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There are few images more politically embarrassing for an oil state than a line of cars waiting for gasoline.

Russia has them. Iran has them. And the spectacle is particularly striking because these are not countries poor in energy. They are among the most resource-rich states on earth, countries that have built foreign policy and political power around their ability to extract and export hydrocarbons. Yet motorists are searching for functioning pumps, stations are running dry, and two regimes accustomed to discussing oil in millions of barrels are confronting the far more intimate question of whether an ordinary citizen can fill a tank.

Crude oil in the ground is not gasoline in a car. Between the two stands an entire civilization of infrastructure: refineries, pipelines, storage facilities, ports, tankers, spare parts, electrical grids, transportation networks, financing, foreign exchange and competent administration.

A country may possess extraordinary natural wealth and still be unable to convert that wealth efficiently into what its population needs.

Iran is becoming a particularly stark example.

The Islamic Republic controls a country with the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves and second-largest natural-gas reserves. Yet Iranian officials are now confronting a significant gap between domestic gasoline production and consumption. Estimates vary, but Iran is producing roughly 120 to 130 million liters of gasoline a day while consuming approximately 135 million or more.

The deficit did not suddenly appear because of the latest confrontation with the United States. War has made it more dangerous, but the underlying problem is older.

Iran had already returned to importing gasoline because domestic demand was exceeding the capacity of its refining system. Much of that infrastructure is aging. Years of sanctions have complicated modernization, investment and access to technology. Consumption has meanwhile continued to grow, encouraged by extremely cheap subsidized fuel, inefficient vehicles and an economic system in which gasoline has long been treated not simply as a commodity but as a political entitlement.

Now the margin for managing that imbalance is shrinking.

The interruption of normal trade, restrictions on shipping, falling oil exports and the difficulties of importing refined products have transformed a chronic structural weakness into a much more immediate problem.

The roots of today’s gasoline shortage reach back to the Iran-Iraq War, when major refineries like Abadan were heavily damaged, and never fully restored to their former capacity or technological standard. In the decades that followed, the regime consistently prioritized other projects—its nuclear program, missiles, regional interventions— while underinvesting in refinery modernization. The result is a stark irony: a nation sitting atop some of the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, struggling to produce enough gasoline for its own people.

Russia, which might under different circumstances have helped compensate for shortages, is wrestling with its own fuel crisis after repeated Ukrainian attacks on Russian refining capacity.

Two energy powers are therefore confronting variations of the same irony: immense petroleum wealth coupled with an increasingly fragile ability to deliver fuel where it is actually needed.

In Iran, the implications go far beyond the inconvenience of finding gasoline.

Abdolnaser Hemmati, the governor of Iran’s Central Bank, recently made an extraordinary admission on Iranian television. Discussing the country’s deteriorating economic position, he said that Iran was no longer exporting oil.

The statement should not necessarily be interpreted as a precise accounting figure. Independent tanker tracking indicates that some Iranian crude has continued to move, although volumes have fallen dramatically. Hemmati’s admission has its significance elsewhere. A senior official of the Islamic Republic was publicly acknowledging something the state has spent decades trying to prevent: the strangulation of the economic mechanism upon which the regime itself depends.

Iran does not merely sell oil. Oil revenue provides foreign exchange. Foreign exchange helps pay for imports. Imports compensate for weaknesses in domestic production. When exports collapse while gasoline production fails to meet domestic demand, the country becomes trapped in a vicious circle. It needs the income generated by one part of its petroleum economy partly to repair the failures of another.

For a normal government, this would constitute a serious economic problem.

For the Islamic Republic, gasoline is also a political memory.

Iran has been here before.

In 2007, the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad introduced gasoline rationing. The response was immediate. Petrol stations were attacked and set ablaze in Tehran. The anger was not difficult to understand. Ordinary Iranians living above one of the greatest petroleum reserves on earth were being told that their government could not provide enough gasoline.

The underlying problem then was remarkably similar to the one Iran confronts today: vast crude reserves combined with insufficient refining capacity and dependence on imported fuel.

Twelve years later, gasoline became explosive again.

In November 2019, the government abruptly raised fuel prices. The demonstrations that followed quickly ceased to be protests about gasoline alone. They became protests against the political order. The authorities shut down much of the country’s internet access and responded with extraordinary violence. Hundreds of Iranians were killed.

No Iranian government can now alter gasoline prices without remembering November 2019.

The current leadership plainly understands this.

President Masoud Pezeshkian has announced plans to raise the price of gasoline purchased in the highest pricing tier, while leaving heavily subsidized allocations in place for the moment. Economically, the logic is obvious. Iran cannot indefinitely sell fuel at prices radically disconnected from its production and replacement costs. Politically, however, gasoline prices occupy dangerous territory.

The subsidy itself has created many of the distortions now haunting the country.

Artificially cheap gasoline encourages consumption. It discourages efficiency. It supports an aging fleet of vehicles with notoriously high fuel use. Most perversely, it has made smuggling enormously profitable. When the price of gasoline inside Iran is dramatically lower than in neighboring countries, moving subsidized Iranian fuel across the border becomes an industry of its own.

The Iranian state therefore subsidizes fuel at immense cost, loses part of that fuel to illegal export, struggles to produce enough gasoline to satisfy domestic consumption, and must sometimes import gasoline into a country sitting on some of the largest oil and gas deposits on the planet.

It would be difficult to design a more concise illustration of economic dysfunction.

Sanctions are part of this story and should not be treated as an incidental detail. They have restricted investment, financing, technology transfers, infrastructure development and access to global markets. The present military conflict has intensified those pressures enormously.

But sanctions alone cannot explain a problem that has recurred across different phases of the Islamic Republic’s history.

Iran’s gasoline predicament is also the cumulative product of political choices: decades of economic isolation, corruption, distorted subsidies, underinvestment, institutional incompetence, prioritization of ideological and regional projects, and the deterioration of an economy that should, given the country’s natural endowments and educated population, be vastly more productive than it is.

That distinction matters because there is always a temptation outside Iran to interpret shortages as proof that external pressure is “working.”

Working toward what?

Economic pressure does not descend neatly upon governments while sparing populations. It travels through societies. A gasoline shortage means that a taxi driver spends part of his working day searching for fuel. A delivery business loses hours. Transportation costs rise. Food becomes more expensive. Families already living under severe inflation lose another portion of their purchasing power. People who had no role in deciding the policies that produced international confrontation absorb the consequences of those policies from both directions.

The Islamic Republic possesses mechanisms for protecting itself that ordinary Iranians do not.

Security institutions will receive fuel. Politically indispensable agencies will receive fuel. Resources can be diverted toward the organizations upon which the regime depends. A state accustomed to rationing scarcity can determine who receives what remains.

The man waiting at the petrol station cannot.

This is why fuel shortages should not automatically be mistaken for imminent regime collapse. Authoritarian governments have demonstrated repeatedly that they can survive extraordinary levels of economic dysfunction, particularly when they are willing to transfer the cost of that dysfunction to their populations and suppress those who object.

Yet survival and stability are not the same thing.

There is something unusually dangerous about shortages that can be seen and experienced directly.

A government can dispute inflation statistics. It can manipulate exchange rates. It can claim that oil exports are higher than foreign analysts suggest. It can insist that sanctions have failed, that production targets have been met, that another economic plan is succeeding and that tomorrow will be better.

An empty gasoline pump is less accommodating.

A driver does not need an economist to explain a closed petrol station. He does not need an opposition television network to tell him that the queue in front of him exists. He does not require foreign propaganda to calculate how many hours of his day have disappeared while he searches for fuel.

Material failure has a language of its own.

That may ultimately be the most important aspect of what is now happening in Iran.

For nearly half a century, the Khomeinist regime has presented resistance as a governing philosophy. Economic pain could be described as sacrifice, isolation as independence, sanctions as proof of revolutionary virtue and deteriorating living standards as the price of refusing submission to foreign powers.

But political rhetoric encounters limits when ideological abstraction enters everyday life.

Iran is not a poor country in the conventional meaning of the word. It possesses energy, minerals, industry, agriculture, coastlines, strategic geography, an ancient commercial culture and a remarkably educated population. Its predicament has never been a simple absence of resources.

The tragedy lies precisely in the abundance.

A government sitting atop such wealth must explain why scarcity has become ordinary.

Why should one of the great oil-producing civilizations of the world worry about gasoline? Why should an Iranian motorist stand in line for fuel? Why should a country that once possessed the resources, expertise and international relationships necessary to imagine itself among the world’s major industrial powers repeatedly find itself improvising around shortages?

The answer cannot forever be reduced to foreigners.

Foreign pressure is real. War is real. Sanctions are real. Damage to infrastructure is real.

So too are forty-seven years of decisions made in Tehran.

Russia’s current experience provides an illuminating comparison. Ukrainian strikes have damaged refineries and reduced gasoline production even though Russia possesses enormous crude resources. It is a reminder that energy power depends not merely upon what lies beneath the soil but upon the functioning systems that turn natural resources into usable prosperity.

For Iran, however, the lesson is harsher because the fragility preceded the current emergency.

The gasoline queues are therefore more than another wartime inconvenience. They expose the distance between resource wealth and national wealth, between possessing oil and possessing a functioning petroleum economy, between controlling a country and governing it successfully.

The Islamic Republic has spent decades describing Iran as a great power under siege.

The far more uncomfortable question is what Iran might have become had so much of its wealth, talent and national energy not been consumed by the siege mentality itself.

A country with some of the greatest petroleum reserves on earth should not force its citizens to live with gasoline scarcity.

Yet once again, Iranians are being asked to adapt.

And once again, the people paying the price are standing in line.

This article is copyright © Iran So Far Away. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this content without explicit written permission is strictly prohibited and subject to legal action under applicable copyright laws.

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There is something almost brazen about the Islamic Republic’s latest effort to persuade expatriate Iranians to return home, not because the government has never attempted such a reconciliation before, but because it has attempted versions of it repeatedly, using much the same emotional inducements and reassuring language while leaving untouched the institutions that made exile dangerous in the first place.

This time the campaign is being presented through artists, “intellectuals” and other prominent Iranians abroad. Culture Minister Seyyed Abbas Salehi has said that the government has assembled a list of more than one hundred cultural and intellectual figures whose return it hopes to facilitate, while assuring prospective returnees that they need not perform for the state, publicly demonstrate gratitude, or even remain permanently in Iran. The suggestion is almost aggressively ordinary: visit your country, see your family, spend some time at home, and then leave again if you wish.

A famous musician who spent two decades outside the country has flown back to Tehran and, at least for the moment, appears to have done exactly what regime leaders now claim others can do. Mohsen Namjoo’s return after roughly twenty years abroad has given that message precisely the kind of visibility Tehran could have hoped for. Whatever Namjoo’s private calculations may have been, the political usefulness of his arrival is obvious. For people who have spent years wondering whether a visit to Iran might end with interrogation, confiscation of a passport, prosecution or an exit ban, such an example can be considerably more persuasive than any government communiqué.

What Tehran would prefer people not to remember is that the sales pitch itself is old.

The Khomeinist regime has repeatedly turned to the Iranian diaspora when it has needed capital, political cover, or a more respectable image abroad.

The first major iteration came under Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s “presidency” in the early 1990s, when the regime openly appealed to Iranians abroad, promised safety and encouraged the return of people whose capital, expertise and professional skills were badly needed after the devastation of the Iran-Iraq war. In March 1992, Rafsanjani went so far as to reassure expatriates that even those who had left the country illegally need not fear returning. After more than a decade of revolutionary purges, confiscations, executions, war and mass flight, the regime had discovered that many of the people it had expelled, frightened away or dispossessed possessed precisely the resources required to rebuild the country.

The apparent generosity did not correspond to any meaningful transformation of the state. The security apparatus remained intact, confiscated property continued to be entangled in opaque and politically dependent negotiations, and the distinction between an expatriate whom Tehran wished to entice home and an opponent whom it still regarded as an enemy remained entirely at the regime’s discretion. During the same period in which Rafsanjani was reassuring Iranians abroad that they could safely return, dissidents outside the country remained vulnerable to surveillance, intimidation and assassination. The September 1992 Mykonos murders in Berlin supplied the most brutal illustration of the contradiction: the Islamic Republic could invite one Iranian home while arranging for another to be eliminated abroad, because the policy was never one of universal reconciliation but of selective usefulness.

Five years later, the maneuver returned under Mohammad Khatami, although its presentation had become far more sophisticated. Khatami’s election in 1997 was greeted by much of the Western political and journalistic establishment as evidence that the Islamic Republic might finally be evolving into a more moderate political order, while his language of reform, civil society and a “dialogue among civilizations”- a project originated in the 1970s under the Shah - offered foreign governments and journalists an attractive vocabulary through which almost every gesture of apparent openness could be interpreted. Iranians abroad were once again encouraged to visit and return, embassies were instructed to facilitate that process, and Tehran cultivated the image of a revolutionary state gradually reconciling itself with the millions of citizens who had built lives elsewhere.

It was during this period that Christiane Amanpour’s relationship with Iran became particularly instructive. Her family had left after the revolution, and property belonging to them had fallen under revolutionary control; years later, during precisely the period in which Tehran was courting expatriates and promoting the idea of a more open Iran, that property was recovered. Amanpour subsequently returned with CNN cameras and made her personal journey back into Iran part of Revolutionary Journey, embedding her rediscovery of the country within the larger story of Khatami, reform and an Islamic Republic supposedly struggling toward political liberalization.

The significance of that episode does not depend upon proving some secret bargain between Amanpour and the Iranian state, because what occurred in plain sight was consequential enough. One of the most recognizable television correspondents in the world returned to the country from which her family had fled, entered a family home that had once been taken over after the revolution, and presented Western audiences with a deeply personal encounter with an Iran supposedly moving toward reform. For a regime whose international rehabilitation depended upon persuading outsiders that the Islamic Republic could somehow be distinguished from the repression embedded in its own institutions, the resulting optics were enormously valuable.

Nothing fundamental in the coercive architecture of the state, however, had disappeared merely because foreign cameras found reformist newspapers, hopeful students, fashionable private parties or young Iranians desperate for greater freedom. The Supreme Leader remained beyond democratic accountability, while the Revolutionary Guards, intelligence services and judiciary retained the power to determine the boundaries of political life and punish those who crossed them. Khatami’s invitation to the diaspora therefore existed alongside repression rather than replacing it, which helps explain why Iranians familiar with the earlier Rafsanjani campaign were considerably less susceptible than many Western observers to the claim that a few gestures of accommodation heralded a transformed state.

The current campaign deserves to be examined against precisely that history, because what Tehran is doing now may involve considerably more than repairing its image or exploiting the homesickness of artists abroad. There is also a longer political calculation behind the selective willingness to rehabilitate figures whose opposition to the Islamic Republic has frequently coexisted with pronounced hostility toward the Pahlavis, particularly at a moment when the regime has every reason to contemplate not merely how to survive the present crisis but how to influence whatever comes after it.

A government that has ruled through coercion for nearly half a century must understand that its loss of power would endanger more than ministries and official titles. Senior figures within the Islamic Republic have little reason to expect that a population emerging from decades of repression would automatically offer them immunity from prosecution, investigation, confiscation or public reckoning. A nominally “post-Islamic Republic” government willing to accommodate important parts of the old establishment could therefore provide something infinitely more valuable than rhetorical reform: continuity disguised as rupture, protection for political and economic networks accumulated under clerical rule, and a successor class capable of presenting itself to foreign governments as an acceptable alternative to both the existing regime and the political opposition Tehran fears most.

Seen in that light, the return of selected expatriate political and cultural personalities acquires a significance extending well beyond personal reconciliation. Figures who can be presented as opponents of the Islamic Republic while remaining equally or more hostile to the Pahlavis would occupy an unusually useful position in any managed transition, particularly if they could establish themselves inside Iran before a moment of political rupture and later claim the legitimacy of physical presence. They could be offered to foreign governments and domestic constituencies as evidence that a “third way” had emerged from within Iranian society, even if that third way preserved far more of the old order than its new language suggested.

According to Donyayeh Eghtesad, a privately owned, regime-permitted site reported the names now circulating around the current return initiative make that possibility difficult to dismiss. Among them are figures such as Abdolkarim Soroush, the religious reform theorist who has spent many years in the United States; Mohsen Kadivar, the reformist cleric and theologian who has likewise lived and taught in the United States; Masoud Behnoud, the London-based BBC Persian commentator and journalist; and Ataollah Mohajerani, the former Islamic Republic culture minister who left Iran and has lived in the United Kingdom for years, have very different careers and relationships with the regime, but all emerged from the political and quasi-intellectual milieu formed around the post-1979 order. Other names mentioned in the article are: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Vali Nasr, Trita Parsi, Akbar Ganji, Hamid Dabashi, Negar Mortazavi, Hossein Derakhshan and Ali Afshari.

The Culture Ministry’s own language makes the selectivity unusually visible. Salehi has spoken approvingly of Soroush, Kadivar and Mohajerani despite acknowledging their differences with the regime, emphasizing instead that they “stood by Iran” during the recent war. The operative judgment, then, is not that political disagreement has suddenly ceased to matter, but that Tehran distinguishes between forms of opposition it considers tolerable and those it continues to regard as existentially dangerous. What is being opened is not the country in any universal sense, but a door through which selected people may be permitted to pass.

Mohsen Namjoo’s return provides the most immediate example of how opaque that process can be. Tickets had already been sold for forthcoming concerts abroad while his return to Iran was under way, and the public did not learn of his decision until he was either already traveling to Tehran or had arrived there.

Whatever explanation may ultimately be offered for the cancelled performances, the sequence establishes that this was not a tentative public exploration of whether the regime might permit him to go back; the decision had advanced far enough for the journey to be undertaken while audiences were still purchasing tickets to performances he knew he would not give.

His previous legal jeopardy in Iran makes the circumstances more striking. Namjoo’s return also follows years of controversy surrounding his place in Iran’s #MeToo reckoning. Beginning in 2020, several women publicly accused him of sexual harassment and assault, allegations he denied; a later leaked audio recording in which he mocked the #MeToo movement and questioned the meaning of sexual consent further intensified the backlash. Against that background, his decision to return carries an additional layer of controversy beyond his relationship with the regime itself.

Namjoo had also faced a five-year sentence connected to charges of insulting religious sanctities, yet he was evidently sufficiently certain of his ability to return to board a flight after approximately two decades abroad. What assurances, accommodations or understandings preceded that journey have not been publicly disclosed, nor has the status of the old case been made transparent. The opacity is characteristic of the system itself, because the regime can offer individualized accommodations while withholding the rules governing them, thereby ensuring that one person’s safe return establishes no enforceable right for anyone else.

There is, however, a calculation that some of those now contemplating a return may themselves be badly misreading. Whatever assurances they believe they have obtained from Tehran, and whatever political usefulness they imagine might accompany their reentry into Iran, they will not be arriving in a politically blank country whose population has forgotten the past forty-seven years. They will be entering a society that has lived through ideological repression, economic degradation, executions, imprisonment, compulsory social engineering and repeated efforts by the Khomeinist regime to manufacture its own version of acceptable dissent; a society in which the distinction between authentic opposition and opposition that becomes useful to the regime at the precise moment it needs political cover is hardly unfamiliar.

Any public figure who now allows himself to be repositioned inside Iran as a regime-approved “opponent,” particularly while participating in the delegitimization of the political forces Tehran most fears, risks placing himself squarely in the crosshairs of Iranian public judgment. The regime may regard such individuals as useful interlocutors, transitional personalities or convenient alternatives, but the Iranian public is under no obligation to accept that characterization. What Tehran presents as reconciliation may look to many Iranians like accommodation, while what the returnee describes as realism or political pragmatism may be interpreted as an attempt to reserve a seat for himself in whatever arrangement follows the present order.

That danger becomes considerably more acute if Iranians conclude that political accommodation with the Islamic Republic has become, formally or informally, a credential for readmission. Anyone perceived to have calculated that tempering his criticism of the regime, accepting the boundaries of opposition it tolerates, or presenting himself as a regime-compatible alternative would secure safe passage home may discover that the bargain has exacted a far greater price than anticipated. Tehran can provide entry, access, and perhaps even protection, but it cannot manufacture historical legitimacy for people whom the public comes to believe placed personal ambition, security, or political relevance above the interests of the country.

The most serious miscalculation would be to imagine that proximity to a weakening regime constitutes political foresight. If any of these figures believes he can return with the blessing of the present establishment, survive a period of transition and subsequently emerge as a respectable representative of a post-Islamic Republic Iran, he may discover that the public has already rendered a much harsher verdict. The very maneuver intended to preserve a reputation could instead become the event that permanently defines it, fixing a name in Iranian political memory not as that of a courageous opponent who came home but as that of someone who recognized the regime’s vulnerability and nevertheless chose to make himself useful to it while the country was struggling to rid itself of the system he had agreed to accommodate.

The regime cannot protect such people from that judgment. It may be capable of forgiving selected expatriates, reopening doors, settling old cases, restoring privileges or providing the physical security necessary for their return, but it has no comparable authority over the historical memory of the Iranian people. If a sufficient portion of the public comes to regard these returns as part of an attempt to manufacture a compliant successor class, the calculation intended to secure these figures a future may instead attach their names permanently to one of the darkest political accusations available in the Iranian historical imagination: that, when the fate of the country itself was at stake, they chose accommodation with the system over fidelity to the nation.

This possibility also clarifies why the regime’s current effort should be understood as a process of sorting rather than reconciliation. Tehran appears to be distinguishing among expatriates according to whether their criticism can be tolerated, absorbed or politically repurposed, while continuing to regard other opponents as irreconcilable enemies. Anti-Pahlavi credentials may be especially valuable within such a calculation because they allow the regime to rehabilitate personalities who can still be marketed as “opposition” while helping obstruct the political alternative that poses the greatest threat to those hoping to preserve some portion of the existing order.

For Iranians who remember the earlier versions, the tactic itself is painfully familiar; what remains to be exposed is whether the people now accepting Tehran’s invitation understand that, in attempting to secure their own place in Iran’s future, they may instead be determining how Iran remembers them.

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Two U.S. Air Force KC-135 aerial refueling aircraft have left Bulgaria’s Bezmer Air Base amid mounting concern over threats from the Islamic Republic of Iran against American military assets in southeastern Europe.

Bulgarian Defense Minister Dimitar Stoyanov

Bulgarian Defense Minister Dimitar Stoyanov announced Saturday that the aircraft departed the country on Friday for an undisclosed destination. The departure came only days after reports that officials in Tehran had examined the possibility of striking U.S. military targets in Bulgaria and Cyprus should hostilities between Washington and the Islamic Republic intensify again.

The timing has inevitably drawn attention, although Bulgarian officials have not said that the American aircraft were removed because of Tehran’s threats. Stoyanov said Sofia had been working in close coordination with Washington and that the government’s decisions were based on intelligence available to it. Bulgarian defense authorities have also maintained that they possess no intelligence indicating an imminent or direct threat to Bulgarian national security.

Nevertheless, Sofia’s actions before the tankers departed suggest that the threat was being taken seriously.

Following publication of the reports, Bulgarian authorities substantially increased security around Bezmer. Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev said the government had implemented precautions designed for a level of danger considerably higher than that indicated by Bulgaria’s own security services. NATO simultaneously declared its readiness to respond to threats against allied territory.

The episode therefore raises a larger question than the fate of two American aircraft: how far is the Islamic Republic prepared to extend its confrontation with the United States into Europe?

Bulgaria enters Tehran’s line of fire

Bulgaria’s parliament approved the temporary deployment of as many as eight U.S. KC-135 Stratotankers and up to 250 American military personnel at Bezmer in July. The aircraft are capable of refueling combat aircraft in flight, extending the range and duration of fighter and bomber operations.

Sofia said the deployment was connected with training and allied operations and rejected Tehran’s accusation that Bulgaria had become complicit in military action against the Islamic Republic.

Tehran nevertheless reacted sharply.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi urged Bulgaria to reconsider allowing U.S. aircraft to use Bezmer and warned his Bulgarian counterpart that countries participating in military operations against the Islamic Republic would have to accept responsibility for the consequences.

That warning acquired considerably greater significance this week.

The Financial Times, citing two sources inside the Islamic Republic, reported that Iranian military officials had assessed options for attacking American assets beyond the Middle East if President Donald Trump resumed or expanded military operations against Tehran. Bulgaria was specifically identified, as was Cyprus. The report said Tehran was considering ways of making the cost of renewed conflict felt outside the immediate Persian Gulf theater.

That moves the issue beyond rhetorical condemnation of countries hosting American forces. It suggests that military facilities on European soil are being incorporated into the Islamic Republic’s retaliatory calculations.

NATO responds

For Bulgaria, that distinction is critical.

Bulgaria is not simply another country hosting American aircraft. It is a member of NATO.

On August 20, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev spoke with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte about the reported Iranian threat. According to the Bulgarian government, Rutte reaffirmed the alliance’s readiness to use its defensive capabilities in the region to neutralize threats against NATO members.

The message was unmistakable: an attack on Bulgaria would not be treated merely as a bilateral confrontation between Sofia and Tehran. NATO reiterated that an attack against a member state would be treated as an attack against the alliance, with the consequences provided for under the North Atlantic Treaty.

Greece has also reportedly considered making a Patriot air-defense system available to help protect Bulgaria if Sofia requests assistance. Greek defense planners have simultaneously examined additional measures to protect military installations elsewhere in southeastern Europe.

These are extraordinary precautions against a government geographically separated from Bulgaria by more than a thousand miles.

But Bulgaria is not an isolated case.

Cyprus has already experienced the danger

Cyprus provides perhaps the clearest warning that threats against European-based military facilities cannot simply be dismissed as rhetoric.

In March, a drone struck the runway at Britain’s RAF Akrotiri base on the island of Cyprus. The attack caused limited damage and no casualties, but European officials said an Iranian-made Shahed drone had reached the base after flying at low altitude, most likely after being launched by the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon. Two other drones were intercepted.

Britain, France and Greece subsequently deployed additional air-defense capabilities to Cyprus.

The Akrotiri incident illustrates one of the central difficulties in assessing the Islamic Republic’s threat to Europe. Tehran does not have to launch every attack directly from Iranian territory. Its longstanding use of proxies, allied militias, intelligence operatives and criminal intermediaries provides other means of extending violence beyond Iran’s borders.

For European governments, therefore, the relevant danger is not limited to the range of an Iranian ballistic missile.

Iranian missiles have already tested NATO territory

Turkey, another NATO member, has experienced a still more direct manifestation of the expanding conflict.

On March 4, NATO air defenses destroyed an Iranian ballistic missile approaching Turkish airspace. Five days later, Turkish authorities said NATO defenses had intercepted a second Iranian ballistic missile that had entered Turkish airspace. Ankara warned that it would respond to future violations.

Those incidents matter when assessing the current debate over Bulgaria.

The possibility of the Islamic Republic threatening NATO territory is no longer entirely theoretical. Iranian weapons have already forced NATO air defenses into action.

A much wider Iranian threat network in Europe

There is another dimension that should not be lost amid discussion of missiles, drones and military bases.

European governments have been warning for years that the Islamic Republic conducts covert operations on European soil against Iranian dissidents, journalists, Jewish and Israeli targets and others regarded by Tehran as enemies.

On June 10, 2026, 24 governments, including Bulgaria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Spain and numerous other European states, issued an unusually direct joint condemnation of the Islamic Republic.

They accused the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence Organization, the Quds Force and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security of what they described as “lethal plotting and other malign actions” in Europe, North America and Australia.

The governments also condemned a campaign of attacks across Europe aimed at Jewish communities, Iranian journalists and U.S. interests and emphasized the Islamic Republic’s longstanding relationship with international and local criminal organizations used as intermediaries.

The warning was explicit: attempts to kill, kidnap, intimidate or attack people on foreign soil constituted violations of national sovereignty, and the participating governments pledged further measures to stop them.

Britain’s experience illustrates the scale of the problem. MI5 has reported responding to more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots involving people in the United Kingdom since 2022, while British authorities say the Islamic Republic has repeatedly relied upon criminals and third-party operatives to carry out surveillance and violent operations.

The threat to Europe, in other words, did not begin with Bezmer.

What has changed is its increasingly overt military dimension.

Tehran continues its threatening posture

The departure of the KC-135s also comes as senior officials of the Islamic Republic continue issuing increasingly aggressive warnings despite efforts by some members of the government to revive diplomacy.

Iranian military leaders have promised “devastating” responses to further U.S. pressure. State television has broadcast images of senior commanders touring what it described as an underground ballistic-missile production facility, while officials have insisted that Iran’s missile and weapons industries remain capable of producing larger quantities of increasingly sophisticated equipment despite months of warfare and sanctions.

At the same time, President Masoud Pezeshkian has called for an end to the war, exposing once again the tension between the Islamic Republic’s diplomatic messaging and the posture of its military-security establishment.

Washington, meanwhile, is shifting toward intensified economic pressure. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has promised what he described as the toughest sanctions yet imposed on the Islamic Republic, while the Trump administration has warned countries and companies against providing Tehran with economic lifelines.

The Islamic Republic has responded by portraying those measures as unlawful “economic warfare” while simultaneously threatening military retaliation and maintaining pressure on commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Europe can no longer regard the Islamic Republic as a distant security problem

The Bulgarian episode should therefore not be viewed in isolation.

A British military installation in Cyprus has already been struck by an Iran-linked drone. Iranian ballistic missiles have entered the defensive calculations of NATO over Turkey. European intelligence services say Iranian state agencies have organized or supported lethal plots inside their countries. Twenty-four governments have publicly accused Tehran’s security apparatus of threatening people on their soil. And now Iranian officials are reported to have examined American military installations in Bulgaria and Cyprus as potential targets in a renewed conflict.

The distinction between the Middle Eastern and European theaters is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

For decades, European policy toward the Islamic Republic often treated Tehran primarily as a problem of nuclear diplomacy, sanctions, regional instability and human rights inside Iran. The evidence accumulated across Europe now points to something broader: a regime willing to project coercion beyond its borders through missiles, drones, intelligence services, proxies and criminal networks.

Bulgaria says it faces no immediate direct threat, and that qualification matters. There is no evidence at present that an Iranian strike on Bezmer is imminent, nor is there evidence that the two U.S. tankers left Bulgaria because Sofia capitulated to Tehran’s warning.

But the measures taken by Bulgaria, Greece and NATO demonstrate that the possibility itself can no longer be dismissed.

The significance of Bezmer is therefore larger than two departing aircraft.

The Islamic Republic has spent years attempting to make its opponents abroad understand that geographic distance does not necessarily provide immunity from its reach.

Increasingly, Europe appears to be taking that message seriously.

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A new bill before the Islamic Majles (Parliament) proposes to place vast areas of an ordinary Iranian’s civic, professional and cultural life under the control and supervision of the Regime’s security apparatus.

Lawmakers, who have continued to hold parliamentary sessions virtually in the aftermath of the 39-day war, voted on August 16 to approve the general framework of a bill entitled “Plan for Countering Foreign Influence.”

The proposed legislation contains 33 articles and, if ultimately approved by parliament and the Guardian Council, would give extraordinary powers to the Regime’s intelligence and security institutions, particularly the Ministry of Intelligence and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence Organization. It would extend their reach to matters far beyond conduct ordinarily associated with espionage.

As Human Rights Activists News Agency describes it, “communication with some countries would require a permit and a range of communications, contracts, financial transactions, media activities, and communications of natural and legal persons with others outside (Iran) would have to be registered in a system supervised by security institutions. The bill also raises concerns about the expansion of security interference in citizens’ privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of communication, and professional activity by criminalizing concepts such as “perceptual influence” and “destructive advice directed from outside” and imposing special surveillance on journalists, researchers, elites, and economic activists.

For Regime critics, this is precisely what makes the legislation so frightening.

The bill is currently receiving pushback from within and without Iran. Nour News, an outlet close to the Supreme National Security Council, has raised worries that it would prove disruptive in execution and only further inflame public anger: “Its title suggests protection and security, but its content and dimensions are so complex, vague, and sometimes surprising that the reader cannot help but ask: Who was the author of this plan and what was his intention? Did national security concerns really lead to the drafting of this plan, or did the designers want to damage the reputation of the parliament with this dramatic action and generate anger and distrust in social groups?”

Reformist-adjacent news outlet IranWire quoted Iranian lawyer Mohammad Olyaeifard as saying the bill essentially codifies repression: “This is oppression that they are turning into law,” he said.

Although parliament has so far approved only the bill’s general framework rather than its individual provisions, the draft under consideration offers a troubling indication of how broadly the concept of “foreign influence” could ultimately be defined.

What does “foreign influence” mean?

Article 1 of the draft states that the activities and communications of both natural and legal persons with foreign persons or agents must take place within the framework established by the law.

It prohibits activities or contacts deemed as undermining Iran’s independence, national unity, Islamic principles, national sovereignty or “Iranian-Islamic culture,” or facilitating foreign influence over the political, economic, social or cultural interests of the Islamic Republic.

Aside from the fact that the above starkly conflicts with international human rights standards, the vagueness of those terms above increases the scope of potential repression.

Concepts such as weakening Iranian-Islamic culture – a loaded concept in and of itself - damaging national interests or facilitating influence are not defined with the precision normally required of criminal law. In several areas, the bill instead leaves definitions and classifications to the Ministry of Intelligence and the IRGC Intelligence Organization, subject to approval by the Supreme National Security Council, all organizations without any popular oversight.

The draft also divides foreign governments into three categories. The first consists of “hostile governments.” The second includes states considered to have planned or carried out actions intended to harm or weaken the Islamic Republic’s national interests. The third encompasses states that fall into neither category. The intelligence agencies themselves would help determine which countries belong on which list.

This delegation of authority is one of the principal objections raised by legal experts, who argue that parliament is effectively allowing security agencies not simply to enforce the law but to help define it.

From academic research to legal advice

Article 2 illustrates just how extensive the proposed system could become.

Numerous forms of international interaction that are presently legal would have to be recorded through an online government system to be established by the Ministry of Communications.

These include transfers of money, goods and services; financial assistance; legal services and legal consultation; writing or publishing books, magazines and articles; providing reports, statistics or information; obtaining scholarships, research grants and academic fellowships; and other forms of scientific or university cooperation.

Media activity is also included, including interviews, consultation with media organizations and the provision of information or analysis.

The legislation reaches into scientific research as well, covering the exchange of medical, genetic, veterinary, soil, mineral and agricultural samples.

Cultural activity receives similarly broad treatment. Participation in in-person or online workshops, educational courses, artistic residencies, academic conferences and festivals, as well as the production or presentation of documentaries, theater, music and visual art, could all become subject to reporting or regulatory requirements.

Olyaeifard raised one of the most striking consequences: ordinary efforts to study or travel abroad could potentially become entangled in the new system.

“A person simply trying to obtain a visa could face problems if it is not reported,” he says. “That visa might be for medical treatment, education, visiting family or tourism.”

Applications to foreign universities, communication with professors abroad, academic funding, embassy appointments, recommendation letters, submitting research to international journals or conferences and receiving foreign qualifications could likewise become subject to registration requirements.

Artists and filmmakers in the crosshairs

The film and cultural sectors have expressed particular alarm.

Article 27 states that cultural or online activity — including producing or directing films, television series, documentaries, theater, music or books — may lead to six months to five years of deprivation of social rights if authorities determine that the work was conducted under the support, supervision, guidance or training of a foreign agent.

Additional penalties are contemplated when authorities conclude that a work questions religious rules, presents what they consider a false or improper image of “Iranian society” or the achievements of the Islamic Revolution, opposes the political system, promotes “anti-Islamic culture,” or was produced with the intention of damaging the country’s independence or security.

Those involved could face permanent restrictions on their social or professional rights as well as financial penalties tied to production costs.

Iran’s House of Cinema has warned that the legislation relies on vague concepts that can easily be used against critical or socially realistic art.

At the center of its concern is the familiar accusation of “blackening” Iran’s image — a phrase frequently used against filmmakers, writers and journalists whose work depicts poverty, repression, discrimination or other social problems.

The organization argues that there is no precise legal definition of what constitutes presenting a “dark image” of the country. As a result, determining whether a film is legitimate criticism or a criminal act could be left largely to the discretion of security and regulatory bodies.

Experience, it warned, demonstrates how easily the term can be extended to encompass almost any critical representation of Iranian society.

A growing architecture of criminalization

The bill has not emerged in isolation. Olyaeifard sees it as part of a broader legislative pattern in which the Islamic Regime has increasingly attempted to codify coercive practices inside formal statutory frameworks; he mentioned the controversial Hijab and Chastity Law as well as legislation increasing punishments for alleged espionage and cooperation with hostile states.

The latter followed an earlier period of conflict with the U.S. and Israel and expanded the government’s legal powers against people accused of collaboration with foreign governments. Human-rights lawyers have criticized the expansive definitions contained in such legislation and the severe sentences that can follow, including lengthy imprisonment and, in some cases, execution.

What distinguishes the new influence bill, however, is the extent to which it moves beyond conventional national-security offenses.

“This has nothing to do with the security of the country or genuine infiltration,” Olyaeifard argues.

Terms such as damaging public confidence or presenting a negative image of the country, he says, are inherently open to interpretation.

From the content of speech to the act of speaking

For lawyers who have worked inside Iran, the proposal also represents the closing of legal spaces that citizens previously used to defend themselves.

Olyaeifard recalled being questioned by Tehran’s prosecutor about interviews he had given to foreign media; his response at the time was straightforward: there was no law prohibiting the interview itself. The prosecutor acknowledged that point, he said, while insisting that the authorities were concerned about what he had said.

Under the new approach, Olyaeifard argues, the distinction would disappear: “Once, they focused on what you said in the interview. Now the interview itself is being called into question.”

That change is significant. The remaining gaps citizens once relied upon — the absence of an explicit prohibition, the ability to point to constitutional protections or the requirement that prosecutors identify a recognizable offense — could progressively be eliminated.

“Every time we find a legal route to protect our civil rights,” he says, “they close that route.”

‘Universal presumption of criminality’

Hossein Raeesi, an Iranian lawyer and professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, has described the proposal in even broader terms: “the universal presumption of criminality.”

He argues that the bill could criminalize interviews or information-sharing with certain foreign-funded media organizations, unauthorized contact with embassies or non-Iranian organizations, and forms of scientific cooperation not approved by the Ministry of Intelligence or IRGC Intelligence Organization.

According to his analysis of the draft, some such offenses could carry prison terms ranging from six months to two years.

Civil-society organizations, associations and political groups receiving foreign funding or entering into contracts with foreign governmental or nongovernmental institutions could face prison sentences for those involved and potentially dissolution of the organization itself.

Cultural workers may face even harsher professional consequences. Filmmakers, musicians, writers and theater practitioners accused of promoting “anti-Islamic culture” or portraying the country negatively could face permanent exclusion from their professions.

The draft also contemplates severe penalties for organizers of certain educational courses or workshops deemed incompatible with officially defined Iranian cultural values.

A government inside private life

For Olyaeifard, the ultimate significance of the bill lies in the model of government it creates: “It moves Iran toward systems in which your entire private life must be visible to the state,”

A conversation about cinema, a legal critique, an academic exchange or a discussion about sports could potentially be reframed as a national-security issue depending on who participated, where the information went, and how Regime authorities interpreted it.

A law is supposed to tell citizens clearly what conduct is prohibited. It should not leave the meaning of an offense to the institutions responsible for investigating and prosecuting it.

The Islamic Regime’s constitution contains provisions concerning expression, assembly, economic activity and other civil freedoms. Although these provisions have long been only platitudes under a system where Islamic doctrine overrides all else, Olyaeifard argued that legislation cannot simply erase those protections by transferring sweeping interpretive authority to intelligence organizations.

A measure presented as protection against espionage and foreign infiltration is actually proposing something far broader: a legal architecture in which contact with the outside world becomes presumptively suspicious, cultural criticism becomes a security matter and citizens must account to the state for activities once considered part of ordinary life. Some officials evidently hope they could isolate Iranians from the rest of the world, much as residents of North Korea are.

The central question raised by this bill is therefore not how the Khomeiniist regime should combat espionage; it is whether the rulers intend to redefine citizenship itself — transforming the Iranian citizen from a person possessing nominal rights into a person perpetually forced to prove that ordinary life is not a crime.

Some observers have noted comparisons between this plan and China’s Social Credit System. This connection is not arbitrary because, just as China and the Khomeiniist Regime have close economic relations, Tehran has also learned from Beijing how to improve its infrastructure of mass surveillance. In a society where Iranians have often accused their overlords of being “East-toxified,” it is thus not surprising that the Regime would copy its allies as it continues to perfect methods of making Iran a model totalitarian system.

This article is copyright © Iran So Far Away. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this content without explicit written permission is strictly prohibited and subject to legal action under applicable copyright laws.

By Banafsheh Zand & Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour

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August 19th, 2026 marks the 48th anniversary of the Cinema Rex massacre in Abadan, Iran, the first mass Islamist terror attack. Hundreds of people who had gathered to watch a film were burned alive after Khomeiniist “revolutionaries” set the theater ablaze. The attack—now known to have been overseen by the late Ali Khamenei himself—marked the beginning of a campaign of terror the Islamic Regime would later export around the world.

After 9/11, Cinema Rex remains the second deadliest terrorist incident in history. The exact number of deaths remains unclear. According to an American diplomatic commentary on Iranian press reports of the day, “firemen found 377 bodies inside and death toll has unofficially risen to 430. It will probably rise still higher, since estimates of the theatre audience range from 600 to 700, and only 20 to 40 people are thought to have escaped without injury.”

August 1978 – The Setting

Iran in 1978 was a rapidly developing society, economically and socially. Fifteen years of the White Revolution had led to the Shah’s announcement in January of the Great Civilization program, which envisioned Iran reaching the economic and living standards of Western Europe within 12 years.

Opposition to the Shah came from two very different camps, both determined to bring down the monarchy. Violent Marxist-Leninist guerrillas, supported by the Communist bloc, opposed capitalism and Iran’s alliance with the United States. Reactionary Islamists remained angered by the land reform program, which had deprived them of hereditary feudal wealth, and by the progress of women’s liberation and a modern culture that included alcohol, dancing, movies, and greater freedom in personal relations. The threat posed by these extremists had made Iran a more authoritarian society than Western-educated liberal intellectuals would have preferred. At the same time, since the 1973 rise in oil prices, Western countries had begun to regard Iran as a potentially formidable competitor in the global market.

A series of demonstrations sparked by the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had begun in January. These were not simply peaceful protests. Mobs, most often paid by clerics, attacked what they considered “un-Islamic” symbols: bars, liquor stores, banks, supermarkets, cinemas, and theatres were attacked and burned. Unveiled women were beaten, and state-run women’s social centers were raided. Marxists joined the Islamists and acted as provocateurs within the mobs.

Despite the unrest, the police and army managed to keep it somewhat contained, and life continued largely as normal into the summer. On August 5^th, Iran’s Constitution Day, the Shah promised new elections open to all political parties within a year. For the revolutionaries, this created a dilemma. An open political campaign was not what the Islamists and Marxist-Leninists wanted. If a truly revolutionary mood were to be created, something drastic had to occur—something capable of causing the public to lose faith in the government.

It is highly likely that August 19 was chosen for a large-scale action because it marked the 25th anniversary of the 1953 uprising that ended the still-controversial premiership of Mohammad Mossadegh.

Weaponization of Social Outcasts

Hossein Takbalizadeh

In 1977, a 20-year-old drug addict named Hossein Takbalizadeh was introduced by a neighborhood friend, Asghar Noruzi, to several of Abadan’s Islamists, including Abdollah Lorghaba and Faraj Bazrkar. Takbalizadeh told his new friends that he wanted to quit drugs and began attending Quran study sessions at Lorghaba’s home.

Another visitor to Lorghaba’s home was a man from Esfahan named Mahmud Abolpur. Because Takbalizadeh’s grandmother lived in Esfahan, he began visiting Islamists there to obtain books and pamphlets to bring back to Abadan.

During the spring of 1978, Takbalizadeh brought several other friends— Fallah Mohammadi-Hashemi and Yadollah Mohammadpur-Hosseini — to Lorghaba’s Quran classes. Soon afterward, Takbalizadeh and Bazrkar stopped attending because they considered the classes useless and wanted to participate directly in revolutionary activities. Takbalizadeh did not, however, completely cease contact with Lorghaba.

Lorghaba later stated that complaints about Abadan not being revolutionary enough affected Takbalizadeh.

Sometime before August 19, 1978, Takbalizadeh and Bazrkar set fire to the Rastakhiz Party headquarters in Abadan, though the building sustained only minimal damage.

After he stopped attending Quran study and fell back into addiction, Takbalizadeh traveled to seek recovery, before returning to Abadan on August19th.

Cinema Rex

That same day, Takbalizadeh later said, Bazrkar told him that he, Fallah Mohammadi, and Yadollah Mohammadpur had decided to set fire to Cinema Soheila. Takbalizadeh agreed to join them. As he later confessed:

“We then prepared four small glasses filled with thinner and went to Cinema Soheila. We threw the glasses on the floor from the waiting room inside the cinema. Then I lit a match, but it did not catch fire.”

They assumed the thinner had dried too quickly and returned to Cinema Soheila with another incendiary glass, but by then the cinema was closed. Searching for another target, they arrived at Cinema Rex and purchased tickets for the 9 PM showing.

Bazrkar, Takbalizadeh, Mohammadpour, and Mohammadi poured the incendiary materials on both sides of the theatre’s entrance before Takbalizadeh struck a match. All four then returned to the theatre, except for Mohammadi, whose body was never found. Within moments, flames and smoke began spreading through the entrance. A scream alerted the audience, and panicked people rushed toward a door near the screen that led to a stairway and the street. Several people forced it open, and the crowd surged through. Takbalizadeh was swept along with the fleeing audience and escaped.

A Government Too Afraid to Reveal the Facts

Immediately after the fire, an investigation was launched by the Iranian security service, SAVAK. Four of Khomeini’s associates who had entered Iran from Iraq were arrested and interrogated.

Front page of the two main Iranian daily newspapers on August 20th, 1979. Left: Etelaa’aat claiming 600 people burned alive, right: Kayhan reporting 377 burned alive.

The SAVAK report on the Cinema Rex disaster was never released because Prime Minister Jafar Sharif-Emami believed that doing so would further inflame a public whose opinion had already been shaped by months of Khomeinist agitation against the government. One copy was held by the anti-Khomeini Ayatollah Shariatmadari until Revolutionary Guards seized it during a 1979 raid on his office, as the new regime moved against its clerical opponents.

The only other person known to have possessed a copy was the then-Minister of Information, Mohammad Reza Ameli-Tehrani. Before being executed by Khomeini in May 1979, Ameli-Tehrani told journalist Ali Reza Nourizadeh that one of the four arrested Khomeiniists, a man named Ashour, had told SAVAK that the plan to burn a major cinema had been devised at a meeting in Khomeini’s house in Najaf, Iraq. According to this account, the four men were sent to Iran with $11,000 and 5,000 Iraqi dinars.

A local Islamist contact in Abadan named Fouad Karimi used the funds to obtain the incendiary materials. At the same meeting in Khomeini’s house, plans were allegedly made to accuse the government of starting the fire. When SAVAK searched Karimi’s house, they found pamphlets accusing the government of burning a movie theatre that had been printed a week before the Cinema Rex tragedy. The manager of the printing house that produced the pamphlets admitted that he had done so in exchange for payment.

Ameli-Tehrani further told Nourizadeh that he believed the true reason for his forthcoming execution was to prevent him from speaking publicly about the Abadan disaster.

Another account of how the arson was arranged emerged in 2002, when former Khomeiniist activist Hossein Boroujerdi published a Persian-language book, Behind the Islamic Revolution.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who was known to the arsonists as Hadj Abdollah, 1979

Boroujerdi wrote that during the summer of 1978, while working as an underground activist, he and his comrades received incendiary materials and a sealed letter from a cleric whose name he knew only as “Hadj Abdollah.” They were instructed to take them to Abadan and deliver them to another cleric, Mousavi-Tabrizi. Boroujerdi then saw the materials passed to Takbalizadeh and his three friends.

Boroujerdi stated that he did not know what would be done with the materials until the Cinema Rex fire was reported on the news and that he felt sick upon realizing he had been an accomplice. He believed the sealed letter he had carried from Abdollah was a fatwa ordering a cinema to be burned. Only after the revolution’s victory in February, he wrote, did he learn Abdollah’s real name: Ali Khamenei.

A third account, which also implicated Mousavi-Tabrizi and his father-in-law, Ayatollah Nouri Hamedani, was given by Ayatollah Ali Tehrani. He recalled:

“On the day when the news came that the Cinema Rex in Abadan had been set on fire and dozens of people had been burned to ashes, Nouri Hamedani, I, and a group of others were sitting in a gathering. As the poison of this news hit the hearts of the people who had gathered, Nouri Hamedani leaned in and said in my ear: This was our doing. I asked: Why? He said, because we had received news that Khuzestan was quiet and not onboard with the revolution and the oil industry workers had not joined the strikers. We had to provoke both the people and the oil company employees.”

A few months later, someone approached Abadan’s deputy police chief, Colonel Bayat, and reported that the brother of the deceased perpetrator Yadollah Mohammadpur had admitted that Mohammadpur had been one of the arsonists, and that Takbalizadeh was another. Takbalizadeh was arrested. During questioning, he said that he and other young men from Abadan had regularly met with Seyyed Mohammad Kiavash, a religiously active teacher in the city. Takbalizadeh claimed that Kiavash mocked the young men of Abadan as not being “man enough” to participate in revolutionary action and repeatedly pushed them to prove otherwise. Kiavash later entered the new Islamic establishment as a member of the Majles, first representing Ahvaz and later Abadan.

An Irresponsible Media Fans the Flames

Cinema Rex was not the first cinema targeted by Islamist terrorists. Just two days earlier, the Arya Movie House in Mashhad had been set ablaze, killing three people. While every other prominent Islamic religious leader condemned the attack, Ruhollah Khomeini conspicuously refused to do so.

Opponents of the monarchy soon saw the Abadan tragedy as an opportunity to accuse the government itself of starting the fire in a “false flag” operation intended to discredit the revolutionaries.

The Tudeh Communist Party was the first group to assert publicly that SAVAK had started the fire, doing so in the September 4 issue of its underground newspaper, Navid. The allegation was supported by a purported interview with unnamed Abadan firemen.

As analyst Robert Moss observed in his 1978 study “The Campaign to Destabilize Iran”, although the communist newspaper’s account contained numerous details inconsistent with what had actually occurred, “Navid‘s story started a rumor that spread like wildfire in Tehran.” Khomeini later repeated the same accusation. What might otherwise have exposed Islamist violence instead deepened public distrust of the government and strengthened the revolutionary movement.

In the months that followed, the Cinema Rex fire triggered larger demonstrations across Iran and accelerated a cycle of violence and unrest that culminated in Khomeini’s rise to power in February 1979. Throughout this period, much of the left-wing media outside Iran repeated revolutionary claims with little scrutiny, often amplifying them, while the Shah’s government was seldom given an adequate hearing.

American media also played a part in attributing the Cinema Rex fire to the Shah’s government. In 1980,60 Minutes host Mike Wallace, who had long displayed hostility toward the Shah, aired a segment titled “Explaining Iran’s Animosity,” during which he identified a former Iranian official, then living as a refugee in Southern California, as responsible for the fire.” That accusation brought death threats and forced the man into hiding. Neither Wallace nor 60 Minutes producers and network ever retracted the claim. Wallace never corrected the record, never apologized, and continued to defend a false narrative of the revolution for the rest of his career.

Scapegoats Offered – But the Truth Emerges

After seizing power, Khomeini and his circle moved swiftly to eliminate opponents, executing officials, military officers, and security personnel who had stayed behind. In that climate, it was inevitable that someone from SAVAK would be blamed for the Cinema Rex atrocity.

On February 23rd, 1979, Captain Monir Taheri, a police officer of the former regime, was executed for allegedly participating in the Cinema Rex fire, despite evidence that he had not even been in Abadan that day. Meanwhile, Takbalizadeh—the man who had confessed to taking part in the arson—was quietly released from detention.

Leftist groups, by then locked in a struggle for power with Khomeini, had little interest in reopening the Cinema Rex case. The claim of SAVAK responsibility had already become a cornerstone of their narrative about the ‘crimes of the Shah and the Americans’.

The relatives of those killed in Abadan wanted real answers. Takbalizadeh, too, wanted the truth to come out—not out of remorse, but because he resented seeing what he regarded as his “holy deed” attributed to the hated “counterrevolutionaries.” He turned himself in, only to be branded a “SAVAK agent” and held incommunicado for more than a year before finally being brought to trial.

Ayatollah Ali Tehrani—Khamenei’s own brother-in-law—stood with the people of Abadan in demanding justice and wanted to oversee the trial. They called for Tehrani to oversee the trial. Instead, the regime handed the proceedings to Seyyed Hossein Mousavi-Tabrizi—the same man Takbalizadeh had identified as helping incite the attack.

Twenty-eight people, including the owner and manager of Cinema Rex, were brought to trial. Takbalizadeh represented himself, remained openly defiant, and confessed in detail to everything he knew, including the involvement of the clerics with whom he had been associated.

Although regime-controlled television broadcast only excerpts of Takbalizadeh’s testimony, the people of Abadan who packed the courtroom heard the proceedings in full, making the truth far more difficult to suppress.

After hearing the testimony, many of the victims’ relatives concluded that Takbalizadeh had been manipulated and was not the principal culprit. Convinced that the other defendants were innocent, they sought out Ayatollah Ali Tehrani, then in Mashhad, to relay what had emerged in court.

As the representatives made their way to Mashhad, they heard on the radio that Takbalizadeh had been executed, along with the owner and manager of Cinema Rex and three others. Seven people who were no longer in Iran were sentenced to death in absentia.” “With the executions carried out, any further inquiry into the massacre’s broader responsibility effectively came to an end.

When the Abadan representatives finally reached Ayatollah Tehrani in Mashhad, he told them that Khomeini had just removed him from the judiciary.” And with that, any realistic hope of establishing the full truth was gone. Tehrani was later placed under house arrest, escaped Iran in 1984, and fled to Iraq, where he published The Catastrophe of Cinema Rex, his own account in Persian. Tehrani returned to Iran in 1995 and received a ten-year prison sentence. He never spoke publicly again before his death in 2022.

Nothing better captures the revolutionary purpose behind the Cinema Rex arson than Takbalizadeh’s own words at trial: “It was oil that I was pouring on the fire of revolution to hasten its success.”

The Regime Extols a Model Operation – and Repeats It

In the early 1980s, a manual for prospective Islamist revolutionaries abroad was printed in Tehran. Written by Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri and titled “Manual of Islamic Revolution”, it laid out what its author called “the techniques revolutionaries employed in order to destroy the satanic regime of the Shah”. The bitter irony is that Montazeri would later fall out with Khomeini over the regime’s brutality, stripped of his position as heir apparent and eventually placed under house arrest, a stark reminder that revolutionary zeal offers no immunity.

Among them were instructions to, “… burn places of sin, bars, cinemas, cabarets, attack all aspects of the stinking Western civilization.” Khomeini’s disciples would later employ similar methods elsewhere. From the attacks of September 11th, 2001 to the Bataclan massacre in Paris in 2015 and Hamas’s October 7th, 2023 attack on the Nova music festival, the world repeatedly witnessed the consequences of an ideology that sanctified the mass murder of civilians in the name of a higher cause.

Cinema Rex was not merely one atrocity among many; it became a template—both for the use of terror as a revolutionary instrument and for the manipulation of public perception that allowed such violence to be justified, denied, or even celebrated.

Iranians have never forgotten that the Islamic regime came to power through bloodshed, deception, and the mobilization of disaffected factions, amplified by religious fervor. For decades, they have tried to warn the global community not to be deceived by Islamist propaganda or to underestimate the violence and expansionism that accompany it.

One of the great tragedies is that the first and most numerous victims of Islamist extremism have in fact been Muslims themselves. Long before the ideology reached New York, Paris, London, Madrid, or Jerusalem, it had already devastated Muslim societies, claiming countless Muslim lives in its pursuit of power.

This article is copyright © Iran So Far Away. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this content without explicit written permission is strictly prohibited and subject to legal action under applicable copyright laws.

By Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour

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On the evening of July 9, in Mashhad, Khorasan Province, as the choreographed spectacle of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s internment was ongoing, two members of the Basij militia were shot and killed.

First reported by the IRGC-linked outlet Sabereen News, the shooting was said to have occurred around 10:00 P.M. in Fakouri Boulevard, in Mashhad’s Sarafrazan neighborhood. Two men, allegedly wearing military uniforms, approached the Basij members and fired on them with handguns. One died at the scene, while the other passed away in hospital. At the same time, there were reports of gunfire being heard in the area of the Imam Reza Shrine, where Khamenei’s funeral was being held.

Regime officials immediately began to downplay the event. Amirallah Shamghadri, the Deputy for Security and Law Enforcement of the Razavi Khorasan Governorate, asserted that the incident was “not terrorist-related.” According to Shamghadri, a fight broke out among two individuals over personal differences. One man killed the other. Shamghadri went on to say that a third man subsequently intervened and shot and killed the survivor from the first quarrel. He also denied that any gunfire had occurred at the Imam Reza Shrine.

However, other accounts of what happened have been circulating. According to one, the shooting occurred at a Basij station on the south side of the Imam Reza Shrine when the assailant, wearing a Basij uniform, approached a checkpoint and opened fire. Different death tolls have also been asserted, ranging from four to possibly eight to ten. The veracity of any of these accounts, whether the regime’s official statement or social media posts, cannot be established yet.

There has been armed resistance against the Khomeiniist Regime by various groups on and off since 1979. In more recent years, there have been multiple cases of ordinary citizens driven out of their wits by the regime’s smothering oppression who have picked up guns and targeted officials and/or soldiers. Since the January 2026 massacre of tens of thousands of protestors, which included many residents of Mashhad, Iranians have become more and more vocal about the need for the Khomeiniist regime to be forcibly overthrown. Some of them have posted videos onto social media asking foreign countries to give them weapons. US President Donald Trump is said to have tried to arm Iranians, but the firepower destined for them was stolen and diverted by Iraqi Kurdish militias.

As the resumption of clashes between the US and Tehran shows that hope for any negotiated settlement is ephemeral, calls for the overthrow the regime will be heard once again. The US has found itself in a quandary because, while the regime’s military infrastructure cannot be effectively dismantled by air attacks alone, the American populace is unwilling to commit ground troops for an invasion. Arming the Iranian people would be the simplest way to eliminate the Khomeinist Regime. Whatever actually occurred in Mashhad, the anger against their tyrants is real and simmering and Iranians are only waiting for the means to express their rage.

This article is copyright © Iran So Far Away. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this content without explicit written permission is strictly prohibited and subject to legal action under applicable copyright laws.

By Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour

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Each year, July 27, the anniversary of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s death in 1980, has long been an occasion for Iranians from all over the world to gather at his tomb in Cairo, Egypt and pay tribute to his memory. Iranians remain eternally grateful also to the memory of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who was the only world leader brave enough to offer the Shah asylum while major Western powers cowered in fear of Khomeiniists. In 2026, however, the Egyptian government has specifically asked that no Iranians come to Cairo for the anniversary. Instead, Empress Farah Pahlavi will only be allowed to attend the tomb privately, without guests. This decision comes amidst, in addition to the regional tensions, increasing ties between Egypt and the Islamic Regime and a rising presence of Islamic Regime agents within Egypt itself.

Tomb of President Anwar Sadat

Commemorations for the Shah have been canceled before; they were so during the ascendency of the Tehran-aligned government of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi from 2011 to 2013. After a massive popular uprising resulted in the Egyptian military’s removing Morsi, banning the Brotherhood and installing General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi as the new President, the country seemed to have returned to the path of secularism and modernity. President Sisi established an image of himself as a man devoted to countering radical Islamist terrorism. Egypt herself was a victim of Tehran’s recent proxy wars when Houthi militants from Yemen disrupted traffic in the Red Sea. Things have seemingly begun to change in recent years, however.

China, to whom most nations in the Middle East are heavily indebted, initiated the Cairo-Tehran reconciliation in 2023, shortly after brokering a similar deal between Tehran and Saudi Arabia. Bilateral contacts developed rapidly after that, Tehran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian visited Egypt in December, 2024, and then Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi went in June 2025. In July 2025, a Tehran street that had been named for Khalil Islambouli – the assassin of Anwar Sadat – was renamed for Hassan Nasrallah (Hezbollah leader killed by Israel), ending a long-standing Egyptian complaint against the Islamic Regime, and on February 20, 2026, full diplomatic relations between the two nations were restored. With an embassy in Cairo, Tehran is now able to freely import spies and provocateurs into Egypt, and conceivably distribute funds and arms to Islamist groups. Why is the Sisi government taking steps that could undermine its own security?

According to many analysts, it’s a question of Cairo needing financial aid. A longstanding debt crisis, with new loans being taken to repay old ones, as well as multiple expensive construction projects, put the country in search of a quick cash infusion. And in stepped Qatar and Türkiye to offer large scale infrastructure development and military modernization packages. These programs are not just economic; they give Doha and Ankara a key stake in Cairo’s decision-making process. These two nations are, of course, governed by Islamists with records of good relations with Tehran.

As these events occurred, Cairo’s behavior towards Iranian dissidents became colder. An individual who visited Egypt for the 45^th anniversary of the Shah’s death in 2025 informs Iran So Far Away that Egyptian government officials tried their utmost to present photos and videos from being taken at the Shah’s tomb in Al Rafa’i Mosque because they feared public backlash from the dissemination of images of unveiled women in an Islamic holy space. Officials also warned Iranian visitors against taking photos showing alcohol being drunk – since Iranians are considered Muslims, the sight of “sin” would offend local Islamists. A party hosted by Empress Farah Pahlavi was cancelled minutes before it was to begin after a “bomb threat” was claimed. An individual with personal ties to President Sisi told this visitor: “This (Egypt) is not a stable country. Sisi is afraid, he doesn’t want anything to provoke an (Islamist) uprising.”

Hence, observers worry Egypt may be breaking with its traditional pro-Western orientation. In doing such, Egypt would actually be running against the regional tide – a declining Shi’a empire has already lost its client in Syria, while Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen are no longer quite in the mullahs’ pocket. The other Gulf States have allied with Israel and Washington to oppose Tehran. Indeed, if the on-again off-again fighting between the US and Iran continues, the Islamic Regime may not survive for much longer. President Sisi would probably then find himself embarrassed for having hedged a friendship in order to bargain with a tyranny on its way out.

Anwar Sadat earned a reputation as a timeless hero for his willingness to do what he thought was right despite the political costs, and even to risk his own life. He called Ruhollah Khomeini a lunatic on television, and Khomeini responded by “prophesying” Sadat’s death. Egyptians should think carefully, do they want to see their country drift down a path of cowardice back towards the Islamism they bravely rose up against in 2013 or will they resume their friendship with the suffering Iranian people and stand up to Tehran’s aggressions?

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🔺 American Islamist-Left and Communists extremists, Islamists and pro-Iranian activists-many now based in Lebanon and Russia—visit Tehran for funeral of Khamenei

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A New York City subway train wrapped in the flag colors of the Islamic Republic of Iran has triggered fierce backlash after videos and photos of the train circulated online over the July 4th holiday weekend. The image was jarring. On the 250th anniversary of American independence, a public train in New York City — the city most scarred by September 11 — appeared wrapped in the symbol of a regime long designated by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism, and whose contacts with al Qaeda were documented by the 9/11 Commission as dating back to the 1990s.

City officials and defenders of the campaign have pointed out that the design was not created solely for Iran. It is part of a broader FIFA World Cup 2026 promotional campaign featuring the flags and colors of all 48 participating nations. That is true. The official NY/NJ World Cup Host Committee described the initiative as a collaboration between the FIFA World Cup 2026 NYNJ Host Committee, New York City Hall, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), with designs developed by New York City-based creative studio Burn & Broad.

But that explanation does not end the controversy. It begins it.

The issue is not whether Iran qualified for the World Cup. Nor is the issue whether FIFA recognizes the Islamic Republic’s current flag. The issue is whether New York City officials exercised any judgment before turning public infrastructure into a rolling display of a hostile regime’s national symbol — and whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s City Hall had both the opportunity and the responsibility to object.

The public record makes clear that this was not a rogue MTA graphic. The campaign was explicitly developed with the Mayor’s Office. Patch reported that the train wraps represented all 48 participating countries, that the initiative was developed by the NYNJ Host Committee alongside the MTA and the Mayor’s Office, and that the designs were created by Burn & Broad. The same report listed the F train as including Iran, along with Argentina, South Africa, Bosnia, Austria, Paraguay, South Korea, Mexico, Belgium, and Qatar.

Mamdani himself lent his voice to the campaign. In the official announcement, he said that when trains wrapped in the colors of Senegal or Morocco enter neighborhoods like Harlem or Astoria, they tell a story “About who we are as New Yorkers.” That framing is important. City Hall did not merely tolerate the campaign; it celebrated it as a civic statement.

And that is exactly why critics are right to ask: who decided that the Islamic Republic’s flag belonged in that civic statement?

Legally, the MTA is not simply an agency of City Hall. It is governed by a board whose members are nominated by the governor, with four recommended by New York City’s mayor. So, the mayor may not have had a simple formal “veto” over every train wrap. But the absence of a formal veto does not mean the absence of political responsibility. When City Hall is named as a collaborator, when the mayor publicly promotes the project, and when the campaign uses the city’s public space and civic symbolism, the mayor cannot plausibly claim to be a bystander.

The deeper problem is that the Islamic Republic’s flag is not a neutral sports emblem for many New Yorkers. For Iranian dissidents, Jewish New Yorkers, 9/11 families, American veterans, and communities targeted by Tehran’s proxies, the flag represents a regime associated with repression, hostage-taking, antisemitism, and terrorism. The U.S. State Department continues to list Iran among state sponsors of terrorism.

Defenders of the campaign argue that every participating nation was represented, and that singling out Iran would politicize sport. But the World Cup is already political, especially in 2026. Reporting on Iran’s participation has described a tournament shadowed by war, diaspora opposition, flag disputes, and a struggle over whether Iran’s national team represents the Iranian people or the Islamic Republic’s ideology.

FIFA may pretend that soccer/football floats above politics. New York City cannot afford that fantasy.

A basic review process should have asked obvious questions: Would displaying the Islamic Republic’s flag on public transit during America’s 250th birthday weekend inflame communities that fled the regime? Would it offend families who still live with the wounds of September 11? Would it hand Tehran a propaganda image? Would it appear that New York City was celebrating the regime rather than merely acknowledging a World Cup participant?

Those questions were either not asked, or they were asked and dismissed.

Either answer is unacceptable.

No serious critic is arguing that Iranian people should be erased from the World Cup. The opposite is true. The Iranian people deserve distinction from the regime that rules over them. Many Iranians reject the Islamic Republic’s symbols precisely because those symbols have been imposed on them. A more thoughtful city could have found a way to recognize Iranian athletes and fans without turning the subway into a spectacle for the regime’s flag.

The question now is not whether the train exists. It does. Fact-checkers have confirmed that the Iran wrap is real, while noting that it is one of many World Cup country wraps and not a standalone Iran tribute.

A city can welcome the world without laundering the symbols of regimes that threaten it. A city can celebrate soccer without asking victims of terrorism and dictatorship to watch the Islamic Republic’s colors roll through their neighborhoods. And a mayor can support a global sporting event while still drawing lines around what should be celebrated in public space.

New York failed to draw that line.

That failure belongs not only to FIFA or the MTA, but to the City Hall that helped make this campaign possible.

This article is copyright © Iran So Far Away. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this content without explicit written permission is strictly prohibited and subject to legal action under applicable copyright laws.

By Elina Farhadi

Source: DW Persian (translated by Iran So Far Away)

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Six days of funeral ceremonies, dozens of official events, millions of participants according to state media accounts, and burial beside the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Shiite Imam, in Mashhad: the Islamic Republic tried to turn Ali Khamenei’s farewell into a display of the political system’s continuity after him. But as the ceremonies came to an end, a question beyond the ceremonial dimensions of the event confronted Iran observers: what is the legacy of the man whose opinion or approval shaped the most important political, security, military, and strategic decisions of the Islamic Republic for more than three decades?

Ali Khamenei assumed the leadership of the Islamic Republic in 1989, at a time when many regarded him as a temporary successor to Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s ruling system. But over 37 years, he not only turned the position of Supreme Leader into the central locus of power in Iran, he also profoundly transformed the political structure, the relationship between elected and appointed institutions, the role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, foreign policy, the nuclear program, and even the relationship between the government and Iranian society.

His supporters cite the stabilization of the system, the expansion of regional influence, and resistance to the West as the most important achievements of this period.

His critics, however, speak of an unprecedented concentration of power, the weakening of elected institutions, intensifying international isolation, economic crises, the suppression of civil protests, and the ever-widening gap between the government and society.

Now, with the political life of the Islamic Republic’s second leader brought to a close, the question is no longer how Ali Khamenei ruled; rather, it is to what extent today’s Iran is the product of his decisions, priorities, and style of governance, and which parts of this legacy will continue to cast a shadow over the future of the Islamic Republic after him.

Amir Taheri and Reza Talebi

Deutsche Welle Persian spoke about this with Amir Taheri, veteran journalist and analyst of Iranian affairs, and Reza Talebi, a political analyst based in Germany.

From “Initial Moderation” to Transformation Within the Bureaucracy of Exclusive Power

A review of the political record of the Islamic Republic’s second leader reflects a complex and gradual process of transformation in both personal and institutional power structures.

Amir Taheri identifies the key turning point in Ali Khamenei’s rule as the period after the abolition of the post of prime minister and the end of Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s premiership.

According to Taheri, at this stage Khamenei “gradually realized that he could move toward exclusive power, because before that, during the first phase of his record, such an atmosphere did not exist.”

Looking back at the first decade after the 1979 Revolution, Taheri notes: “At that time, Khamenei was considered one of the moderate and relatively reasonable figures. For example, during the hostage-taking of American diplomats, he personally went to the U.S. Embassy, spoke with the hostages, comforted them, and even said that in the future we would buy weapons from you. Also, at the beginning of the Salman Rushdie fatwa affair, he again took a moderate position and said that if Salman Rushdie repented, he would be forgiven.”

However, the internal logic of the ideological system imposed a different path. Taheri believes Khamenei gradually realized he was facing a system that he could not shape in his own image or align with his own outlook; rather, he himself had to conform to the requirements of that system.

As a result of this process, the literary side of his personality — the part that had always aspired to become a great poet — was overshadowed: “He realized that the functionaries of this system wanted someone who had complete power and the final say. In other words, Khamenei was the product of a system, not its creator.”

In the same framework, Reza Talebi, the political analyst, opens a complementary angle on this mutual transformation and says: “One can speak both of Khamenei’s legacy and of Khamenei himself as the legacy of the Islamic Republic. He is precisely an example of how power can transform an individual, and how that same transformation can be reproduced within a political system.”

According to Talebi, if Khomeini built the system on revolutionary authority and his own personal charisma, Khamenei rebuilt it on institutions, security networks, administrative mechanisms, and organizational loyalty, so that the system’s dependency would shift from individuals to loyal institutions. This caused the Islamic Republic, over the next three decades, to change in nature from a clergy-centered system into a security-based, institution-centered, IRGC-centered system.

The Ideological Mixture of 1979 and the Strategy of “Step-by-Step Advancement” in the Absence of Rivals

From the perspective of observers, the intellectual roots of the movement that produced the 1979 system have a varied genealogy. Amir Taheri describes the revolutionary current as “an uneven mixture of the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Fada’iyan-e Islam, and the ideas of medieval atheists,” combined with the fashionable currents of that era, such as leftism, Marxism, and Leninism. He points to Khamenei’s influence by Abul A’la Maududi, the radical Pakistani thinker, who was one of his favorite figures and who spoke of the need for the emergence of an “Islamic Lenin.”

In Taheri’s view, the absence of a coherent ideology or precise planning from the very beginning meant that historical events affected this assemblage, while the assemblage in turn affected events — a process resembling a developing personality that had not been formed beforehand, but was shaped gradually. Still, Taheri emphasizes: “At least over the past 25 years, what is called the Islamic Republic was truly made and fashioned by Khamenei, far more than by Khomeini.”

In explaining how the leadership institution transformed from a limited position in the early 1990s into the main center of political, security, and economic decision-making, Amir Taheri stresses Khamenei’s experimental, step-by-step strategy, and at the same time, the “stepping aside” of other institutions and functionaries: “He always tested to see how far he could go; then he advanced to the point where no one stood against him.”

Taheri points to the behavior of his principal rivals and says: “Rafsanjani pursued the idea of economic progress, development, and becoming wealthy, and preferred to build financial power, remnants of which still exist. Another group was merely pursuing street popularity, and Khatami, by speaking of John Locke and Edmund Burke, wanted to become popular among Western intellectuals and send the message that we are people of learning and sophistication.”

This vacuum and weak environment meant that, according to Taheri, even those who stood up to Khamenei took the wrong path, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, after “eleven days of staying home and stubbornness,” was ultimately forced to return.

Taheri compares this process of power concentration to Lenin’s sixteen-member Politburo, in which eventually, apart from Lenin and Stalin, the others were eliminated or executed: “Here too, the early members of the Revolutionary Council were either assassinated at the beginning, like Motahhari and others, or gradually the wheel of time turned and they were pushed aside. In the end, Ali Khamenei remained, and the person who at the beginning had been one of the weakest members of the Revolutionary Council became its strongest.”

The Shift in the Clerical Balance and the Rise of an “IRGC-Centered” and “Frankensteinian” System

With the sidelining of technocratic elites and the first generation of Imam-line loyalists, the internal structure of power underwent a fundamental transformation.

Reza Talebi points to the transformation in the traditional balance between the clergy and political power, arguing that during Khamenei’s era, the effective role of sources of emulation and seminaries in major decision-making was “gradually transferred to security institutions, the Office of the Supreme Leader, and the networks connected to it.” As a result, the historical authority of the traditional clergy diminished in the face of administrative and security institutions, and velayat-e faqih shifted more than ever from a jurisprudential theory into a mechanism for administering, controlling, and stabilizing political power.

Talebi adds: “The first generation of revolutionary managers, despite their differences, had greater diversity, but they were replaced by managers judged by the degree of their loyalty to the person of the leader and the central core of power. In such a structure, expertise fell below loyalty; the security bureaucracy expanded; elite circulation declined; and circles of flatterers, profit-seeking networks, and ‘Saturday mujahideen’ formed around power.”

This process made the decision-making circle more homogeneous and rendered elected institutions such as the presidency ineffective. Talebi believes presidential elections effectively became competitions within a pre-determined boundary, and presidents from every faction, rather than being policymakers, became executors of policies dictated by the leadership institution in major foreign, nuclear, and regional files.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps became the most important pillar preserving the structure. Amir Taheri notes that Ruhollah Khomeini initially created five separate commands to prevent a coup, each connected to him only through his office. Taheri recalls that Khamenei, from his time as deputy defense minister, realized that this regime survived through two levers: “force and money.”

Taheri says: “He had reached the conclusion that in Western countries, if you have money, you also have force, but in Eastern countries such as Iran, if you have force, you will have money. Therefore, he turned toward the IRGC and toward security and military matters.”

Reza Talebi also confirms the IRGC’s supra-military role and stresses that Khamenei’s most important organizational legacy was not the grooming of an individual successor, but “building a succession system”: a system in which the IRGC became the main pillar for preserving, reproducing, and transferring power. This structure is somewhat reminiscent of the role of the Communist Party in China’s system, with the difference that in Iran, that role is held by a military-security institution.

Talebi calls the creation of this multiplicity of parallel institutions and the division of informal decision-making centers a kind of “Frankensteinization” of the power structure. Although it created severe managerial deadlock, it also created an internal balance that reduced the possibility of a single rival emerging — though in the future, these networks of interest will themselves affect the position of leadership as well.

Economic Borrowing From Pyongyang’s “Juche” and the Birth of the Oil Mafia

The economic decisions of Ali Khamenei’s leadership era, and the invention of the term “resistance economy,” are rooted in specific models and his concrete observations of the world.

Amir Taheri refers to Khamenei’s trip to North Korea during his presidency and says that there he became deeply enamored with the political system of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — something Akbar Nateq-Nouri also recounts in detail and with interest in his memoirs.

According to Taheri, Khamenei took the principle of “Juche,” or absolute self-sufficiency, from Kim Il-sung’s theory and turned it into the “resistance economy,” with the idea that there was no need to trade with the world, because if we are dependent on the outside for anything, we become dependent for everything.

Taheri explains the fundamental difference between the two systems as follows: “Iran’s misfortune was having oil income, which became our greatest affliction. When you have oil income, you do not need anyone, and you import or build anything; then you can become ambitious, export the revolution, and change the world — the very things Khamenei talked about. As a result, he brought the economy to an impasse in which various economic mafias emerged, and the IRGC’s Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters grew into a state within the state. Without doubt, responsibility for the current economic deadlock lies with him.”

Reza Talebi also confirms the “anti-development” nature of Khamenei’s economic policies and believes that Iran’s economy, relying on rent, hidden budgets, and a non-competitive economic structure, entered a chronic and diseased condition.

According to Talebi, the communiqué on the general policies of Article 44 of the Constitution, instead of strengthening the real private sector, in many cases paved the way for the expansion of the influence of security, military, and quasi-state institutions, without real competition or economic transparency taking shape.

Life in an Ivory Tower; Social Engineering and the Deepening of Religion-Avoidance

In the social and cultural sphere, insistence on state engineering gradually created the deepest gaps between the ruling establishment and citizens.

Amir Taheri refers to the former leader’s growing geographical and media isolation and says his connection with society and ordinary life was severed: “In the past 22 years, he did not travel to any of Iran’s provinces, not even to his birthplace, Mashhad. They placed him in an ivory tower and brought selected people to meet him and praise him. To some extent, this process made him a prisoner of his own illusions.”

Taheri adds that Khamenei, who until ten years ago read many newspapers and even watched CNN, gradually set media aside. Because he heard only positive voices, he called society’s natural protests “conspiracies, or in his own words, foreign plots,” and ordered repression and issued the command of “fire at will”: “This system transformed Khamenei and turned a relatively young man without ambition into a monster, one who turned a revolution full of hope into a historical catastrophe — a history that shows us examples of personality transformation under the influence of position in the Roman Emperor Julian, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Napoleon.”

Reza Talebi also sees the successive protests — from the 1999 university dormitory protests, to 2009, 2017, 2019, and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement after the killing of Mahsa Amini — as the direct result of top-down social engineering distancing itself from the evolving realities of society. Policies such as the Islamization of the humanities, cultural supervision, and pressure over the hijab issue, according to Talebi, not only failed to achieve the government’s goals, but led to the gradual erosion of social capital, declining electoral participation, increased elite migration, and the growth of public distrust. Thus, the system became strong in hardware and military terms, but severely eroded in software terms and in its ability to create national consensus.

On the other hand, Talebi points to the paradoxical consequence of this religious approach and says that insistence on Islamic civilization unintentionally fueled “religion-avoidance and religion-hostility” among parts of society, because people came to view official religion not as a spiritual belief, but as an instrument of political power and bureaucratic control. This shift in the relationship between religion and society will continue for years after Khamenei.

Foreign Policy: From “Regional Monster” to the Endless Paradox With Israel

In the international and regional arena, Ali Khamenei’s detailed strategies altered the balance of power.

Amir Taheri, emphasizing that Iran, because of its geographic position, population, and natural resources, has been and will remain a natural power in the region for three thousand years, says: “Unfortunately, Khamenei turned this regional power into a regional monster, like what Hitler did to the great Germany of Bismarck’s era.”

Taheri attributes this advance to the passivity and letter-writing of U.S. presidents, from Carter and Bush to Trump: “When Trump, during his first term, sent a letter through the Japanese prime minister, and Khamenei said, ‘I will not even take the letter; it is not worth reading,’ and America showed no reaction, he came to believe in Tehran that he was exceptional and that everyone feared him.”

According to Taheri, figures such as Qasem Soleimani, as “masters of public relations,” spent $20 to $30 billion of oil money in the region and took selfies, strengthening the illusion within the Office of the Supreme Leader that Khamenei was “the leader of the Muslim ummah.” It was a terrible game that, according to Taheri, Khamenei ultimately paid for with his life.

Taheri sees the insistence on slogans of hostility toward America and the West, and the focus on a policy of “looking East,” as a way of filling the vacuum left by the regime’s lack of structural programs: “When you have severed ties with Iran’s history, when the majority of the world’s Muslims do not accept you because of the government’s religious policies, when seventeen Islamic countries cut relations with Iran and their leaders do not come to your funeral, and when you yourself cannot go to Najaf and Karbala, you are forced to invent a new project of enmity.”

However, Taheri believes Khamenei also had a particular characteristic: his “caution, or his fearfulness.” He always went to the edge of the abyss but did not fall into it — such as missile launches in the True Promise operations or attacks on tankers in Fujairah, which were carried out with prior notice so as not to drag the other side into all-out war.

The Final Legacy: Structural Rupture and the Scenario of a “Stateless Land”

In the end, with this long period of individual and networked rule coming to a close, the political structure produced by Ali Khamenei’s decisions faces an uncertain future. Amir Taheri describes his legacy as “a shaky regime that, in its current form, has no future.”

Beyond the question of personnel changes and whether Mojtaba Khamenei is present or not, he sees Iran’s main crisis as structural and institutional: “Iran’s great problem is that it is in danger of turning into a stateless land, because states are made up of institutions and departments, but in present-day Iran, none of them has either dignity or capability. This army has no credibility; there is fragmentation and internal fighting within the IRGC; the Islamic Consultative Assembly, after an election in which people participated in that manner, is a big joke; the president has no real role; and there is no coherent opposition either. This situation is truly dangerous.”

Reza Talebi also bases his conclusion on the fundamental transformation in the nature of the system, saying that the Islamic Republic of 1989 bears no resemblance to the current system, because everything is now based on a security, administrative, and military network that is itself the most important product of the Khamenei era — a system in which the IRGC is the main pillar, designed to sustain a structure, not a single individual.

The 37-year record of the Islamic Republic’s second leader, beyond the polarized narratives of supporters and critics, presents an image of deep structural transformation: a process in which a “political system,” in order to survive, first dissolved its own functionaries and then swallowed all elected, civil, and clerical institutions into the harsh bureaucracy of security and militarism. Ali Khamenei inherited a mechanism whose pillars had been founded on individual charisma, but he left behind a structure whose survival is tied to weapons, a complex network of oil-rent interests, and the organizational loyalty of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The greatest paradox of this legacy lies in the fact that the government, at the height of its hardware development and regional influence, is experiencing the deepest software rupture and crisis of legitimacy in the face of a dynamic and protesting society.

With his burial in Mashhad, the showcase of ceremony collapses, and Iran is confronted with the reality of a Frankensteinian structure — a structure that, by eliminating elites and rendering legal institutions ineffective, now finds itself facing the challenge of succession and the fear of falling into the condition of a “stateless land.”

History’s final judgment will be determined not by the splendor of funeral processions, but by the ability or inability of this worn-out bureaucracy to save the country from its accumulated crises.

This article is copyright © Iran So Far Away. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this content without explicit written permission is strictly prohibited and subject to legal action under applicable copyright laws.

By Banafsheh Zand and Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour

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The Islamic Regime has tried to turn Ali Khamenei’s funeral into a spectacle of continuity, revenge, and survival. Instead, the week-long ceremony has exposed the regime’s deepest vulnerabilities: a dead ruler, an invisible successor, a grieving dynasty, a militarized public ritual, and a population increasingly unwilling to confuse state choreography with national mourning.

Ali Khamenei was killed on February 28^th during an Israeli airstrike on his underground bunker. Under Shi’a Islamic rules, his burial should have occurred within 24 hours of his death. However, the ruling clerics chose to ignore custom so that another public scene could be arranged to make the international media display crowds of Iranians seemingly in monolith behind their system. The Regime does not bury its leaders quietly. It uses them, even in death, to demand obedience from the living.

Khamenei’s funeral was postponed several times and only held after the provisional deal with the USA was signed on June 14, ending the war for the moment. A week of events from July 4-9 was scheduled, beginning in Tehran, then proceeding to Qom and then the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq – where Khamenei spent so much of Iran’s blood and treasure building up Shi’a forces to serve as his personal dominators of that country - and culminating in Khamenei’s entombment in the holy city of Mashhad next to the Imam Reza, effectively deifying him. To ensure as large a crowd as they could gather, officials offered a destitute populace 50 million loaves of bread, 1000 free cabs were deployed in Tehran, grocery stores were kept open 24 hours a day, and hotel rates were halved. Workplaces, shops, and all public gathering spaces were closed, and threatened with heavy penalties if they remained open and their employees in turn pressured to attend the ceremonies. Under the watchful eye of the security forces, it was hoped these measures would suffice to gather the hoped-for million people into the streets. To help with that, mourners were flown in from Iraq.

In choosing July 4, it was obvious that the regime was trying to compete with Donald Trump’s 250^th anniversary of America festival. The United Arab Emirates, which had been the victim of multiple missile strikes from the Regime, took the opportunity to diplomatically snub Tehran and send fighter jets to fly over New York. Tehran’s gala guests would be limited to the leaders of border countries and lower-profile officials from Russia and China.

The buildup had been intense, but when it finally happened, the first comments on social media- before the official media could begin their spin - were about underwhelming the turnout was.

Commentators also pointed out how the pre-arranged route had been changed. By following the planned march course, a large, continuous procession would have proceeded across a major part of Tehran. However, televised coverage repeatedly focused on selected locations. The lack of continuous coverage from the announced starting point to the final destination was seen as the first major sign that the expected crowd did not materialize. Images from Ferdowsi Square were particularly damaging - when state television briefly showed that area, the crowd appeared thin and unimpressive compared with the scale being claimed.

Violence against the infidels is sure to be a feature of any regime event. On the third day of the funeral procession, July 6, the media showed regime supporters carrying banners threatening to kill President Donald Trump, an image of Trump was hanged in effigy while passers-by hurled stones at it, and a poet exclaimed “I swear by your blood; Trump’s murder is our responsibility.” This is classic Islamic Republic theater: grief weaponized into murder rhetoric, mourning converted into mobilization, and death turned into a loyalty test.

Meanwhile, Iranians were questioning officials inflated turnout numbers – which rose from two to ten and then twelve million, before ultimately being called the largest human gathering in history. Several rough calculations were used to challenge the official narrative. Even if one assumed a long route packed with people, the physical space would not support claims of tens of millions. A route several kilometers long and several dozen meters wide can hold only a limited number of people, especially when accounting for buses, police vehicles, barriers, trees, gutters, temporary stands, empty gaps, and movement corridors. State-controlled media assertions of five or six people per square meter are unrealistic, especially across an entire route. In a dense, crowded space, such numbers may exist briefly when bodies are crushed against each other, but they cannot be applied casually to kilometers of public streets. Viewers also noticed differences between ground and aerial images, and wondered if photos were being doctored.

More importantly, Iranians were asking how much all of this was costing them and they criticized both the enormous expense and the lack of transparency regarding it. This is ironic, for the Islamic Regime came to power in 1979 trumpeting false accusations against the former Imperial government’s “extravagant” holding of the 1971 Persepolis anniversary celebrations.

Video of Ahmadinejad, 99-year-old Mullah and head of the Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati and IRGC commanders Ahmad Vahidi and Esmaïl Qaani at the proecession.

This was never just a funeral. It was a state operation designed to convert a military and political humiliation into a ritual of “martyrdom.” The regime’s message is obvious: Khamenei may be dead, but the Islamic Republic claims to live on. Yet the symbolism cuts both ways. A regime that spent decades projecting invulnerability has been forced to parade the coffin of its longest-serving Supreme Leader through a heavily managed mourning circuit months after he was killed at the center of his own power structure. Iran International described the funeral as an attempt to recast a humiliating wartime death as “martyrdom, continuity and power,” but that effort itself shows how wounded the system has become.

The wound can be best typified by the absence of Ali Khamenei’s son and successor – Mojtaba. Mojtaba Khamenei, the man who has neither been seen nor heard since February but whose picture is all-pervasive, is the epitome of what the Islamic Regime is at the moment. A state without citizens has a ruler without a visible body. Mojtaba’s authority is proclaimed by posters, books, statements, and loyalty oaths, but not through his own physical presence. In a regime obsessed with presence, ceremony, and visual shows of submission, the missing successor speaks louder than the funeral chants. For a system built on the image of divine authority, this is a serious problem. The revolution that said it would bring back the Hidden Imam – the long-awaited leader of the Shi’a whom they believe to be alive but “in occultation” now itself is led by a non-human presence. Rumours that Mojtaba is, in fact, dead continue to be repeated and amplified.

Intra-regime infighting also did not take a pause for the funeral. Former President Hassan Rouhani and Vice-President Mohammad Javad Zarif, leaders of the Reformist faction, either did not attend or did so unostentatiously, rather than risk receiving jeers from hardline supporters. During the ceremony, chants such as “death to compromise” were heard being directed at President Masoud Pezeshkian. This was not the called-for unity.

Also in Tehran, a video of Khomeinist regime supporters holding placards with images of Miriam Adelson, Mark Dubowitz (FDD), Peter Thiel, Ben Shapiro, Lindsey Graham, Laura Loomer and many other non-Iranians who oppose the Khomeinist regime.

Even Khamenei’s wife became part of the Regime’s fog. Initial state-media reports claimed that Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh had died from injuries sustained in the same strike that killed her husband, but Fars News, affiliated with the IRGC, later said she was alive and that earlier reports were incorrect. The confusion is telling. In a system that controls information as tightly as the Islamic Republic does, even the status of the dead leader’s wife became unstable public knowledge.

And yet despite all of the above, in its coverage of the past few days, the international media that typically repeats the Regime’s assertions without scepticism largely bought the narrative Tehran wanted to convey, a devoted nation mourning their spiritual and temporal master. But even their correspondents in Tehran were forced to admit the public response appears far more complicated than the official narrative suggests. Not too far away from the funeral grounds, Tehran café society continues as usual, with city-dwellers visibly indifferent towards the extravaganza.

The Islamic Republic is not in mourning on behalf of the nation. At a time when Iranians’ living standards have never been lower, it is spending the nation’s treasury to mourn itself.

The regime wants the world to see a sea of mourners. But what is also visible is fear: fear of empty streets, fear of Mojtaba’s absence, fear of public indifference, fear of internal fracture, and fear that Khamenei’s death may not strengthen the system but expose the rot beneath it.

Ali Khamenei’s funeral is being staged as a farewell to a “martyr.” In reality, it is a referendum on the Islamic Republic’s remaining claim to legitimacy. The coffin is not only carrying Khamenei. It is carrying the regime’s fantasy that coercion, propaganda, and choreographed grief can still substitute for genuine national loyalty.

And that fantasy is looking increasingly hard to sell.

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A war that did not stay on the battlefield

The missiles and drones were visible. The cyber campaign was not. When the United States and Israel opened a new strike campaign against Iran on February 28, Reuters reported that Israel had launched what it called a pre-emptive attack and that U.S. strikes were underway. Another Reuters dispatch described fear, flight and disruption inside Iran as the attack spread. In the days that followed, Iran answered in the familiar language of asymmetric war: missiles, drones, proxy pressure and threats against U.S. positions around the region.

But the part of the story that has received far less unified attention is the parallel front that moved through Microsoft tenants, leak sites, personal inboxes, WhatsApp messages, industrial controllers, defense-contractor personnel files and commercially available location data. It was not one event. It was a chain. And although each link has appeared somewhere in public reporting, the full pattern has not been widely reported in this level of detail. The pieces are scattered across wire reports, official advisories and specialist cybersecurity outlets; together, they show a campaign designed not merely to steal information, but to intimidate, disrupt, publicize and keep operating even after takedowns.

The U.S. government expected something like this. A March 2 Reuters report on a DHS intelligence assessment said the Department of Homeland Security assessed that Iran-aligned hacktivists would likely conduct cyberattacks against U.S. networks after the opening strikes. That warning was framed around lower-level activity such as defacements and distributed denial-of-service attacks. What followed was broader and more revealing: a campaign that used ordinary administrative tools and commercially available data as weapons.

Stryker: the attack that turned an IT control plane into a weapon

The central case is Stryker Corporation, one of the world’s major medical technology companies. On March 11, Stryker posted that it was experiencing a global network disruption to its Microsoft environment as a result of a cyberattack. The company repeatedly said it had no indication of ransomware or malware, that the incident was contained to its internal Microsoft environment, and that its connected and life-saving products remained safe to use. It also acknowledged that the disruption affected order processing, manufacturing and shipping.

This is where the case becomes more important than a conventional cyber incident. According to Reuters, the March 11 attack caused widespread disruption to Stryker’s business, including its ability to process orders, make products and ship them. Reuters also reported that the Iran-linked group Handala claimed responsibility. By March 26, Reuters reported that Stryker’s manufacturing was mostly restored, while staff had found that cellphones, laptops and other remote Windows devices able to connect to the company’s platforms had been impacted.

The most alarming allegation was not that the attackers smuggled in a brilliant new virus. It was that they may have used Stryker’s own management infrastructure. KrebsOnSecurity reported, citing a source familiar with the attack, that the perpetrators appeared to use Microsoft Intune to issue remote wipe commands. Censys and Sygnia reached the same practical lesson: cloud identity and endpoint-management systems like Microsoft Entra ID and Intune should be treated as high-value control planes because, in the wrong hands, they can deliver destructive impact through legitimate administrative functions.

That distinction matters. A ransomware attack announces itself as extortion. A malware outbreak spreads as code. The Stryker incident, as publicly described, points to something simpler and in some ways more frightening: a trusted tool used in an untrusted context. If an attacker gets high-level access to a platform designed to update, manage, lock or wipe devices, the platform itself becomes the weapon.

The biggest numerical claims should be handled carefully. Handala claimed, according to KrebsOnSecurity, that more than 200,000 systems, servers and mobile devices were erased and that offices in 79 countries were affected. Those figures have circulated widely in security reporting, but they remain Handala claims, not independently verified numbers from Stryker. Likewise, Reuters, citing Bloomberg, reported that surgeries were delayed for some patients, not that hundreds of surgeries across countries had been publicly confirmed. The defensible point is still stark enough: a cyberattack on a medical-device supply chain disrupted manufacturing, shipping, ordering and some patient-specific procedures.

Handala was not just a hacktivist label

Handala presents itself as a hacktivist brand. U.S. officials and security researchers describe something closer to an Iranian intelligence persona. On March 19, the Justice Department announced the seizure of four domains - Justicehomeland, Handala-Hack, Karmabelow80 and Handala-Redwanted - and said those domains were used by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, for psychological operations, hacking claims, stolen-data leaks and threats. DOJ specifically said the Handala-hack domain was used to claim credit for a March 2026 destructive malware attack against a U.S.-based multinational medical technologies firm.

Researchers had been following the same ecosystem under other names. Check Point Research identifies Handala Hack as an online persona operated by Void Manticore, also known as Red Sandstorm and Banished Kitten, and says the actor is affiliated with MOIS. CrowdStrike describes Banished Kitten as an Iran-nexus adversary linked to MOIS and says it has used personas including Homeland Justice and Handala Hack Team. MITRE ATT&CK now lists Void Manticore as a group assessed to operate on behalf of MOIS, with associated names including Handala Hack, Homeland Justice, Banished Kitten and Red Sandstorm.

There is also a reported human chain behind the brand. Check Point cited public reporting that linked Void Manticore to MOIS internal-security structures under Seyed Yahya Hosseini Panjaki. Iran International reported that Israel’s military said it killed Yahya Hamidi - identified by Iran International as Yahya Hosseini Panjaki - a deputy minister-level intelligence official for Israel affairs, in the opening phase of the strikes. That does not prove, in the public record, that Panjaki personally commanded every Handala operation. It does support a more careful formulation: Handala belongs to, or operates inside, a broader MOIS-linked ecosystem whose public personas persisted after senior intelligence figures were reportedly killed.

The resilience was visible almost immediately. A day after the DOJ and FBI domain seizures, Reuters reported that the Iranian government-linked hacking unit’s website was back online. That same Reuters story said DOJ described Handala as one of several public personas used by a hacking unit operating under MOIS as part of psychological operations. In other words: the takedown interrupted infrastructure, not the operating model.

From domains to the FBI director’s inbox

Then came the breach of FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email. On March 27, Reuters reported that Iran-linked hackers had broken into Patel’s personal inbox and published photographs and documents online; the bureau said the information was historical and did not involve government data. WIRED framed the same incident as a breach of Patel’s personal email, not the FBI’s systems.

The symbolism was obvious. The same ecosystem whose domains had just been seized by DOJ was able to reappear and claim an intrusion into the personal communications of the FBI director. The public evidence does not prove every technical detail of the compromise. But the timing and target fit the pattern: embarrassment, intimidation and psychological effect layered on top of cyber access.

Defense engineers and U.S. troops became targets

Handala’s campaign then moved from corporate disruption and official embarrassment into direct threats against identifiable people. On March 26, Cybernews reported that Handala had leaked names, identification numbers, passport details, residences and service bases for 28 Lockheed Martin engineers allegedly working in Israel. Cybersecurity Dive separately reported that Iran-linked actors’ claims about Lockheed data were raising questions about veracity and tactics, and noted that Handala had allegedly doxxed Lockheed Martin engineers and threatened them to leave Israel within 48 hours. The caution is important: the leak was reported as a claim and not all underlying data has been publicly authenticated. The tactic, however, was consistent with Handala’s documented pattern of publishing personal data to frighten targets.

By late April, the target set had widened to U.S. service members. Stars and Stripes reported that U.S. service members assigned to units in the Middle East received WhatsApp messages signed by Handala warning that they were under surveillance and would be targeted by drones and missiles. The outlet reviewed messages sent to two service members stationed in Bahrain, which hosts U.S. Naval Forces Central Command. The same report said Handala claimed on Telegram to have published the personal details of 2,379 U.S. Marines stationed in the Persian Gulf. SecurityWeek summarized the episode as an influence campaign against U.S. troops in Bahrain and repeated that the claim about 2,379 Marines came from the group’s Telegram channel.

That is not simply a cyber story. It is a cyber-enabled targeting and intimidation story. The data leak, the direct message, the missile threat and the public boast work together. The goal is not only access. It is to make the target feel seen, located and personally vulnerable.

Critical infrastructure: the quiet pressure on water and power

At the same time, U.S. agencies were warning that Iranian-affiliated actors were probing and disrupting operational technology inside civilian infrastructure. An April 7 joint advisory from the FBI, CISA, NSA, EPA, the Department of Energy and U.S. Cyber Command warned that Iran-affiliated actors were exploiting internet-facing operational technology devices, including Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers, across multiple critical-infrastructure sectors. The advisory said the activity had led to PLC disruptions through malicious interactions with project files and manipulation of data on HMI and SCADA displays, causing operational disruption and financial loss in some cases.

The EPA press release announcing the advisory emphasized water systems, saying U.S. organizations were experiencing exploitation and, in some cases, disruption of operational technology at drinking-water and wastewater systems. This is where the public script should be tightened: the advisory does not say attackers were merely “lying in wait” inside every water plant. It says they were exploiting exposed operational technology and, in some cases, causing disruption. That is alarming without embellishment.

The commercial surveillance economy enters the battlefield

The most revealing confirmation may be the least dramatic-sounding one. On May 28, Reuters reported that U.S. military personnel deployed to war zones had been targeted using commercially available location data. Reuters cited a letter in which U.S. Central Command said it had received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater. CENTCOM did not publicly name Iran or Handala. But the disclosure landed in the middle of a Gulf confrontation with Iran, and the lawmakers who pressed the Pentagon described it as the first official confirmation that U.S. forces had been targeted in an active war zone using this type of data.

This matters because the “weapon” was not a classified implant. It was the data economy. Reuters described location data as information typically collected from smartphones or devices by apps or service providers, then sold through data brokers and intermediaries. That means the same ecosystem that powers targeted advertising can also reveal troop movement, congregation points and patterns of life. In the logic of modern asymmetric conflict, ad-tech exhaust becomes targeting intelligence.

A single brand for cyber, influence and physical threat

By May, outside researchers were explicitly warning that Handala was no longer just a hack-and-leak persona. Recorded Future’s Insikt Group assessed that MOIS had likely broadened the Handala brand to encompass external physical and influence operations targeting U.S. and Israeli interests. The report said this consolidation could amplify cyber and physical threats, particularly against law-enforcement, military and intelligence personnel. That analysis helps explain why the Stryker wipe, the Lockheed doxxing, the Marine WhatsApp messages, the Patel breach and the location-data warning should not be read as isolated episodes.

They are not identical operations. Some are officially confirmed; some are adversary claims; some are security-research assessments. But they share a strategic logic: use data, identity, access and ordinary platforms to impose psychological cost. The operation does not need to destroy a power grid to matter. It only needs to show that hospital supply chains, personal inboxes, defense engineers, deployed Marines and critical infrastructure operators are all reachable.

The point was persistence

The cyber front also appears designed to absorb punishment. Commanders can be killed. Domains can be seized. Accounts can be frozen. Leak sites can move. The operational persona survives because its infrastructure is cheap, replaceable and performative. The public-facing brand is itself part of the weapon.

Even Israeli officials now describe the cyber conflict as persistent beyond kinetic pauses. On June 29, Reuters reported that Israel’s cyber chief said Iranian cyberattacks against Israel had surged in 2026, with June hostile cyber incidents rising to about 4,800 compared with roughly 1,600 in June 2025. He added that in cyberspace there is no ceasefire. That line captures the larger issue: the digital front does not end when missiles stop flying.

What can be said with confidence

The clean version is this: since the February 28 U.S.-Israel strikes, Iran-linked cyber and influence actors have run a parallel campaign against U.S., Israeli, military, medical and critical-infrastructure targets. The most clearly documented private-sector case is Stryker, where the company confirmed a global Microsoft-environment disruption and Handala claimed responsibility. Official U.S. documents tie Handala-linked domains to MOIS. Security researchers connect Handala to Void Manticore/Banished Kitten. U.S. agencies warned of Iranian-affiliated exploitation of operational technology in water, energy and municipal systems. U.S. service members in Bahrain received direct threatening messages signed by Handala. CENTCOM confirmed reports that adversaries used commercially available location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.

The careful version is just as important: not every number is verified. Handala’s claim of 200,000 wiped devices and 79 countries should be attributed to Handala. The Lockheed data leak should be described as alleged unless independently authenticated. The critical-infrastructure advisory describes exploitation and some disruption, not a proven sleeper campaign inside every facility. CENTCOM confirmed adversary exploitation of commercial location data, but did not publicly name Iran or Handala in that disclosure.

But the bottom line survives those caveats. The overlooked story is not a single spectacular hack. It is the accumulation of smaller, cheaper, deniable and repeatable operations that turn normal commercial systems into instruments of state pressure. Microsoft device management. Data brokers. WhatsApp. Telegram. Leak sites. Exposed PLCs. Personal email accounts. None of them is exotic. That is precisely why the campaign matters.

Iran’s response was not only fired through the sky. Part of it moved through the infrastructure of ordinary digital life - the systems companies buy to manage devices, the apps people use to communicate, the brokers that sell location trails, and the public platforms that turn stolen data into fear. This story has been visible in fragments. Put together, it shows a cyber campaign built not just to hit, but to haunt.

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Montenegrin police, working in cooperation with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, have arrested a 39-year-old Iranian-Turkish citizen in the coastal city of Kotor on a U.S. warrant tied to a major cybercrime case.

According to the official statement from Montenegro’s Police Directorate, officers from NCB Interpol Podgorica’s FAST team, together with Kotor police, located and detained the suspect at the request of U.S. authorities and the FBI. The statement identifies him only by the initials A.B., describing him as a high-profile target sought in connection with cybercrime and organized crime proceedings in the United States.

Montenegrin outlet Vijesti identified the suspect as Amir Barati, reporting that he is accused of damaging U.S. infrastructure through hacking attacks estimated at $3.4 billion. Iran International also reported that although Montenegrin media named the suspect, the official police statement itself identified him only by his initials.

The man is wanted by a U.S. court in New York on charges including conspiracy to commit computer fraud, computer hacking, and identity theft, according to both Reuters and the Associated Press. Montenegrin police said the alleged cyberattacks began in 2013 and targeted more than 150 U.S. universities, causing damage estimated at more than $3.4 billion.

The Montenegrin police statement said the stolen data, as well as access to compromised university accounts, was used for the benefit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian users, including Iran-based universities. Reuters likewise reported that the compromised access was allegedly used for the benefit of the IRGC and other Iranian entities.

The extradition case has now been referred to the High Court in Podgorica. Reuters reported that the case will go before a High Court judge in Montenegro’s capital, while the Associated Press reported that a court in Podgorica will handle the extradition proceedings.

The allegations closely resemble the U.S. government’s 2018 case against the Iran-based Mabna Institute. In that case, the U.S. Department of Justice charged nine Iranians with conducting what it described as a massive cyber-theft campaign on behalf of the IRGC. The DOJ said the Mabna Institute targeted 144 U.S.-based universities, 176 foreign universities in 21 countries, 47 companies, U.S. government entities, and the United Nations, stealing more than 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property.

The FBI’s 2018 summary of the Mabna case said the group targeted more than 100,000 professor accounts worldwide and successfully compromised approximately 8,000. The FBI also said U.S.-based universities spent approximately $3.4 billion to procure and access data that the hackers obtained for free through criminal activity.

That overlap is significant: the 2013 start date, the university targets, the IRGC connection, and the $3.4 billion figure all mirror the Mabna Institute case. However, Iran International noted that Barati’s name does not appear on the FBI’s public list of the nine Iranian hackers charged in 2018, leaving open whether he is tied to the same broader operation, a related U.S. case, an alias, or a separate sealed or later warrant.

The public record therefore leaves two layers to the story. The first is confirmed: Montenegro says it arrested a 39-year-old Iranian-Turkish citizen in Kotor at the request of U.S. authorities and the FBI, and the case is now moving through extradition proceedings in Podgorica. The second remains unresolved: whether Amir Barati, as named by Montenegrin media, is directly part of the Mabna Institute case or linked to a separate U.S. cybercrime prosecution with overlapping facts.

The arrest also places Montenegro, a NATO member and U.S. ally, at the center of a high-profile extradition case involving alleged Iranian cyber operations. As the Associated Press reported, Montenegro is a small Adriatic country of about 620,000 people and is viewed as next in line to join the European Union. Its cooperation with the FBI in this case underscores how U.S. cybercrime investigations can extend far beyond American territory, particularly when wanted suspects travel outside Iran.

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Reports and rumors have circulated in recent days about the collection of banknotes and a sharp increase in demand for physical cash in parts of Iran. Some of these reports remain difficult to verify. But whether every detail proves accurate or not, the alarm they raise is real.

What happens if Iran’s banking infrastructure, payment networks, or financial systems suddenly face a serious disruption? And more importantly: are ordinary Iranians prepared for that moment?

For years, the Islamic Republic has pushed the Iranian public into deep dependence on electronic banking, card payments, mobile banking applications, and online transfers. In normal times, this dependence is presented as convenience. But in a crisis, it can become a trap.

If banking networks are disabled, if the main data centers of major banks are attacked, or if payment systems are taken offline, daily life can freeze almost immediately. People may still have money in their accounts, but they cannot access it. They may have bank cards, but no functioning point-of-sale machines. They may have mobile banking apps, but no connection to the system. They may need basic goods, but have no usable way to pay for them.

That risk becomes far more dangerous if physical cash has already become scarce.

This is why the reports about cash being collected or pulled out of circulation deserve serious attention. Iran has already seen warning signs. On June 23, 2026, Reuters reported that Iran’s state-owned banking technology provider said cyberattacks had disrupted card-based banking services at Bank Melli, Bank Saderat, and Bank Tejarat. The same report said ATM services, point-of-sale terminals, and mobile banking applications linked to card systems were affected, and that card-related operations at the three banks were temporarily suspended.

That incident followed an earlier disruption. On June 14, Reuters reported that a cyberattack had disrupted services at four major Iranian banks — Bank Melli, Bank Tejarat, Bank Saderat, and the Export Development Bank of Iran — after an attack on shared communications infrastructure used by those institutions.

The warnings did not begin there. In March 2026, the Jerusalem Post reported that services at Bank Sepah and Bank Melli were disrupted, citing Iran’s IRGC-linked Fars News Agency. The report said Bank Sepah’s mobile and internet services were disrupted, while Bank Melli experienced problems affecting ATMs and other points of service.

Whether these incidents were cyberattacks, infrastructure failures, or a combination of both, the issue is about the entire architecture of daily economic survival.

Modern authoritarian systems understand that social control is not only exercised through prisons, censorship, or armed force. It can also be exercised through access to money and basic services. When these systems are disrupted or manipulated, the public can be forced into dependency, panic, and paralysis.

Iran’s own record makes that concern impossible to dismiss. Reuters reported in May 2026 that Iranians were reconnecting after a long internet shutdown, following a blackout initially imposed on January 8 during a crackdown on nationwide anti-government demonstrations and then renewed after the start of U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran on February 28. Freedom House has also documented Iran’s highly restricted internet environment, including shutdowns and efforts to push users toward a domestic version of the internet where authorities can more effectively control content and monitor activity.

In a country where internet shutdowns have repeatedly been used as instruments of political control, the possibility of banking and payment disruption cannot be treated as hypothetical. In such a context, the collection or disappearance of banknotes is not a minor monetary issue. It may become part of a broader pressure campaign against the population.

Cash matters because cash is the last-resort payment system. When the state cannot guarantee digital access, physical currency becomes a form of civilian resilience.

The European Central Bank has noted that cash’s unique attributes — that it is tangible, resilient, offline, and widely accepted — become especially important during crises and can be used for crisis preparedness. The Eurosystem’s cash strategy also states that euro cash should remain widely available, accessible, and accepted as both a means of payment and a store of value.

The United States Federal Reserve has its own continuity planning for physical currency. Its FedCash Services Business Continuity Guide explains procedures for disruptions to automated cash ordering systems and site-specific disruptions such as power outages, severe weather, or transportation problems.

The lesson is straightforward: serious states plan for the moment when normal payment channels fail. They maintain liquidity, backup ordering channels, cash distribution procedures, and continuity plans so that everyday economic activity does not collapse when technology breaks down.

Iran’s vulnerability is especially acute because the public has been made dependent on systems that the state itself can restrict, disable, monitor, or fail to protect. If the regime or hostile actors can interfere with banking infrastructure, and if cash is unavailable at the same time, the Iranian public could be trapped between two locked doors: no digital access and no physical money.

That is why the Central Bank and the country’s financial institutions must be questioned directly.

The Islamic Republic has long weaponized instability. It has used scarcity, fear, and dependency as tools of rule. A banking crisis combined with a cash shortage would fit that pattern: a crisis in which the public bears the burden while the ruling class protects itself.

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The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was born as the armed fist of the 1979 revolution. Four decades later, it is something else: an armed economic class.

The story of the Guards is often told as a story of ideology, militancy, and repression. That is true, but incomplete. The IRGC is also a story about money — who got it, who controls it, who was left out, and who is now being asked to defend a system whose spoils were never meant for them.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, after the Iran-Iraq War, the Guards faced a turning point. The war had ended, but the Islamic Republic was left with thousands of militarized men, an exhausted economy, damaged infrastructure, and a regime that needed to keep its most loyal armed constituency employed, rewarded, and politically useful.

Under the banner of reconstruction, the IRGC entered the economy.

That postwar moment became the foundation of a new power structure. What began as the use of military manpower and equipment to rebuild a devastated country gradually became a vast empire of construction firms, oil and gas contracts, import channels, ports, foundations, front companies, banks, telecommunications interests, smuggling routes, and sanctions-evasion networks.

The Guards were created to be the muscle of the clerical class, but with the war over, they were no longer content to remain merely the mullahs’ enforcers. They began carving out a financial and political domain of their own.

One of the most important vehicles for that transformation was Khatam al-Anbiya, the IRGC’s engineering and construction conglomerate. According to the Institute for National Security Studies, Khatam al-Anbiya was established in 1989 at the Supreme Leader’s directive to help reconstruct Iran after the Iran-Iraq War. It was placed under the Revolutionary Guards, with its head appointed by the IRGC commander. Over time, it became one of the regime’s most important economic arms. It built a network of lucrative subsidiaries, and ghosts with shell companies, working with thousands of affiliaties and contractors, and tens of thousands of workers.

If the postwar reconstruction period gave the Guards their opening, the Rafsanjani era gave them their opportunity. As the Foundation for Defense of Democracies noted in its report, the IRGC’s economic role was still limited when Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani took office, but by the time he left the presidency in 1997, the Guards had become one of the main players in Iran’s economy.

This is the key point: the IRGC did not simply become rich by accident. It was allowed — and then empowered — to become rich.

The Islamic Republic created an armed patronage class and then became dependent on it.

Today, the IRGC is no longer only a military organization. The senior ranks of the IRGC and their associated networks have become one of the principal beneficiaries of the Islamic Republic’s decay. They thrive in opacity, profit from sanctions and benefit from isolation. They dominate sectors where competition has been strangled and where access is determined not by efficiency or innovation, but by proximity to power.

This is why the Guards’ economic empire has been so difficult to dislodge. The IRGC does not merely receive state money; it generates its own. It does not merely enforce the regime; it owns pieces of it and monetizes the revolution.

But the wealth at the top has not translated into security at the bottom.

And that is the fracture worth watching.

The Islamic Republic presents the IRGC as a brotherhood of ideological loyalty: commanders and foot soldiers united by faith, sacrifice, martyrdom, and revolutionary purpose. The reality is more brittle. At the top are commanders, former commanders, politically connected veterans, and regime insiders who have turned revolutionary credentials into contracts, foundations, commercial monopolies, luxury lifestyles, and privileged access to the state. Beneath them are ordinary Guardsmen, Basij members, border personnel, and lower-ranking security forces who are expected to suppress protests, man dangerous posts, absorb public hatred, and survive on salaries that often fail to keep up with the cost of living.

The class divide inside the IRGC mirrors the class divide inside the Islamic Republic itself.

The commanders became a new aristocracy. The lower ranks became the servants.

This internal resentment is not theoretical. A Washington Institute analysis of purported internal IRGC meeting notes, published as Inside Iran’s Regime: IRGC Economic Frustrations, described commanders complaining that salaries could not keep up with the cost of living, especially for soldiers trying to support families or pay for their children’s education. One commander reportedly said soldiers were being forced to take multiple jobs. Another complained about the pay disparity between personnel serving on dangerous borders and those sitting behind desks in Tehran.

That is not just an administrative grievance. It is a class grievance.

The lower-ranking Guardsman is asked to believe in sacrifice while watching the upper ranks accumulate wealth. He is told the Islamic Republic is under siege while seeing the children of regime insiders enjoy privilege, connections, and protection. He is ordered to defend a system that preaches austerity to the poor and impunity to the powerful.

In any authoritarian system, the loyalty of the coercive apparatus is the final firewall. The Islamic Republic has survived not because it is popular, but because it has maintained enough cohesion among those willing to shoot, arrest, intimidate, monitor, and suppress on its behalf. The regime’s survival depends on the assumption that those men will obey.

But obedience is not the same as belief.

For years, Tehran has tried to manage this problem through patronage: salaries, benefits, housing access, university quotas, business opportunities, pensions, and the social prestige of belonging to the regime’s armed elite. But patronage systems decay when the spoils become too visibly unequal. The commanders at the top are not just better paid; they are plugged into a different economy entirely. They live in the economy of contracts, protection, foreign currency, foundations, import monopolies, and illicit channels. The lower ranks live in the economy of inflation, delayed wages, shrinking purchasing power, and public resentment.

Iran International reported in 2023 that some IRGC commanders were allegedly pocketing large sums intended as salaries for proxy fighters, claiming higher salary expenses from the government while paying fighters much less and keeping the difference. The report should be treated as an allegation based on hearsay, but its significance lies in what it reveals about the structure: even within the world of militias and proxy warfare, money flows downward through commanders who control access, accounting, and distribution.

The Islamic Republic has built a hierarchy in which every layer above can extract from the layer below. That is why the IRGC’s corruption is not merely personal greed. It is institutional design.

Sanctions, instead of weakening the Guards uniformly, have often strengthened their relative position. In a normal economy, sanctions are a disaster. In a militarized shadow economy, sanctions become an opportunity for those with access to smuggling routes, front companies and black markets. The ordinary Iranian gets inflation and scarcity. Independent businesses get squeezed. Lower-ranking personnel get eroded salaries. But those tied to the right networks can turn scarcity into profit. This is the economy the IRGC learned to master: the economy of crisis.

A commander with access to a port can profit from sanctions but the lower-ranking Guardsman cannot. A senior figure connected to procurement can profit from import controls, but his provincial Basij member cannot. An IRGC-linked firm can win no-bid infrastructure contracts, but ordinary worker, soldier, or small business owner cannot. That is the hidden class war inside the Guards.

The IRGC’s senior ranks now have every incentive to preserve the Islamic Republic as a closed, securitized, sanctioned, opaque system because that is the environment in which their power is most valuable. The more normal, transparent, competitive, and accountable Iran becomes, the less valuable their coercive access becomes. The lower ranks, however, are asked to defend that order without sharing in its rewards.

This does not mean the IRGC is about to collapse. Authoritarian coercive institutions can endure deep resentment for a long time. Fear, indoctrination, surveillance, mutual complicity, and lack of alternatives can hold men in place even when belief fades. Many in the lower ranks may still be ideologically committed. Others may remain loyal out of self-interest, fear, or hatred of the regime’s opponents. The IRGC is not a monolith, but neither is it a fragile shell.

Still, the divide matters because it exposes the regime’s most dangerous vulnerability: the gap between the mythology of sacrifice and the reality of extraction.

The Islamic Republic has always relied on revolutionary language to disguise material hierarchy. It speaks of the oppressed while enriching the connected. It praises martyrdom while protecting the sons of insiders. It denounces capitalism while building monopolies. It condemns corruption while running the economy through opaque institutions. It tells the poor to endure hardship for Islam while rewarding commanders with contracts, companies, and immunity.

The IRGC is the purest expression of that contradiction.

The men at the top became rich by claiming to defend the revolution from enemies. The men at the bottom are now being asked to defend the rich men at the top from the consequences of what they built.

That is why the class divide inside the Guards is politically explosive. It strikes at the regime’s final line of defense. If the public hates the commanders, the regime can repress the public. If the lower ranks resent the commanders, the regime has a different problem.

The Islamic Republic’s great fear has always been that the street will rise. The street has risen multiple times before, but the Guards quenched the popular voice. The truly dangerous question now may be what happens when the men ordered to crush the street begin asking why their commanders got mansions, contracts, foundations, and foreign accounts — while they got inflation, delayed salaries, dead friends, and blame.

The Guards were created to protect the revolution, but they may yet become the place where the revolution’s own class contradictions are most impossible to hide.

This article is copyright © Iran So Far Away. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this content without explicit written permission is strictly prohibited and subject to legal action under applicable copyright laws.

By Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour

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The trial of Johannes Natland, a 19-year-old Norwegian with a history of drug abuse and psychiatric hospitalization, ended in London’s Old Bailey with a deadlocked jury on June 18, 2026, and Natland will remain in custody until a new trial can be arranged. Over the past couple weeks, the court and the press heard how the young man had been hired by a Tehran-linked criminal gang called Foxtrot, operating in Sweden, and sent to the UK to kill an as-yet unnamed target on behalf of the Islamic Regime for 25,000 Euros.

Teenage Norwegian hitman ‘sent to UK by gangsters linked to Iran’

Arrested in Huddersfield’s Briar Court Hotel on March 18, 2025, Natland was discovered by police to be carrying two guns and 12 rounds of ammunition. When the officers entered his room, Natland “was seen pretending to shoot one of the officers arresting him, in police body-worn camera footage shown in court.”

As described by the BBC, “The jury heard that Natland was added to a Signal group chat on 15 March 2025 - eight days after his 18th birthday - and (he) almost immediately asked “Who is to be killed?” Two days later he was at Stavanger (in Norway) airport with an emergency passport and boarded a flight to Manchester. On arrival, he was stopped by Border Force because he had only £40 in cash, no accommodation and no return ticket.

He was refused entry but allowed into the UK temporarily until a flight home four days later.

The next morning, Natland travelled by taxi to Huddersfield and was sent a video by a Signal user showing where cash had been hidden near a footpath underpass. After collecting the money, he checked into the hotel and paid in cash. Following further instructions sent by the same Signal user, he took another taxi to woodland on the outskirts of the town, where he retrieved two handguns. He was also directed to a stolen car with a key hidden under the wheel. That evening, Natland bought beer and sent videos of the guns to a friend, along with a photo of himself posing with cash spread across the hotel bed. A Signal user known as ‘Agent 47’, who had arranged his travel to Manchester, messaged him: ‘We have much to do tomorrow.’ He was arrested the following morning.”

The Natland case is not an outlier, as the Foxtrot gang has been tied to a large number of terrorist attacks and assassinations carried out in return for money, as part of Tehran’s wider program of using professional criminals to carry out its dirty work. Where Foxtrot is unique is in its practice of hiring adolescents who are impoverished and mentally disturbed to be its gunmen.

Emerging in the late 2010s and quickly becoming one of the biggest narcotics and weapons trafficking networks in Sweden, Foxtrot is led by 39-year-old Rawa Majid. An ethnic Kurdish man born in Kermanshah, Iran, Majid was raised in Uppsala, Sweden, and he began his career as a teenager, first selling stolen goods before graduating to drug dealing. Arrested in 2009, he was imprisoned until 2015, and formed Foxtrot upon his release. Foxtrot quickly became the primary drug supplier in Stockholm, with Majid receiving the nickname “Kurdish Fox” –“Children became his hitmen. Backstreet rappers wrote songs for him. He used an encrypted communication system. His organization even had a logo: a uniformed fox holding a gun.”

Foxtrot leader Rawa Majid and narcotics bearing the Foxtrot label. Images from an investigation by the Swedish Customs Service. File photo.

But Swedish police began to infiltrate the gang and were able to break through its communications mechanism. Majid fled to Iraqi Kurdistan, adopting the alias Miran Othman, but soon had to leave due to an extradition request from Sweden.

He found a new home in Turkiye, purchasing nationality using that country’s Citizens by Investment program, and buying a large villa for $300,000. Then, a new gang war broke out between Majid and a former lieutenant of his named Ismael Abdo. Also Kurdish, but of Lebanese and Turkish parentage, the contest between Foxtrot and Abdo’s gang, called Rumba, soon spread across multiple boundaries. “Majid’s men beat up a man from Ismail Abdo’s gang in Istanbul. In retaliation, on September 6, 2023, Abdo’s men shot at Majid’s men sitting in a café in Istanbul’s Sarıyer, right by Majid’s house. The next day, Majid retaliated by having Abdo’s 60-year-old mother in Sweden killed. Abdo took his revenge by shooting up the building where Majid’s mother-in-law lived on September 9.” Also, that same month, Stockholm police seized 800 kg of hashish, cocaine and amphetamines smuggled by Foxtrot.

Swedish authorities immediately filed an extradition request for Majid, and the gang leader fled Turkiye for Iran, choosing that country apparently because it had very bad relations with Sweeden at that moment. He was arrested, however, in October 2023 and given a blunt choice – go to prison or join the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Majid did so, and he is said to still be living in Iran, under the protection of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

Thus, Foxtrot branched out from organized crime to terrorism, and Majid’s network now began to work for the Islamic Regime’s interests. An investigation a year later by Swedish public television station SVT found “a comprehensive ‘target catalogue’ Iran provided to Foxtrot encompassing Israeli embassy attacks, defense contractor strikes, Israeli citizen kidnappings and assassinations, plus assaults on Jewish community facilities and synagogues throughout Europe. The report details how the organization’s sources received directives to expand operations into Germany, Belgium, and Britain, including the elimination of Iran International television’s exiled journalists.”

In January 2024, a grenade was placed outside the Israeli embassy in Stockholm, in what analysts later described as “Majid’s ‘admission ticket’ to Iran, understanding the device was never meant to detonate but rather demonstrate serious intent to secure regime sponsorship.” The grenade was thrown over the embassy’s fence and later detonated in a controlled manner by Swedish police, causing no injuries.

The “test” obviously found approval, because Foxtrot’s terrorist actions soon escalated. On May 16, 2024, a 15-year-old boy was arrested traveling to the same Stockholm Israeli embassy, having been hired to conduct a shooting there. Swedish police were monitoring the mobile phone and text conversations and arrested the boy before his arrival. However, the next day, May 17, a 14-year-old boy who had been hired for the same job by Rumba, Foxtrot’s rival, managed to get to the embassy and fire several rounds from a 9mm semi-automatic pistol before being subdued and arrested. Also in May, a Foxtrot operative threw grenades at the Israeli embassy in Brussels, Belgium. Independent investigations by both Swedish intelligence (SAPO) and Israeli intelligence (Mossad) soon discovered and revealed the Foxtrot-Tehran and Rumba-Tehran relationships to the global public. Observers could only note the morbid irony that two homicidal nemeses, each the archfiend of the other, were yet working for the same paymaster. “Iran operates many criminal organizations in Sweden and Europe in general, while taking advantage of the relative advantage of each and sometimes the rivalry between them,” the Mossad statement read.

Yet the violence continued. More shots were fired at the Stockholm Israeli embassy the evening of September 30^th. Two days, later, early in the morning on October 2, 2024, two Swedish boys, aged 16 and 18, threw grenades at the Israeli embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. They missed and the weapons instead exploded on the terrace of a nearby residential building, leaving no one hurt. The pair were quickly caught and at trial, the younger of them admitted to working for Foxtrot while both confessed to the crime and “said they did it for money and denied being ideologically motivated.” On October 10, a 13-year-old was apprehended while shooting at the Gothenburg headquarters of Elsbit Systems, an Israeli electronics firm.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on March 12, 2025 that Foxtrot, and Rawa Majid individually, were being placed under sanctions. The UK government placed their own sanctions on the network on April 14. On June 22, Swedish television reported that Tehran was urging Rawa Majid to carry out more attacks against U.S. and Israeli targets in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Informants within his circle are said to have told the TV network that Majid directed his top collaborators to identify assassins who could carry out the missions. According to the informant, “We have been offered a job by Iran, synagogues and embassies to be blown up or shot and diplomats are killed or kidnapped.” The TV report went on to state that members of Majid’s inner circle contacted Swedish professional criminals and demanded that they help locate people to carry out attacks, threatening retaliation against those who refuse. June 2025 also brought reports that Foxtrot was exploring methods of renting drones for attacking Jewish targets in Scandinavia. On June 23, the US Embassy in Stockholm issued a warning that it too might soon be attacked by Iranian-hired criminals, including Foxtrot.

On March 8, 2026, the US embassy in Oslo, Norway was bombed, and reports soon stated that Norwegian police suspected Foxtrot. That same week, as US forces attacked Iran, a number of terrorist attacks took place in Europe – a synagogue in Liege, Belgium, was bombed on March 9, while four Iranians were arrested in the UK on March 6 on suspicion of planning attacks on Jewish sites.

Implications

Tehran has always preferred to due to have its extrajudicial actions performed by proxy forces, allowing it to assert clean hands and deny any responsibility. The scope of the proxy forces it used has been broadening over the decades, moving first from Islamist militias, then to left-wing and ultranationalist European guerillas, finally to transnational crime syndicates who will do anything for a dollar. Groups like Foxtrot and Rumba, however, add a new layer to this matrix as perpetrators can be anyone, seemingly, responding to an online “job offer.” As British researcher Guy Fiennes writes:

In cases of state-orchestrated violence-as-a-service attacks, recruits are often (but not always) young and motivated by financial incentive or thrill-seeking; some have prior involvement in low-level criminal activity...

So, just as the notion of work is changing and full-time employment at a big corporation for many is replaced by a succession of short-term independent contract jobs found online, so too organized crime is changing, no longer is a gang a secret society that can be penetrated and broken by law enforcement, instead any socially alienated and violent person can be hired to commit a crime via their mobile. Likewise, a terrorist is no longer someone a leader must recruit, spend months if not years ideologically indoctrinating, and carefully nurtured for the planned attack, no; Tehran can now just as easily find gunmen as the average person finds a plumber.

Despite the signing of a memorandum to end the US-Iran conflict on June 19, 2026, there is no reason to doubt that Tehran will not continue to attack targets in Europe, whether they be Israeli, Jewish, or Iranian dissidents. Islamic Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf still says that “the liberation of Jerusalem is the vengeance for the Leader’s death.” In that regard, there should be many employment opportunities available for groups such as Foxtrot and Rumba.

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In Persian, the word akhoond refers to a Shiite cleric. In its neutral sense, it simply means clergyman, but in Iranian vernacular, the word often carries a more derogatory and contemptuous charge than formal terms such as Rowhani, meaning cleric or spiritual figure, or the broader word Mullah. Akhoond does not merely describe a profession, it evokes a social type.

In everyday Iranian usage, especially in anti-clerical jokes, political criticism, and folk memory, the akhoond is not imagined as a humble man of faith. He is the clerical operator: the man who uses religion as leverage, hides appetite behind piety, and turns sacred language into a tool of control. He lectures others about morality while exempting himself from it. He speaks in the name of God while coveting someone else’s property, body, vote, or country.

There is an old Iranian folk tale about a man, his donkey, and an akhoond.

The story goes: A poor man’s donkey — the animal he depended on for work and hauling — is taken by a cleric. The man pleads, telling the akhoond that he cannot work and earn his crust without the donkey, to no avail. The man waits, hoping to one day reclaim what is his. Then the cleric dies. Thinking justice may finally be possible, the man goes to retrieve his donkey, only to realize that another cleric has taken the donkey for himself. The new akhoond then tells the man that the donkey will only be returned to him when it is dead and no longer useful.

The joke is bitter because it is not really about a donkey. It is about power. It is about property swallowed by sanctimony. It is about a class of men who turn religious status into social immunity, and who pass privilege from one turban to the next as if the world itself were an inheritance. The joke is a living memory, a testament to the feeling of a nation oppressed by a ruling caste who were largely imported from abroad by Shiite kings.

This is why the tale survives. It is not a documented historical incident. It belongs to the deeper archive of Iranian memory: oral satire, bazaar wit, village grievance, family storytelling. For centuries, Iranians have used jokes, animal fables, and street wisdom to say what formal politics would not allow them to say openly.

That power did not materialize suddenly in 1979. The revolution simply marked the moment the akhoond finally grabbed the position of dominance he had long coveted, after decades in which modern, secular civilization had rightly, pushed clerical authority further to the margins of Iranian life. The Islamic Republic weaponized the akhoond, gave him ministries, prisons, militias, courts, foundations, media networks, and international reach. But the cultural type was already familiar. Long before Khomeini transformed the clerical class into a political elite, the Iranian public had already developed an instinctive suspicion toward the mullah who speaks in the name of God while reaching for someone else’s donkey.

The genius of Iranian culture is that it often encodes its most serious political truths in comedy. The folk tale of the stolen donkey is funny only on the surface. Beneath it is a devastating observation: when clerical power becomes institutional, the individual akhoond hardly matters. One dies, another arrives, the black robe remains. The appetite remains. The language of piety remains. The donkey is still gone.

This same cultural understanding appears with magnificent force in legendary Iranian play Shahr-e Ghesseh — The City of Tales, or Story Ville.

Written and staged in the late 1960s, by the celebrated Iranian playwright, director, and actor Bijan Mofid, it is one of the great works of modern Iranian theater. It is remembered not merely as a play, but as a national allegory that examines how the pursuit of social status often comes at the cost of one’s inherent characteristics. Each character is represented by a specific animal, and each tries to prove who they are, even as the world around them pressures them to abandon what makes them distinct. It is a grievous tale of characters whose realities are inhibited by enforced practices, values, and superstitions; alienated from themselves, stripped of their original nature, and forced to conform. The play draws on traditional Iranian theatrical forms, including music, improvisation, comedy, and elements of puppet theater.

And in that symbolic universe, the mullah appears as a fox.

The choice is perfect.

The fox in Iranian and broader literary imagination is not powerful like a lion; it survives by cunning. He flatters, maneuvers, deceives, hides, calculates, and waits. He does not need to own the field openly; he only needs to manipulate the rules of the field. The fox is slippery and crafty. He is not necessarily wise or spiritual, but he sure knows how to perform spirituality when it serves him.

That is why the mullah-as-fox lands so deeply in Iranian cultural memory. It captures an ancient public intuition: the corrupt akhoond is rarely direct. He does not simply steal; he sanctifies the theft. He does not merely lust; he moralizes everyone else’s body. He does not openly hunger for power; he calls power “duty,” “divine order,” “guardianship,” or “protection of religion.” He does not admit that he wants the donkey. He produces a sermon explaining why the donkey was never truly yours.

This is the character Iranians have mocked for generations: the lecherous preacher who polices women in public and pursues them in private; the sly mediator who profits from both sides of a dispute; the self-appointed guardian of morality whose own appetite is never satisfied; the cleric who speaks of sacrifice while living off the sacrifices of others.

This distinction matters. Iranian hostility to the akhoond has never simply been hostility to religion. Iran is a civilization of poets, mystics, philosophers, rituals, and sacred language. The Iranian people have produced profound forms of spiritual imagination. What they have also produced, with equal sophistication, is a long tradition of anti-clerical satire. They know the difference between faith and clerical predation.

What is contradictory, confusing, and deeply depressing to Iranians of all political persuasions, even including Iranian leftists, is that many Western so-called liberals and leftists - who claim to oppose precisely these same forces in their own societies: the abuse of religion for political power, parochialism, social coercion, outdated patriarchy, moral policing, and the fusion of state authority with religious control - suddenly become apologists for it when Middle Eastern people — especially Iranians — fight tooth and nail to free themselves from that very yoke. Some of those same Western voices romanticize or excuse the covetous, hypocritical mullah and his army of guards as “culturally authentic,” “anti-imperialist,” or “national liberation leaders”, while ignoring the people crushed beneath them. The result is a grotesque double standard: what they would denounce as reactionary oppression at home, they defend or minimize abroad, even when the people living under it have made clear, at immense personal cost, that they want out.

The Islamic Republic collapsed that distinction by design. It turned the akhoond from a familiar social nuisance into the central machinery of the state. The fox was no longer merely lurking around the henhouse. The fox became the law, the judge, the executioner, the censor, the diplomat, the banker, the commander, and the television preacher. The same Ulema who had long claimed to “own” Iranians’ souls know completely dominated their bodies.

This is why old jokes now sound prophetic.

The story of the donkey is the story of confiscated property, revolutionary courts, religious foundations, “temporary” seizures that become permanent, and private lives swallowed by clerical authority. The man who cannot get his donkey back is the Iranian citizen trying to reclaim his country, his home, his daughter’s freedom, his son’s future, his stolen wealth, his language, his history.

And the answer he receives is always some version of the same akhoond logic: wait, obey, submit, accept, and perhaps when the thing is dead, useless, exhausted, or destroyed, we will discuss returning it.

In Shahr-e Ghesseh, the animal masks allow society to look at itself without the false dignity of official titles. Strip away the turban, the pulpit, the Arabic phrases, the theatrical humility, and what remains? The fox. The operator. The creature of appetite and evasion.

That is the cultural brilliance of the Iranian imagination. It understood the akhoond not by his claims, but by his behavior. It measured him not by the holiness of his vocabulary, but by the trail of damage behind him.

The Islamic Republic did not invent the fox-mullah. It enthroned him.

That is why the protest chant “This is the last battle” carries such historical and cultural force. It is not merely a slogan against one administration, one faction, or one supreme leader. It is a declaration that many Iranians understand their struggle as a final confrontation with the clerical system itself: the Shiite mullah as ruler, censor, moral policeman, judge, and beneficiary of armed protection. The message is not simply that the Khomeinist regime must go, but that the social privileges, coercive institutions, and inherited authority of the akhoond class must go with it. In that sense, the chant expresses a determination to end not only a government, but the political culture that allowed the fox in a turban to occupy every corner of public life.

There is a grim historical irony here. In Medici Florence, the reign of a religious disciplinarian such as Savonarola — with his moral absolutism, public puritanism, and coercive vision of society — burned intensely but briefly. His moment of dominance lasted only a few years before Florence turned against him. Iran’s Savonarolas, by contrast, have not merely survived; they have thrived and been institutionalized. In 2026, after 47 years, the Khomeinist order has hardened into a state culture of enforcement. That is what makes the Iranian case so tragic: a form of religious authoritarianism that Renaissance Florence ultimately rejected in less than a decade has been allowed to entrench itself over nearly half a century in one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

For generations, Iranians laughed at the akhoond because laughter was safer than accusation. They told stories about him because direct confrontation was dangerous. They turned him into an animal because animals reveal what costumes conceal. A fox in a turban is still a fox. Westerners educated in ideas of “parody” as a method of protest can easily appreciate the methods.

Today, that old folk wisdom feels less like folklore than political diagnosis. The akhoond who took the donkey has become the regime that took the country. And just as in the old tale, the problem is not solved when one cleric disappears. The next one steps forward, recites the same sanctimonious script, and keeps what was stolen.

This is the enduring Iranian understanding of the mullah culture: not merely religious authority, but a system of entitlement disguised as piety; not merely hypocrisy, but organized hypocrisy; not merely personal corruption, but inherited predation.

The donkey was never just a donkey.

It was Iran.

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Tucker Carlson has now done what every serious observer of the Islamic Republic’s influence operations should have expected: he handed Trita Parsi a two-hour propaganda platform, dressed it up as “independent thinking,” and let one of Tehran’s most reliable Washington echo chambers recast the Khomeinist regime as the misunderstood victim of American and Israeli aggression.

This was not journalism.

It was laundering.

Parsi’s own Substack made clear why Carlson invited him: after The Free Press reported that the State Department was examining whether Parsi should face immigration consequences, Carlson contacted him and brought him on to discuss that issue, the war, negotiations, and “Israel’s role” in U.S.-Iran tensions. In other words, Tucker saw a man accused for years of carrying water for the regime’s interests and decided the correct response was to give him a two-hour rehabilitation tour.

That tells us something.

Either Tucker Carlson is bought and paid for by the Khomeinist regime’s influence network, mentally unstable, or so ideologically deranged by his hatred of Israel and America’s traditional alliances that he can no longer distinguish anti-war rhetoric from regime propaganda. Whichever it is, the result is the same: he is now functioning as a broadcast outlet for Tehran’s preferred narrative.

And the narrative is always the same.

The Islamic Republic is never the aggressor. The IRGC is never the problem. The hostage-taking, terrorism, assassinations, militias, nuclear extortion, gender apartheid, internet shutdowns, torture chambers, mass executions, proxy wars, and decades of chants of “Death to America” somehow disappear. What remains is a familiar little morality play in which Iran is “provoked,” Israel is the villain, America is manipulated, and people like Trita Parsi are merely “reasonable” men calling for peace.

Spare us.

This is not peace advocacy. This is a protection racket for the regime.

Carlson did not interrogate Parsi’s record. He did not press him on NIAC’s history. He did not press him on the court record from Parsi and NIAC’s failed defamation case against Hassan Daioleslam, where the D.C. Circuit documented discovery conduct that included withheld materials, belated productions, and a district court finding that NIAC’s suppression of documents was “inexplicable,” “unexplained,” and “indefensible.” He did not ask why emails disclosed in that case showed Parsi corresponding with Javad Zarif, then Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations and later foreign minister, about meetings with U.S. lawmakers and policy conferences.

No, Tucker treated him as a persecuted truth-teller.

That is not skepticism. That is surrender.

Worse, Carlson framed Parsi as some brave dissident voice being crushed by the machine. But what “machine,” exactly? The machine that actually crushes dissent is in Tehran. It is the Khomeinist regime that blinds protesters, rapes prisoners, hangs teenagers, murders women for showing their hair, disappears dissidents, and bankrolls militias from Beirut to Baghdad to Sana’a. It is the IRGC that has built an empire of blood and theft while ordinary Iranians are starved, censored, beaten, and shot.

And yet somehow, in Tucker Carlson’s upside-down universe, the victim is Trita Parsi.

This is the oldest trick in the regime-lobby playbook: take attention away from the Islamic Republic’s crimes and redirect it toward Israel, neocons, “warmongers,” “the blob,” or anyone else who can be blamed for Tehran’s behavior. The mullahs set the region on fire, and their apologists run to American microphones to complain about the smoke.

Tucker has now become one of those microphones.

During the interview, Parsi praised the U.S.-Iran deal as a “significant achievement,” argued that Iran’s frozen funds were simply “their money,” dismissed the idea that Iran is an existential threat to Israel, and suggested that Israel’s own security doctrine is the real existential threat. Tucker, instead of challenging the absurdity, rewarded him with praise, calling him one of the most “reasonable pro-American voices” on the issue.

That sentence alone should end whatever credibility Tucker Carlson still had on Iran.

Reasonable? Pro-American?

A pro-American position does not whitewash a regime that has spent forty-seven years targeting Americans, threatening Americans, kidnapping Americans, plotting on American soil, arming America’s enemies, and chanting for America’s destruction. A pro-American position does not pretend that the Islamic Republic is a normal state actor being unfairly maligned by Israel. A pro-American position does not ignore the Iranian people, who have risked their lives again and again to tell the world that this regime does not represent them.

Tucker Carlson’s problem is not that he opposes war. Plenty of decent people oppose war. The problem is that he has confused opposition to war with apologetics for one of the most violent regimes on earth.

That is not restraint.

That is moral collapse.

And it is especially grotesque because the people who pay the price for this propaganda are not Tucker Carlson, not Trita Parsi, not the Quincy Institute circuit, not the Substack class, and not the American podcast aristocracy. The people who pay the price are Iranians inside Iran — women, students, workers, dissidents, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, prisoners, and families of the executed — whose suffering is erased every time Tehran’s lobbyists successfully reframe the regime as the injured party.

This is why the Iranian diaspora has been warning America for years.

The Khomeinist regime does not need every useful voice to be formally on its payroll. Sometimes it only needs vanity, ideology, resentment, and a very large microphone. Tucker Carlson has supplied all four.

He has become the perfect American vessel for Tehran’s message: arrogant enough to think he has discovered a hidden truth, ignorant enough to ignore the regime’s record, and reckless enough to platform a man whose public career has revolved around softening Washington’s posture toward the Islamic Republic.

The issue is not whether Tucker Carlson has the right to interview Trita Parsi. Of course he does.

But if Tucker Carlson is so committed to “hearing all sides,” then let him prove it. I challenge him to sit down with Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. I challenge him to interview Amir Taheri. I challenge him to give two uninterrupted hours to any serious Iranian voice who represents the other side of Parsi’s propaganda — the side of the Iranian people, the dissidents, the prisoners, the families of the executed, the women beaten for refusing the hijab, the exiles who have spent decades warning the West about exactly this machinery of deception. Let Tucker put a real Iranian patriot across from his microphone and see whether his “anti-war” courage survives contact with the truth. Because platforming Trita Parsi is easy. Challenging the Khomeinist narrative is what would require a spine.

The issue is that the interview revealed, again, how completely Carlson has abandoned any serious moral standard when the subject is Iran. He is not challenging power. He is protecting it — just not American power. He is protecting the narrative architecture of a foreign regime that has survived for decades by deception, brutality, and Western gullibility.

And he did it while pretending to be brave. There is nothing brave about repeating Tehran’s talking points in English. There is nothing brave about attacking Israel while ignoring the IRGC. There is nothing brave about presenting the regime’s apologists as persecuted prophets while real Iranian dissidents rot in prison cells. There is nothing brave about turning American skepticism of war into a propaganda pipeline for the Islamic Republic.

Tucker Carlson can call this “anti-war” all he wants. But when your anti-war politics consistently excuse the men who export war, fund war, threaten war, and use war to keep themselves in power, you are not anti-war. You are anti-accountability.

And that is exactly what this was.

A two-hour exercise in anti-accountability, and a disgraceful reminder that the Khomeinist regime does not only operate through embassies, militias, and front organizations. It also operates through the vanity of Western men who think being contrarian makes them wise.

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