRGC will operate openly in the economy.

If yesterday the IRGC was the emperor of Iran’s hidden economy, today it is becoming the central authority within the formal and visible economy. I am confident that no major protocol or policy will be written from this point forward without the IRGC playing a role. Everything will require its approval and coordination.

So a return of Motalefeh to power is unlikely?

In this new political landscape, neither Motalefeh nor any other political party is likely to play a decisive role.

Trump made what I would describe as a strategic mistake. The IRGC now sees the situation as a blessing in disguise. A ripe fruit has fallen into its lap, and it has no intention of sharing that fruit with anyone else.

The post “Trump Ended Up Giving the IRGC Everything It Wanted” appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

A paper takeout cup is what closed the café down. In late March, as war with the United States and Israel escalated, authorities in Iran turned off the lights at over forty Lamiz Coffee outlets across the country. Posters of Ali Khamenei were taped over the cafés’ dark windows. The chain was shuttered for featuring a coffee cup with an image that officials claimed mocked the assassination of the Supreme Leader in a February 28 air strike. The illustration, based on a 1975 poster created by graphic designer Farshid Mesghali, depicts an empty chair beneath a volley of large raindrops, which authorities said resembles the chair used by the late leader in his public appearances. Referencing the Persian New Year, which took place on March 20, the cup’s back reads “Nowruz 1405—Spring Will Come.” 

Representatives of Lamiz, established in 2004 by Iranian-Canadian Armin Lamei, have denied the allegation, explaining that the cups were ordered for Nowruz long before the war began. Subsequently, other coffee shops in Tehran such as the popular Sam Café were closed or had their Instagram pages taken down by the authorities, most of them after the April 8 ceasefire went into effect. These spaces have been crucial gathering spots for Iranians to see and hear from one another during the extended internet shutdowns that began in early January amid mass protests against the regime, and they have served as social and emotional refuges since the war began.

Despite the crackdowns, many cafés have remained open for business (Lamiz and Sam were allowed to reopen in early May). Every day, they come to life during long business hours between 8 a.m and 11 p.m. Young Iranians in Western-style clothing—many without any regard for Islamic dress codes—move between the city center and posh District 1. Inside, espresso machines grind and hiss, milk is frothed and shaped into foamy compositions, and playlists vary from upbeat Coldplay in the north to moody Tom Waits downtown. Lively conversation fills the air.

Bahram, a young visitor at one café, put it simply: “We have no internet, so we have to go to the café every day just to see our friends. The streets were empty during the war but inside these cafés the tables were full.” While the streets are busy again as the ceasefire enters its sixth week, many café windows are still prepared for bombardment, covered with colorful tape in creative patterns to prevent glass from shattering into dangerous, flying shards.

Within these popular, politically fraught destinations, what kind of public life remains possible and how much does it cost? To address that question it helps to understand cafés in Iran as establishments serving multiple purposes, part of a history of layered spaces whose functions have continually shifted over time.

1. Sleepovers at the Qahveh-Khaneh

A café in Iran is never simply a coffee shop. It can resemble a Western pub or bar without alcohol, even a muted nightclub—defined less by what it sells than by atmosphere, personal proximity, and social visibility. It is a place for being seen as much as for consuming coffee and light meals. What sustains it is the gathering itself. And the contemporary café is only the latest in a long history of Iranian social-commercial interiors, shaped by changing relations between coffee and tea, private and public life, and formal and informal assembly.

This structure has deep roots. In the Safavid era (1501–1736), during which a unified Persian state was established with Twelver Shiism as the official religion, coffee arrived as an imported commodity tied to long-distance trade networks. In the 16th century, the qahveh-khaneh (literally, “coffeehouse”) emerged in cities such as Qazvin and Isfahan. These urban establishments served both locals and travelers, with an economic model that extended well beyond coffee. Patrons paid not only for beverages but for access to a shared environment where poetry recitations, games, political discussion, and informal business took place. Information circulated through conversation rather than institutions, making the space itself a form of value. Even at this stage, the coffeehouse depended on imported supply chains and on the ability to convert social gathering into sustained economic activity, while remaining subject to the oversight drawn to spaces where people met, spoke, and exchanged ideas.

Coffeehouses were never separate from structures of power. Under Shah Abbas I (r. 1588–1629), they were drawn into the economic and political orbit of the court, at times serving as informal venues for receiving foreign envoys. This use reinforced their role as spaces where commerce, sociability, and political exchange overlapped, even as that multivalent role made them subject to scrutiny. As political discussion took place within them, efforts were made to regulate such activity; religious figures visited coffeehouses to monitor conversations and steer them toward acceptable themes. Under Shah Abbas II (r. 1642–66), coffeehouses were briefly closed before being allowed to reopen under stricter oversight, indicating that while they were economically and socially necessary, they remained closely scrutinized as part of a broader system of control.

An Economy of Storytellers and Trade

From its beginnings, the coffeehouse operated as a structured urban enterprise with multiple sources of income. Divans allowed for daytime eating and nighttime rest; to increase foot traffic, proprietors invited preachers and naqqals (storytellers) who worked within informal payment systems based on audience contributions. A naqqal might recite tales from a classic such as Ferdowsi’s epic Shahnameh, the Khamseh of Nizami, or the medieval romance Samak-e Ayyar. Evenings might be devoted to the reading of the ghazals of Hafez or fortune-telling based on his verse (fal-e Hafez). A small labor economy developed in such venues, with workers employed to prepare drinks, serve customers, and maintain supplies. Rather than relying exclusively or even primarily on coffee, the business depended on layering services—beverages, entertainment, food, and lodging.

At the same time, these activities remained subject to ideological oversight. Unlike in parts of the Ottoman world and Mecca, where coffee was prohibited at times due to fears that coffeehouses fostered radical thinking and political dissent, coffee was never banned in Iran. Yet it existed within a framework where social practices could be restricted according to their impact on order. As Rudi Matthee notes, patterns of consumption were shaped by trade, geography, and hierarchy as much as by taste, and by the relationship between state and religious authority. (Matthee’s The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500–1900 is an invaluable historical resource.) Shia clerics often allowed certain practices to continue so long as they remained contained, reflecting a pragmatic approach to regulation that extended to spaces of gathering. Within this framework, the decline of coffee did not eliminate the coffeehouse; its functions evolved as tea replaced coffee as the dominant drink.

By the early Qajar period (1789–1925), this transition was driven by trade and cost. Tea entered northern Iran through Russian and Central Asian routes, while coffee remained tied to southern import networks via the Persian Gulf. As tea imports expanded and prices fell, it transformed from an elite commodity to a widely consumed good, gradually displacing coffee. State involvement in this shift became explicit in the late 19th century through efforts to reduce dependence on imports. At a time when roughly 83 percent of tea was imported from India, diplomat Mohammad Mirza Kashef al-Saltaneh introduced domestic cultivation after disguising himself as a French merchant to study production methods in British India. With state backing, including a production monopoly granted by Mozaffar al-Din Shah, plantations were established in regions such as Lahijan and Tonekabon, expanding to 300,000 tea plants by 1903.

The spread of tea altered the economic structure of consumption. Unlike coffee, it did not depend on specialized public venues. With the introduction of the samovar, tea moved into domestic settings, becoming part of everyday hospitality and reducing reliance on the coffeehouse as the primary site of consumption. It was cheaper, locally produced, and less exposed to fluctuations in global trade. Coffeehouses adapted rather than disappeared, replacing coffee with tea while maintaining their role as revenue-generating social spaces.

During the Qajar period, their economic function expanded further. Coffeehouses operated as informal labor exchanges, where employers recruited workers and tradesmen gathered according to occupation. They remained key points for the spread of news and information, which brought increased state attention. Reform proposals in 1879 called for closing existing coffeehouses and replacing them with regulated establishments with restrictions on such activities as newspaper reading. During the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11), coffeehouses in fact became pivotal as venues for people in a still largely illiterate society to come and listen to newspapers being read out loud.

Urban Expansion, Social Function, and Class Structure

By the early 20th century, coffeehouses had become embedded in the urban economy at scale. In Tehran, their numbers rose from 711 in 1929 to around 1,500 by 1960 and roughly 3,500 by 1979, before falling sharply to just over 900 by 1990. The pattern was similar in Isfahan, where numbers increased from about 19 in the late 19th century to around 70 by the 1920s. This expansion reflected the range of economic functions these establishments performed at a time when few other urban institutions attracted a comparable range of activity.

During the Pahlavi period, rapid urbanization brought an influx of working-class men, migrants, and tradesmen into cities. Coffeehouses operated as low-cost, accessible businesses within neighborhood economies and bazaar networks. Their income was built on multiple streams: tea, shisha, and simple meals such as omelettes and meat stews, combined with the monetization of space. They continued to function as informal labor exchanges and sites for the circulation of information about everything from national politics to local affairs, sustaining a steady flow of customers interested in more than just food and beverages.

The business model reflected the economic position of their clientele. These were high-turnover, low-margin establishments, concentrated in older districts and serving primarily lower- and middle-income patrons. Interiors were modest and durable. Almost universally on display were portraits of the first Shia Imam, Ali, and the ill-fated wrestler Gholamreza Takhti, whose death by suicide became the subject of lasting conspiracy theories. Together, these figures represented ideals of honorable masculinity and chivalry among working-class patrons. The viability of coffeehouses depended on regular customers, inexpensive offerings, and continuous occupation of space. Today, the remaining coffeehouses—largely located in older, religious, or economically disadvantaged neighborhoods—continue to operate as small, service-based businesses built on sustained patronage.

Coffeehouse to Café

The emergence of modern cafés in early 20th-century Tehran marked a shift in both urban consumption and the organization of social space. Establishments such as Café Naderi, Cafe Orient, and Café Loghanteh—now reopened at the Qasr Prison Museum—introduced a different commercial model tied to urban modernity. Among them, Café Naderi, founded in 1927 by Armenian immigrant Khachik Madikians, became the most prominent. It operated not only as a coffeehouse but as a restaurant and meeting place, drawing a more affluent and educated clientele, including writers and intellectuals such as Sadegh Hedayat, Forough Farrokhzad, and Ahmad Shamlou, and generating income through extended patronage rather than quick turnover.

Compared to the classic qahveh-khaneh, where revenue depended in large part on patrons attracted by storytelling, other forms of entertainment, and lodging, the modern café reorganized its economic base around print culture and longer sitting times. Newspapers and journals replaced oral narration as the primary draw, encouraging customers to remain for extended periods, order repeatedly, and return regularly. 

As Rudi Matthee’s work shows, changes in these spaces were shaped by trade, urban development, and consumption habits. Just as Safavid coffeehouses had depended on imported coffee and supplementary services, and Qajar-era venues had adapted to tea and labor exchange, modern cafés aligned themselves with new economic conditions. Whereas traditional coffeehouses were entirely male preserves, the expansion of female social possibilities after Reza Shah Pahlavi’s 1936 decree prohibiting women from wearing the veil in public widened cafés’ customer base. They became the first commercial “third places” accessible to women, and mixed-gender patronage made them natural venues for dating.

At the same time, cafés remained subject to regulation and oversight as public gathering spaces. Their role in hosting discussion, intellectual exchange, and social interaction placed them within the same framework of monitoring and control that had shaped earlier coffeehouses. 

2. Rise of the Baristas

Tehran’s postrevolutionary and postwar cafés represent a later stage in a longer economic history of Iranian social interiors, extending from the Safavid coffeehouse to the modern café. Across these periods, the structure persisted even as the form changed: spaces of gathering moved between coffee and tea, public and domestic settings, and regulated and informal environments, while continuing to operate as businesses shaped by shifting political and economic conditions.

Over the years, Café Naderi’s identity gradually shifted from dynamic gathering place to something more symbolic, valued for its cultural association with earlier generations. Efforts to prevent its demolition secured its designation as a protected heritage site, preserving it not simply as a business but as part of Tehran’s urban and economic history.

Meanwhile, new establishments opened that aimed to replicate the ambience of the era in which Naderi first opened its doors. These “nostalgia cafés” staged the atmosphere of the first half of the 20th century through retro furniture, archival photographs, and historical objects. What was being sold was not only food and drink but a constructed sense of the past—memory turned into an economic asset. With warm lighting, restrained noise volume, and durable furnishings, their interiors were carefully managed to encourage customers to remain for extended periods and to return time and again.

Cafe Shouka, opened by Yareli Pourmoghadam in September 1981 in Gandhi Mall, illustrates this model. Its location within what became a concentration of cafés tied its business to foot traffic and neighborhood demand. It combined service with production by roasting its own coffee beans daily, reducing dependence on external suppliers while adding value through control over quality. Its unchanged décor—tables, wooden benches, and an old television—functioned as a stable visual identity, reinforcing customer loyalty. The café’s viability depended on regular patrons who treated the space as part of their routine, sustaining income through continued use rather than one-time transactions. Other cafés, such as Aram on Qaem Maqam Street and Santo in the Tehran Bazaar, operated within similar, locally embedded economies.

From the 1990s onward, cafés increasingly diversified their revenue streams. Cafe Aks, located beneath the Eskan Residential Towers on Mirdamad Boulevard, represents a shift toward hybrid models. It combined coffee service with exhibition space, integrating photography shows directly into its daily operation. Exhibitions attracted visitors, while café sales provided a steady financial base. Additional income came from the sale of CDs and art magazines. Its position within a commercial complex linked its business to a wider retail environment, where cultural programming and hospitality reinforced each other economically.

The Commercialization of Coffee Culture

By the early 2000s, cafés in Tehran increasingly adopted Western-style formats while coming under closer and more systematic state scrutiny. Although many remained small neighborhood businesses, they were incorporated into expanding systems of surveillance through licensing requirements, municipal directives, and security and moral enforcement policies. By the mid-2010s, CCTV installation had effectively become a de facto condition of operation across much of the urban commercial sector. Enforcement intensified during moments of political unrest, including after the 2009 protests and again following the Mahsa Amini protests, when surveillance footage from businesses was used for identification and enforcement. Today, all businesses are required to maintain surveillance systems as part of licensing, with noncompliance risking fines, closure, or loss of permits. Some cafés resisted and were shut down, but most complied, acquiescing to conditions of oversight like those that have long shaped Iranian coffeehouses and cafés.

Despite these constraints, café-going continued to expand. Young Iranians remained frequent customers, sustaining a dense network of small cafés alongside larger branded chains. Many establishments adopted international models in menu design and visual presentation, while adapting to local economic conditions. One early example of expansion through branding and retail was Raees Coffee, founded in 2000, which developed into a multibranch business while also selling packaged coffee. A similar trajectory was followed by Bonmano, which built nationwide distribution of packaged items aimed at broader markets. Positioned as a more affordable brand, Bonmano entered supermarkets with products such as self-brew disposable sachets before opening its first café in Iran Mall, the world’s largest shopping mall, in 2022.

Alongside these retail-driven models, a roastery-café format emerged in which production, branding, and service were integrated within a single business structure. Lamiz became the most prominent example, expanding to dozens of locations across multiple cities. Selling its own packaged beans, it positioned itself in the mid-market segment, combining affordability with standardization to reach a wide urban customer base. A different model developed with Sam Café in Sam Center on Fereshteh Street in northern Tehran. Originally designed to generate foot traffic for a luxury retail complex, the café itself became the primary attraction. Alongside conscientious sourcing and specialty roasting, it incorporated art displays, exhibitions, and a highly developed visual identity. Its success led to it opening branches across the city.

The original café in Sam Center became known for drawing customers from across different segments of Tehran’s urban population. Business meetings, student gatherings, informal artistic encounters, celebrity visits, and affluent arrivals in luxury cars all take place within the same space. Amid shops selling high-end goods such as opulent Swiss watches and wildly expensive designer T-shirts, the flagship outlet has often been the most active commercial and social space in the complex, generating revenue through prolonged stays and the desire for social visibility in a curated, on-trend environment.

The broader rise of roastery cafés marked a structural shift in Tehran’s café economy. These businesses functioned simultaneously as coffee shops, retail outlets, and production sites. Coffee beans were roasted in-house or through tightly controlled supply chains, while packaged products extended the brand into domestic and workplace settings. Freshness and traceable sourcing became central to marketing, turning coffee into a branded lifestyle product tied to design, consumption patterns, and social display.

The geography of café development, meanwhile, reflected Tehran’s wider economic inequalities across a pronounced north–south divide. Northern districts such as affluent Fereshteh were characterized by larger, more expensive, more design-forward cafés, where revenue was closely linked to atmosphere, branding, and extended stays. In contrast, cafés in central and southern areas remained smaller, denser, and more functional, closer to older patterns of everyday social use rooted in neighborhood economies.

A Parallel Coffee Economy

The growth of specialty coffee in Tehran has reshaped both café culture and the organization of labor. The barista, once peripheral to the café economy, has become a central figure occupying a hybrid technical and performative role. Espresso extraction, milk texturing, customer interaction, and visual presentation are integrated into a single form of work in which coffee preparation is inseparable from the production of atmosphere and experience. This transformation has been accompanied by the emergence of formal professional structures. Institutions such as the Iranian Barista Guild, along with competitions modeled on the World Barista Championship, have contributed to the formation of a recognizable coffee labor market. Figures such as Morteza Bagherpanah, who overcame dozens of competitors to win the crown of 2018 Iran Barista Champion, and initiatives led by Mahsa Niyayesh, founder and CEO of the Iranian Women Coffee Association, became associated with this development, while the work itself remained economically unstable due to rising input costs and fluctuations in consumer spending.

International sanctions and financial restrictions have also significantly shaped the structure of Iran’s specialty coffee sector. Limits on banking, travel, and certification access have constrained participation in global training systems, competitions, and professional networks. As a result, domestic institutions developed in partial substitution for international frameworks, producing a parallel coffee economy that is simultaneously isolated and internally structured.

Over the past decade, this parallel system has expanded through the rapid growth of coffee academies and training programs. Institutions such as the Iran Coffee Academy and Iran Coffee School introduced structured curricula covering brewing methods, sensory evaluation, café management, and service standards, contributing to the formalization of café labor. While access to official Specialty Coffee Association certification remained limited, selective international integration continued. In 2023, the introduction of the Italian Barista Certificate through Espresso Academy marked a partial reopening of training channels. Competitions, workshops, festivals, online courses, and informal networks further accelerated the circulation of technical knowledge. By 2025, the expansion of training infrastructures and a younger workforce increasingly fluent in specialty coffee terminology was clearly transforming the scene, with barista training becoming more central to the functioning of the café economy.

Media and publishing have also played a key role in structuring these developments. Safa Haratian, founder and editor of iCoff.ee—the leading Persian-language media outlet in the field—has contributed to the professionalization of coffee discourse through reporting, industry analysis, and coverage of cafés, roasting practices, competitions, and global trends. Through iCoff.ee and his international writing, Haratian has helped connect Iran’s expanding coffee sector to broader developments in the global specialty coffee industry while reinforcing domestic training and consumer knowledge systems.

3. The Red Lipstick Effect

By the 2020s, cafés in Tehran increasingly developed into hybrid interiors combining coffee service with bookstores, retail, galleries, performance spaces, and work environments. New venues such as Luvo and Roostar (already with four locations)—opened during the recent Ramadan War with the United States and Israel—and café spaces linked to Saless Publishing House on Karimkhan Street reflect this shift. In these settings, the café functions simultaneously as leisure space, workplace, commercial site, and cultural venue.

This hybridization also extends into event- and exhibition-based business models. Daa House operates as a café-performance venue where live theater, jazz, and experimental music events are staged within a hospitality setting rather than a formal cultural institution. Performances frequently sell out, indicating sustained demand for small-scale cultural programming within Tehran’s independent arts economy. In this model, attendance becomes a purchasable commodity, and the café operates as a hybrid cultural enterprise combining hospitality, performance, and urban sociability within a single commercial structure. Ticket prices generally range from around 200,000 to 350,000 tomans (2 to 3.5 million rials), depending on the program. (A year ago, that amount would have fetched about $2.40 to $4.20 USD from a Tehran currency trader; today, $1.10 to $1.95. From March 2024 to March 2026, the official minimum monthly wage was 110 million rials, though many jobs fell short of that in practice. In response to runaway inflation, the government recently raised the minimum wage to 166 million rials per month—$92 USD as of May 15, per Bonbast.com.) 

A parallel development is visible in hybrid gallery-cafés, where exhibition space is sustained through café revenue and event programming rather than institutional funding or direct art sales. Spaces such as Iranshahr House, Ariana Art Cafe, and Kajeh Art Cafe combine café service with rotating exhibitions, talks, and informal cultural gatherings. Café operations function as the primary financial base, subsidizing exhibitions, which in turn generate footfall and repeat consumption, linking cultural visibility directly to commercial sustainability. Iranshahr House, founded by Majid Mollanorouzi, former director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, exemplifies this model. It integrates a bookstore, café, private art consulting and sales office, and gallery space, translating institutional cultural experience into a flexible, market-oriented business structure.

Across business models both conventional and cutting-edge, Tehran café prices are relatively high, restricting regular use largely to middle and upper-middle income groups. One patron, Amir, noted: “I go to cafés almost every day, either to socialize or to spend time alone … I spend between five million and ten million tomans on each visit.” When the average pre-tax monthly salary in Iran sits at around 40 million tomans (per wage.is), even if the figure in the capital is perhaps double that, daily indulgence like Amir’s is available to few.

At the broader level, a single café meal can cost from 3 to 5 percent of the average monthly wage and up to ten times more than a home-cooked meal, making frequent patronage next to impossible for most working-class Iranians. Access is also shaped by nonmonetary factors, including familiarity with the behavioral and aesthetic codes of café culture—language, dress, and modes of interaction. As a result, cafés function as sites where class distinctions are both reflected and reproduced.

Visible Consumption 

Despite the rapid expansion of cafés and specialty coffee culture in recent decades, tea remains structurally dominant in Iranian homes, workplaces, and everyday hospitality. For many Iranians—particularly older and lower-income groups—tea continues to signify affordability, continuity, and domestic routine, while coffee is more closely associated with younger urban populations, public consumption, mobility, and discretionary spending. Rather than displacing tea, coffee has largely been added alongside it, creating an additional recurring expense within everyday household and leisure budgets.

Under conditions of economic pressure, this pattern has become visible through what has been described as the “red lipstick effect,” in which major expenditures are reduced while smaller, visible forms of consumption are maintained to preserve status and normality. Even during periods of financial strain, including the recent war, many young consumers in Tehran continued visiting higher-end cafés, where the cost of entry remained relatively modest compared to housing, transport, and other major expenses. Cost management often takes the form of shared consumption—a coffee accompanied by a shared pastry or dish—allowing group participation while reducing per-person spending. At the same time, cafés function as sites where class status is performed through the display of branded clothing, luxury accessories, and the latest smartphones.

These dynamics are also reflected in everyday interactions. At a Fereshteh Street establishment, one patron, Maryam, responded to a question about whether going out to cafés on a regular basis is getting too expensive: “Maybe for some people. But for us it is still manageable.” Her friend added, “We share the food anyway because we have to watch our figures.” Such exchanges sit alongside visible markers of consumption, where fashion, accessory, and cosmetic choices signal belonging to specific urban social groups.

Economic pressures have begun to reshape patterns of coffee consumption more broadly. Rising café prices have encouraged some consumers to shift from café-based consumption toward the purchase of coffee beans for home brewing. This shift reflects structural vulnerability in the sector: coffee in Iran remains entirely import dependent, making retail prices highly sensitive to inflation, currency volatility, and broader, macroeconomic instability.

Declining Imports vs. Growing Demand

There are no official published figures specifically for Iran’s coffee imports in 2026, but available trade data indicates mounting pressure on the market.

During the first eight months of the Persian calendar year 1404 (March 21–November 21, 2025), Iran imported approximately 26,493 tons of coffee valued at about $156.6 million USD. This represents a 29.4 percent decline in import volume compared with the same period in 1403, while the average unit value rose from roughly $4.65 USD per kilogram in 1403 to $5.91 USD per kilogram in 1404, reflecting rising global coffee prices.

This data, compiled by Mehran Mehdizadeh, commercial consultant to the Northern Tea Factories Syndicate, points to a broader pattern: declining volumes alongside increasing prices. Import flows remain highly concentrated, with around 70.7 percent of coffee entering through the United Arab Emirates before the war, while India, Indonesia, and Vietnam supply most of the remainder. Together, these four countries account for approximately 96.2 percent of total imports. The contraction has been attributed to the higher international prices (exacerbated by Iranian currency depreciation), stock accumulation from earlier overimporting, and constraints in foreign exchange availability.

These economic pressures intersect with broader political and regulatory uncertainty. As coffee consumption became embedded in urban lifestyles, open warfare and a fragile ceasefire have introduced additional constraints around the import of nonessential goods. Foreign currency allocation prioritized essential imports, increasing expectations of further price rises and reinforcing the volatility of supply.

At retail level, these pressures are visible in consumption shifts. A coffee seller in central Tehran reported sustained demand despite worsening household conditions, alongside a gradual move from café consumption toward home and workplace preparation. Periods of conflict have produced sharp short-term declines in sales, followed by concerns that sustained price increases could suppress demand.

Price differences across cafés can reflect everything from differences in quality and wholesale cost to rent, location, branding, and design overheads. As of April 25, the local delivery app Snappfood indicated that Lamiz Coffee (still closed at the time) was charging approximately 35 million rials per kilogram for Arabica beans, with a cup of espresso around 1.5 million rials. At Sam Café, beans were priced similarly, while espresso was close to 3 million rials. At Roostar Cafe, espresso was priced at around 2.6 million rials. (By the time this article is published, all of these prices will almost certainly have risen due to the ongoing crash of Iran’s currency.)

The broader trajectory indicates continued growth in demand, even as supply remains exposed to exchange-rate volatility, spikes in shipping costs, and state-managed foreign currency allocation. Supply chains are extended and often routed through intermediary countries, with prices shaped by external shocks rather than domestic production capacity.

Cafés, meanwhile, remain subject to periodic inspection, licensing reviews, and closures, reflecting the persistent, intensive regulation of public gathering spaces in the Islamic Republic.

Café Culture, “Clean” and Real

Across centuries, Iranian café culture has shifted in form—qahveh-khaneh, tea house, literary café, nostalgia café, roastery café, gallery café, and performance café—each shaped by changing political pressures, cultural formations, and economic conditions. Two continuities run through these transformations.

The first is financial improvisation. From Safavid coffeehouses sustained by storytellers, other performers, and lodging, to Qajar-era labor-exchange venues, to contemporary cafés dependent on retail bean sales, exhibitions, ticketed events, and branded merchandise, these spaces have rarely been viable on beverage sales alone. Supplementary economies have remained central throughout.

The second is suspicion. From their earliest appearance, cafés and coffeehouses have been treated as sites where strangers gather, information circulates, and dissent can form—and thus been monitored, inspected, regulated, surveilled, and even closed by nearly every government. Across regimes, cafés have remained subject to scrutiny not for what they serve, but for the forms of community they enable.

Within these conditions, cafés continue to operate as both economic and social infrastructure. In Tehran and other large cities, rising prices have not halted patronage; young Iranians continue to frequent cafés, sustaining both consumption and the practices of meeting, pausing, and lingering. The café functions simultaneously as commercial experiment, temporary refuge, and staged social space—its viability resting on continued assembly under constraint. This persistence is evident in the cycle of closure and return, including the reopening of Lamiz Coffee and the immediate resumption of its online presence in an Instagram post.

In mid-May, several weeks into the ceasefire, a Tehran resident was asked by a friend abroad what he had been up to recently. “Not much—cafés” was the response. He continued, “There is no point in investing anything or starting a business. We don’t know if we’ll be alive tomorrow. So at least we can come to a café and enjoy ourselves.”

Yet cafés also remain sites of political contention. Following the Lamiz chain’s reopening, a makeshift café was established outside its Farmanieh branch by diehard government supporters. Under the banner “We are Tamiz [clean] Coffee and extremely in love with our homeland,” a chador-clad woman explained: “We began gathering outside this café to show our disdain for what these people had done. But when our numbers increased, the management of Lamiz asked us to leave because they said we were interfering with their business. So we thought—why not serve ourselves coffee where we have gathered? We are not coffee sellers, but we are doing this to object to them.” Another woman holding a Mojtaba Khamenei poster said she rejected Lamiz’s “dirty coffee” while affirming “clean coffee” as honoring the memory of the war’s martyrs.

Across such episodes, cafés continue to function as contested commercial spaces in which consumption, labor, and political expression intersect. The opposing interpretations attached to a not-so-simple cup of coffee ultimately return to the same structural condition—a social life organized through café spaces that persist, adapt, and sometimes vanish in the face of economic or governmental pressure only to reappear.

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For over two months, Iran’s streets and squares have routinely been occupied by members of the new jan-fada movement, ordinary citizens who have pledged themselves as the regime’s “devotees unto death.” Crowds of these ardent supporters of the Islamic Republic erect mokeb encampments, modeled after pilgrimage way stations, where they offer free tea and food while asserting ideological control over public space. Staging demonstrations of loyalty to the regime and parading through neighborhoods as they chant slogans, often PA amplified and meant to intimidate, such as “Heydar, Heydar” and “Commander, give the order—whatever you command, we will carry out,” these jan-fada groups do not mobilize spontaneously. They are the product of an entrenched financial architecture designed to manufacture and sustain political allegiance. 

As the destructive effects of the 40-day war sink into the Iranian economy, effects that grow more severe each day due to the US blockade, the state has slashed spending in almost every sphere. Funding for many state-owned companies, such as those in the electricity and water sectors, has been almost completely eliminated. Yet money still flows unabated to a sector with an already outsized budget allocation—propaganda. 

Iran’s latest budget—which was proposed to the Majles in early January and received parliamentary approval on February 17—suggests that the Islamic Republic continues to treat control over ideology not as an accessory to government, but as one of its core functions. According to the 2026–27 national budget (which follows the Persian calendar, extending from March 21, 2026, to March 20, 2027) at least 188 trillion tomans (approximately $1.43 billion USD) in official public spending is directed toward media institutions, religious organizations, ideological outreach, and security-linked cultural bodies. This amount alone is comparable to the combined budgets of the Ministries of Communications, Justice, Culture, and Cultural Heritage, and it omits entirely opaque funding streams underwritten by quasi-governmental “charitable” institutions, or bonyads, that are overseen by officials at the very heart of the regime.

This budget allocation breaks down roughly as follows:

• Media and content production (state broadcasting, news agencies): ~45%
• Religious and ideological institutions: ~20%
• Military-security ideological sectors: ~20%
• Educational and cultural-engineering bodies: ~10%
• International ideological outreach organizations: ~5%

The use of these funds goes far beyond the production of media content. They support the recruitment and training of Iranians for careers of service to the regime, as well the organization and deployment of broad-based operations like the faux-grassroots, “astroturfed” jan-fada campaign and the coordination and promotion, both domestic and international, of political, religious, and military messaging.

The amount of spending on propaganda is notable not only for its volume, but for its durability. Even amid an unresolved war and a financially crushing blockade, there is no indication that disbursements in the propaganda realm have been curtailed. While the regime has made drastic cuts elsewhere, it has left belief-making largely untouched. Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), long one of the regime’s central ideological instruments, has even seen a marked increase in its already substantial allocation. Having received 29 trillion tomans under the 2025–26 national budget, IRIB’s allotment has ballooned to 80 trillion tomans in the current fiscal year.

Rather than flowing through a single ministry, propaganda funding is dispersed across a sprawling ecosystem of broadcasters, seminaries, cultural foundations, military organizations, and religious institutions. The largest share goes to state media and content production, including Iran’s broadcasting apparatus and affiliated press services, such as the Islamic Republic News Agency (506 billion tomans). A large portion also goes to numerous religious and ideological entities, ranging from the Islamic Development Organization (6.8 trillion tomans, up from 5 trillion last year) to the Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute (193 billion tomans for “discourse-building, explanation, and promotion of religious teachings”). Military-security cultural organs closely linked to the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) such as the Foundation for the Preservation of Sacred Defense and Resistance Values (724 billion tomans for “promotion of the Iranian-Islamic lifestyle“) take another sizable chunk.

Aside from domestic messaging, state budget funds also support international ideological outreach through IRIB’s Press TV subsidiary, institutions such as the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization (2.2 trillion tomans), and various bodies dedicated to exporting revolutionary ideology abroad, including Qom’s Al-Mustafa International University. The school has been sanctioned by the United States Treasury as “a recruiting ground for the IRGC-QF” (Quds Force, the Guards’ elite foreign arm). In the 2021–22 fiscal year, it received 487 billion tomans (about $115 million at the time), according to previous reporting by Tehran Bureau. Its allocation this year is almost 1.9 trillion tomans.

This extravagantly endowed structure reveals something deeper than the political importance of a censorship apparatus or messaging discipline. Propaganda functions as an economic sector, employing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, from journalists and filmmakers to clerics and educators. Some are ideologically committed. Many are financially dependent. Either way, the system reproduces itself through material incentives as much as political conviction.

Elite clans and ethereal audits

The propaganda industry is essential to the survival of the political business empires that effectively run the Islamic Republic. Connected through marriage and shared business interests, each of these elite clans fosters connections to high politics, state-funded media, and lucrative industries, placing friends and family members in central positions whenever possible. State-run media is an especially powerful tool. The clans own major news agencies like Tabnak (Mohsen Rezaei) and Fars News (Seyyed Nezalmodin Mousavi) and newspapers such as Hamshahri (Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf), Khorasan (Mohammad Saeed Ahdian), and Iran (the Khameneis). They use these media outlets, which are mostly funded by taxpayers, to attack their political and business rivals and to dispel reports of corruption. Those with business activities in the media sphere often also run the institutions that control censorship boards and limit press freedom, empowering them to undermine and eliminate critics.

Behind many of these media ventures is the aforementioned Islamic Development Organization (IDO), a propaganda-focused umbrella charity that falls under the purview of the Office of the Supreme Leader (Beyt-e Rahbari). IDO is linked to a vast network of media organizations, including widely read news outlets such as Nasim Online and 90 Eqtesadi. Their ownership structures are intentionally complicated to hide the outlets’ affiliations with the IRGC, Tehran Bureau’s reporting has shown.

IDO’s finances are vetted by Mofid Rahbar, an auditing firm that exclusively services the companies that fall under the Beyt’s purview, along with the bonyads the Beyt also oversees, including EIKO, Astan-e Qods Razavi, and Bonyad Mostazafan (BM). The aegis of the Beyt-e Rahbari means these organizations—designed to enrich the IRGC and other regime insiders—are exempt from tax obligations, anti-corruption codes, and financial reporting rules. 

The propaganda pyramid

As the main funding vehicle of the Islamic Republic’s propaganda machine, IDO sits at the top of a pyramid of subsidiaries that serve as cash cows for the ruling elite. Beneficiaries include the new (nominal) Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who played a major role at Beyt-e Rahbari long before his father’s death and whose family controls a network of influential media outlets, prominent book publishers, and media industry regulators. 

Another clan leader with business ties to IDO is pasta tycoon Reza Motallebi-Kashani, who has common business interests with IDO trustee Seyyed Mehdi Khamoushi. An influential clerical ally of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khamoushi has close ties to Ghalibaf and heads the board of trustees of Amir Kabir Publishing House (yet another Mofid Rahbar auditing client). Other former and current Amir Kabir trustees include the late Ali Larijani (former former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council), Mohsen Rafiqdoust (former IRGC minister and BM director), and Mohammad Saeedikia (former BM director and current head of the BM board of trustees).

IDO is one of the organizations instrumental in online censorship and facilitating internet shutdowns, Tehran Bureau’s reporting has shown. Its director—currently Hojatoleslam Mohammad Qomi—sits on the powerful Committee to Determine Instances of Criminal Content. This group, headed by Iran’s attorney general, Mohammad Movahedi-Azad, is in charge of monitoring internet content and blacklisting websites that are deemed inappropriate. 

Aside from controlling internet censorship, IDO has overseen the launch of multiple e-propaganda operations, as well as a start-up that appears well-positioned to thrive in the increasingly repressive digital space that has emerged in Iran amid the current web blackout. In 2020, IDO founded a subsidiary, the Bina Institute, whose articles of incorporation describe its aim to produce “quantitative and qualitative analyses” on a broad range of issues, supported by creating “video clips [and] digital texts,” undertaking “social media activities,” and providing related “services to institutions and organizations.” In the Islamic Republic’s recondite language, this phrasing suggests that Bina was established, in part, to coordinate pro-regime social media accounts. Among its unambiguous remits is to “monitor and evaluate” the regime’s propaganda efforts. 

A notable member of the Bina Institute’s founding board is Seyyed Meysam Seyyed Salehi, who manages Soroush, a domestic messaging app created to replace Telegram, which officials banned during the protests of 2017–18. As the crackdown on international social media usage intensifies, Soroush stands to benefit enormously. Between 2018 and 2020, Salehi was the CEO of Jam-e Jam Institute, which publishes Jam-e Jam newspaper and operates its website. Fariduddin Haddad Adel, brother-in-law to Mojtaba Khamenei, has long been a member of the institute’s board. 

The intricate business connections between Iran’s power brokers and the country’s propaganda-producing organizations help explain why wartime stresses have not fundamentally altered their financial dispensations. The regime can tolerate runaway inflation and crippled industry. But weakening the propaganda apparatus would impact the networks that maintain ideological discipline, rationalize repression, and coordinate regional proxies.

The result is a system in which propaganda is treated less as a tool of persuasion than as infrastructure.

In most countries, propaganda is episodic, activated during elections or major crises. In Iran, it is a permanent, massive state expenditure. Even as its economy crumbles and prospects for a swift recovery dim, the Islamic Republic still maintains that controlling the narrative for a weary audience is worth hundreds of trillions of tomans. And perhaps the chants of the “devotees unto death” that resound within its ideological echo chamber are even loud enough to convince it.

The post Bankrolling Belief appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

At its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz is just 21 nautical miles across—so narrow that the sovereign territorial waters of Iran and Oman overlap. The oil that routinely passes through this chokepoint accounts for one-fifth of global consumption; the portions of the world’s liquified natural gas, petrochemicals, and internationally traded fertilizer that make the transit are similar or even greater. The law of the sea must strike a balance here between the rights of the two nations that adjoin the strait and the global community’s need to keep a vital shipping artery open for navigation. Hormuz, as a result, is neither part of the “high seas” nor the exclusive preserve of Tehran and Muscat. This maritime bottleneck—youthful in oceanic terms, about 6,000 years old—thus also presents newly salient challenges to international law.

From the first hours of the war pitting Iranian against US and Israeli forces, images of oil tankers and cargo vessels stalled on either side of the strait have become familiar. As US bombers and Iranian missiles flew over the Persian Gulf to the west of the strait and the Sea of Oman to its east, shipping insurance premiums skyrocketed, making transit of the strait financially infeasible for many. The Islamic Revolution Guard Corps’ declaration in early March that the strait was closed to all but Iran’s own ships brought foreign navigation through the waterway to a near-complete halt. Compared to the prewar daily average of 138 vessels, roughly two ships a day took advantage of the Guards’ subsequent offer to allow passage in return for payment of a toll, before the US blockade shut down the strait almost entirely. All of these developments lead back to one question: Who actually has the right to decide who passes through Hormuz?

Under the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea, which Iran signed but never ratified and whose language it continues to reference, the division of such narrow waterways with different nations on either side is governed by the principle of the median line. According to this rule, unless the two countries agree otherwise, the boundary is a line where every point is equidistant from the nearest points on the baselines of each coast. This effectively splits the strait into two sectors of national sovereignty—every ship transiting Hormuz is always navigating within the sovereign territorial sea of either Iran or Oman.

A maritime highway

For decades, management of passage through the strait has followed this dual logic. The current routing system for vessels in Hormuz is the result of the Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS), which was jointly proposed by Iran and Oman and adopted by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 1968. The system was designed specifically to facilitate the safe, rapid transit of goods by establishing organized corridors for the heavy volume of traffic passing through the chokepoint.

Under the TSS, the strait functions like a strictly regulated maritime highway. To speed up transport and minimize the risk of accidents, Iran and Oman agreed on specific directions of travel: ships heading west and entering the Persian Gulf from the ocean would use an inbound lane that passes through Iranian territorial waters, while ships heading east and exiting the Gulf would follow an outbound lane through Omani waters.

Because the tankers and container ships that traverse the strait are so massive—often exceeding 1,000 feet in length—they cannot simply choose alternate routes through the narrow gap. As on a divided land highway, a driver cannot suddenly decide to veer into the opposite lane or drive across the median whenever they please without risking a catastrophic collision. The TSS thus functionally locks ships into a system of designated lanes that relies on the cooperation of the two coastal states.

This technical reality is crucial because it demonstrates that the management of Hormuz is based not on claims of exclusive (or semiexclusive) ownership, but rather on navigation rules, regional coordination, and international recognition. While Tehran and Muscat have been the stewards of this system for decades, its approval by the IMO was never intended to grant them authority to close the waterway, impose arbitrary pricing, or selectively decide which ships are allowed to pass. Indeed, the IMO and the statutes of international law—such as Article 16(4) of the 1958 Territorial Sea Convention and Article 44 of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea—consistently maintain that the right of transit through such a vital channel between international waters is a shared global necessity that cannot be suspended.

Exploiting the “gray zone”

To manage its confrontation with stronger adversaries in the strait, Tehran has developed what the analyst Michael Eisenstadt describes as a “gray zone” strategy—deploying legal ambiguity and strategic indirection to manufacture crises while controlling the pace of escalation and maintaining a veneer of statutory legitimacy. This is not a state navigating a genuine legal dispute in good faith. It is a government using the language of international law as a tool of coercion, selectively invoking whichever framework expands its leverage while discarding the obligations that would constrain it.

The clearest expression of this strategy is terminological. Iranian officials rarely cite the 1958 Geneva Convention by name, yet they reach consistently for its specific legal vocabulary when justifying their actions in the strait. In March 2026, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated directly that “Iran currently applies the innocent passage regime in the Strait of Hormuz.” The choice of “innocent passage” over the “transit passage” standard enshrined in the 1982 Convention is not casual. It is a deliberate reversion to a pre-1982 legal order that grants coastal states significantly broader authority to regulate, supervise, and, in certain circumstances, prohibit traffic through their territorial waters.

This preference for older statutory language has been codified in domestic law. Iran’s 1993 Act on Marine Areas is the formal architecture of its position, legislation designed to give statutory grounding to its physical control of the strait while sidestepping the obligations of international treaty. The Act selectively borrows from the international frameworks Iran finds useful while discarding those it does not. It adopts the UNCLOS standard of a 12-nautical-mile territorial sea—which, given the strait’s width of 21 miles, allows Iran to claim the entire northern half of the waterway as sovereign territory—while simultaneously omitting the transit passage rights that were the essential global bargain for accepting that broader limit in the first place. Article 5 of the Act formally endorses the 1958 “innocent passage” language. Article 8 grants Tehran the power to suspend passage for national security reasons, a power flatly prohibited under modern international law in straits used for international navigation. Articles 9 and 16 go further still, requiring prior authorization for all foreign warships and purporting to prohibit foreign military activity throughout Iran’s entire exclusive economic zone.

That selectivity is not incidental—it is the strategy. The 1993 Act is its domestic expression; the decision to sign the 1982 Convention without ratifying it is its international one. Signing alongside 88 other states allowed Iran to claim sovereign rights over the natural resources of a maritime area extending 200 nautical miles from its coast. By withholding ratification, Tehran preserved its status as a “persistent objector”—a recognized if contested principle in international law under which a state that consistently and openly rejects a norm during its formation cannot later be held bound by it. In its 1982 interpretive declaration, Iran argued that transit passage is merely a “contractual right” born of a package deal, binding only on states that have fully joined the treaty. This framing carries an additional tactical advantage: since the United States also never ratified UNCLOS, Iran can argue that Washington has no standing to invoke transit passage rights in Hormuz at all.

This strategy is widely regarded by international legal observers as a form of lawfare—the weaponization of legal language to achieve ends that the law itself would prohibit. The critique is pointed: Iran’s position is built on the 1958 framework it claims as its authority, yet Article 16(4) of that same convention explicitly prohibits the suspension of innocent passage through straits used for international navigation. In closing the strait to commerce it has designated hostile and conducting naval mining in one of the world’s most critical waterways, the Islamic Republic is not merely bending the rules—it is gutting the very framework it invokes for cover.

The United States, though it participated in drafting the navigational rules, declined to become a party to the treaty, rejecting its restrictions on deep seabed mining. Nonetheless, it argues that the transit passage regime has become so entrenched in international practice that it has crystallized into “customary international law”—binding on all states, including non-signatories like the US itself. (That Washington demands adherence to a treaty it has never joined is fodder for easy criticism. That it has now responded to Iran’s actions by imposing a blockade which violates recognized maritime law under any formula sets what some legal observers view as a dangerous precedent.)

Oman formally maintains a position somewhere in the middle of this statutory tug-of-war. While Muscat, unlike Tehran, both signed and ratified the 1982 Convention, it hardly adopted a maximalist reading of transit passage. In its “declarations made upon ratification,” Oman expressed concerns much like Iran’s regarding coastal sovereignty and the sensitivity of military vessels’ passage, asserting that foreign warships—along with all ships powered by or “carrying nuclear or other substances that are inherently dangerous or harmful to health or the environment”—must secure advance permission to traverse its territorial waters. There is no record, though, of Oman having even once impeded a vessel’s passage through the strait on this basis.

The law and the reality

Ultimately, Hormuz is neither entirely within nor beyond its two coastal states’ statutory control. The legal rights of Iran and Oman in the strait are real—and restricted. The restrictions stem directly from the unique role Hormuz plays in the global economy. If the strait were an entirely local body of water, the international community could afford its rules to be more localized. However, when a significant portion of the world’s oil, gas, and petroleum derivatives must pass through it, the waterway cannot be governed by the national security logic of a littoral state.

So who does have the right to decide who passes through Hormuz? Iran and Oman exercise sovereignty over their respective territorial seas, but this sovereignty is legally subject to international passage rights. These rights were established to ensure that a chokepoint of global importance could not be transformed into a single government’s lever of political pressure or weapon of war. This much is true: According to well-established, long-observed, explicitly articulated maritime law, any civilian vessel from anywhere on Earth has the right to pass through Hormuz under any circumstance. The current conflict, however, has demonstrated that this legal regime is not nearly robust enough to withstand the combined pressure of bombing, mining, drones, blockades, seaside arms, and the assertion of raw power, whether that of would-be regional heavyweight or planetary hegemon.

In 2026, the Strait of Hormuz is an arena neither for the realization of absolute Iranian sovereignty, nor for the cost-free triumph of the American-endorsed (if still unratified) principle of “freedom of navigation.” What has become clear is that the legal architecture intended to create a balance between coastal states, global commerce, and the rights of passing ships is more fragile than had been widely imagined. With the strait, as with so many other flashpoints of the international order, the law still commands rhetorical respect, but it no longer rules the waves.

The post Pick Your Own Sea Law: Iran’s Creative Hormuz Claims appeared first on Tehran Bureau.