u/KireRakhsh

The same Islamic regime who butchers Iranians and the same useful idiots in the West who today screech and mock-faint at current events.

Nothing has changed, except they hope that you'll forget or won't think for yourself.

Unlike the rootless, Iranians do not forget.

We know who we are and we know who they are as well.

Payande Iran

Javid Shah

Mountains preserve evidence of ancient oceans, moving continents and tectonic processes that have shaped Earth over millions of years. Later deformation, erosion and burial, however, can obscure important parts of this geological record. An international research team led by Istanbul Technical University (ITU) has identified evidence of a previously unrecognized Late Cretaceous continental magmatic arc in northwestern Iran.

The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research and Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences; ETH Zurich, Switzerland; Karadeniz Technical University, Türkiye; and Damghan University, Iran.

The researchers refer to this system as the Azerbaijan Continental Magmatic Arc, providing new constraints on the tectonic evolution of the region that is now part of the Arabia–Eurasia collision zone.

Iran has survived revolution, war and decades of sanctions without losing its oil revenue entirely. That could change in December.

For the first time in Iran's history, revenue from crude oil and condensate exports could fall to ZERO by mid-December if the US blockade continues, according to new analysis from Kpler. The Islamic Republic stands to lose as much as $6 billion a month. But will unprecedented economic pressure force Tehran to compromise, or is its leadership prepared to fight to the bitter end?

This week on Eye for Iran, Negar Mojtahedi explores three extraordinary stories that raise troubling questions about the Islamic Republic's future.

Why is Tehran accelerating its executions? Khosro Esfahani, Research Director at NUFDI, examines the regime's escalating use of the death penalty following January's anti-government protests. He argues that the leadership's apocalyptic worldview helps explain its willingness to embrace endless conflict, even at the cost of devastating consequences for Iran. Just how far is it prepared to go?

Could Iran's oil money disappear by December? Homayoun Falakshahi, Head of Crude Oil Analysis at Kpler, reveals why Iran could be approaching an unprecedented financial turning point. With oil exports effectively halted, can Tehran find a way around the US blockade? What happens to the economy, the regime's regional allies and its negotiating position with Washington if billions in oil revenue vanish?

Imprisoned for being poor. Shahin Milani, Executive Director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, exposes the largely forgotten Iranians held behind bars over unpaid debts. Some have spent years in prison without a criminal conviction. As economic conditions worsen, could thousands more face the same fate?

From the regime's execution campaign to the potential disappearance of its oil lifeline, this episode asks a fundamental question: What happens when an increasingly isolated leadership faces unprecedented pressure but refuses to change course?

Watch the full episode of Eye for Iran for exclusive interviews and analysis of Iran's executions, the US oil blockade, sanctions evasion, the Islamic Republic's ideology and the country's deepening economic crisis.

Chapters:

02:48 Segment 1 | Khosro Esfahani

Iran's escalating executions: Why the Islamic Republic's leadership is prepared to fight to the bitter end.

22:07 Segment 2 | Homayoun Falakshahi

Iran's oil revenue could hit zero by December for the first time in history. What happens next?

46:31 Segment 3 | Shahin Milani

Iran's forgotten prisoners: Thousands jailed over unpaid debts, sometimes for years.

The rial has crashed through one record low after another. It trades at around 2.7m to the dollar. It has lost half its value this year (and 99% over the past decade). Last month the central bank injected $2bn of foreign currency into the market. That slowed the decline but failed to reverse it.

Currency collapse has spurred galloping year-on-year inflation, which hit 90% in September. Food and transport prices increased by more than 115%, and clothing by 97%. Prices for staple goods such as cooking oil, eggs and rice are all up by more than 200%. Pensioners have staged protests over allowances eroded by inflation. The nurses’ association says some members would rather quit than work for salaries that are now worth just $100 a month.

America has imposed tight sanctions on Iran before, but they were always porous. Even in 2020, at the height of Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign and the covid-19 pandemic, Iran still managed to sell more than 440,000 barrels a day of oil. America now enforces sanctions at gunpoint: warships are blockading Iran’s ports, and they disabled or sank at least eight Iranian oil tankers last month.

Though Iran did not load any new shipments of crude in September, it did continue selling oil to China, drawing from a supply held in seaborne storage (most of it in Asia). The stockpile is dwindling, however. Kpler, a data firm, estimates that Iran has perhaps 10m barrels of oil in storage outside the blockade line, down from more than 120m before the war. It will probably run dry within weeks. Though payments could continue until December, Iran’s most valuable export is about to dry up.

• Iran has preserved its missile and drone factories despite US and Israeli bombing, allowing it to replenish its arsenals, officials familiar with the matter said.
• Western officials said Iran remains well-stocked with ballistic missiles and some anti-ship weapons, and can quickly add more, with Russia also providing missiles.
• Assessments from Western officials signal the Islamic Republic still has enough firepower to retaliate if Washington resumes airstrikes, and may lean deeper into asymmetric warfare.

The assessment of Iran’s capability runs counter to repeated claims from Trump and his team that eight months of airstrikes have decimated Iran’s ability to threaten US bases in the region and American allies. Trump said earlier this year that Iran’s military is “totally destroyed” and in a speech on Sept. 30 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US had destroyed Iran’s “military industrial capacity” and “their entire defense base.”

That ability raises the likelihood that Iran could reconstitute its missile forces if Trump makes good on a vow, delivered via social media on Thursday, not to attack Iran before November’s midterm elections. In addition, Tehran has escalated attacks on shipping around the Strait of Hormuz, hitting at least 10 vessels in the last week, according to the UK Navy.

“There is probably less high-end stuff available, but they’ve been stockpiling cruise missiles for themselves and the Houthis for years, and hiding them,” said William Alberque, a Europe-based senior fellow at the Pacific Forum. “I’d guess with a fair bit of confidence that we haven’t seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of anti-ship attacks.”

Oil prices, now trading above $100 a barrel, remain under pressure and sensitive to the outlook for supply. Even though transit through the Strait of Hormuz has increased, the cost of hiring a tanker rose to about $1.2 million a day, compared with less than $50,000 a day before the war.

And a conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-backed Houthi militants is raising concerns over the kingdom’s ability to rely on an export bypass through the Red Sea. On Thursday night, Houthi ballistic missiles struck two airports in Saudi Arabia, killing at least three people and wounding dozens.

The biggest challenge to attacking commercial vessels is most likely getting targeting data, said Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

“The actual anti-ship missile stockpiles likely remain large, both because they are comparatively easy to make, and Iran has in-housed much of the production of older Chinese ASCMs, and Iran’s southern mountains provide natural shelters against air attack,” he said, referring to anti-ship cruise missiles.

A Starlink trial on an Italian hilltop connected an ordinary smartphone to the Internet without mobile coverage, a satellite dish, or an external antenna. The demonstration quickly drew attention in Iran, where Internet access remains heavily filtered and authorities imposed a near-total blackout during the January protests. As Hannah Kaviani from RFE/RL's Radio Farda program Negah-e-Farda (Iran Tomorrow) explains, for many Iranians the test raised a provocative possibility: getting online without relying on infrastructure the state can control or switch off.

Montefiore speaks about Iran at 30 min appx

“We’re in a new world of counterhistory,” he said recently. “A new world of counterhistory where neither historical facts nor present-time facts matter if they don’t fit the ideological orthodoxy.”

It is “our responsibility as historians,” he said, “to stand up and be unafraid to contradict conventional wisdom, surging conspiracies, witch hunts, purity tests, pile-ons that are used to crush debate . . . and to say persuasively, ‘This is what happened.’ ”

And that is what he does in his brilliant new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.

But don’t worry. This is Sebag. I promise you this is not some serious, dry textbook. There is a chapter in his book called “Fat Fucker” (which was the CIA’s code name for King Farouk of Egypt). You will learn in his pages that a Palestine Liberation Organization terrorist was married to a Miss Universe. That Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and President John F. Kennedy were both johns at Madame Claude’s Parisian brothel. And that Saddam Hussein was raised by an uncle who wrote a pamphlet titled “Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies.” Okay, maybe that last one was predictable.

Sebag has said that this book is the hardest he has ever written, and is a subject that only someone “bonkers” would tackle. Bonkers or brilliant or both: You’ll decide.

Sebag is, of course, the author of over a dozen other books such as Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great & Potemkin, which are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature.

I asked him how he makes sense of the fight within Islam itself, why we’re so fixated on this region, whether the Middle East’s plight is the product of Western intervention or the choices of its own leaders, how the Gulf States came to ally with Israel and Iran with China and Russia, who is winning the current war, and much more.

I am so thrilled to share the conversation I had with him—live—in NYC.

Tousi TV video is linked to the 3 min timestamp where he begins covering this.

There is another section where he interviews Nicholas Lissack about this around 30 min.

Omid Ghanouni, from Arjanak village in Khansar county, died during judicial questioning at the Khansar courthouse on Tuesday, October 6, less than 24 hours after his arrest, according to the source.

He was detained on Monday evening, following a verbal dispute with a Basij member. Basij forces severely beat him with rifle butts before handing him over to police, the source said.

Ghanouni spent the night at Vist police station and was taken to the courthouse the following morning.

Father’s plea for hospital treatment rejected

During questioning, Ghanouni was suffering from severe abdominal pain and was visibly unwell, according to the source.

His father, who was at the courthouse, asked judicial officials to allow his son to be taken to hospital. He even offered to remain in custody in his son’s place so the teenager could receive treatment.

The judge rejected the request and questioning continued, the source said. Ghanouni then collapsed from his chair and died at the courthouse. His body was subsequently taken to Khansar’s Fatemiyeh Hospital.

Medical staff at the hospital identified internal bleeding as the cause of death, according to the source, who also described extensive bruising and injuries on the teenager’s body and face.

The source said there had been obstruction in the process of referring his body for forensic examination.

The U.S. State Department noted that earlier this year, the IRGC launched a recruitment campaign establishing a minimum participation age of 12 for certain security activities.

The 2026 report emphasized that beyond internal recruitment, the IRGC provides support to non-state armed groups abroad that forcibly recruit and deploy child soldiers.

Furthermore, the report concluded that Iran lacks effective mechanisms to identify and protect trafficking victims and has reported no concrete steps to halt child recruitment by the IRGC or Basij.

The State Department also highlighted the exploitation of children in forced begging, forced labor, and sex trafficking, noting that undocumented migrant children, particularly Afghans, face heightened vulnerability.

Despite ratifying the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime in August 2025, Iran has yet to accede to the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump administration is moving beyond financial sanctions to impose what he calls an "absolute isolation campaign" against Iran, including naval blockades, restrictions on air travel, efforts to close land routes, and plans to seize about $1 billion in cryptocurrency.

In an interview with Greta Van Susteren at Newsmax's NPolicy Summit in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Bessent said the administration's strategy is designed to completely quarantine Iran's ruling regime, cutting off its access to international markets, transportation, and financial resources.

"We did have a maximum pressure campaign. Now we have an absolute isolation campaign and it's working," Bessent told Van Susteren.

Bessent said the administration's efforts are already creating panic within Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Citing a recent New York Times report, Bessent said the IRGC "is now panicking amongst themselves."

"And that's the key, because what we have done has never been seen before," he said.

Bessent described an unprecedented effort to shut down Iranian oil exports through military action and maritime blockades.

"We have, we had military. Now we have the blockades, so nothing is going in, coming out or going in," Bessent said.

He predicted the restrictions would bring Iranian oil exports to a complete halt.

"For the first time ever since they started pumping oil, the history of Iran, they will have no oil on the water for sale," he said.

But Bessent emphasized that the campaign extends far beyond oil exports and traditional economic sanctions.

Bessent said the United Arab Emirates and Oman are cooperating with Washington and that the administration is working with Pakistan and Turkey to shut down overland routes into and out of Iran.

"UAE has been a good partner. Oman has been a good partner. We're working with Pakistan and Turkey to cut off all the land routes," Bessent said.

The Treasury secretary also described restrictions on international air travel intended to prevent Iranian officials and regime-connected elites from escaping the country's growing isolation.

"We have quarantined them, uh, with airline flights," Bessent said.

He mocked the foreign travel habits of Iranian officials, saying members of the IRGC could no longer visit "their plastic surgeon in London, their girlfriend in Paris, and their money in Geneva."

"If they love the Islamic Republic of Iran, they are stuck there so they can enjoy it," he said.

Bessent suggested that trapping regime officials inside Iran could exert psychological pressure on the country's leadership.

The administration is also targeting financial assets held outside the traditional banking system.

"We're probably gonna seize a billion dollars of crypto this week," Bessent revealed.

"And, you know, we know where it is and we are isolating them," he added.

The comments came as Van Susteren questioned whether U.S. sanctions were successfully squeezing Iran's economy.

Bessent's response made clear that the administration views the campaign as much more than a financial crackdown.

The administration's stated objective is to isolate Iran economically and geographically while increasing pressure on the ruling regime and the IRGC.

"We have isolated them economically," Bessent said, insisting that the expanded campaign is already producing results.

During the debate, Rogers blasted El-Sayed for his lack of clarity on terrorism and laced into him for not releasing a statement marking the three-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack that killed some 1,200 Israelis. El-Sayed had ducked questions earlier in the day about why he didn’t release a statement on the grim anniversary.

“This is why you should get absolutely angry,” Rogers said. “He could not bring himself to even acknowledge the pain, the terrorism, the rape, the murders, cutting off of women’s breasts, putting children in ovens and killing them in front of their families.”

Senior IRGC commander Hossein-Reza Sadeghi and his son Saeed played central roles in efforts to preserve an IRGC Intelligence oil-sales network and shift its financial operations from the United Arab Emirates to Russia, an Iran International investigation found.

Two informed sources told Iran International that Sadeghi, a senior adviser to the Revolutionary Guards commander-in-chief, and his son were at the center of efforts to shift the mechanism for transferring sanctioned oil revenues from the UAE to Russia.

The sources linked the changes to the departure of Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad.

On Sunday, the IRGC-affiliated Fars news agency reported that Iran’s Central Bank had found an alternative route to repatriate money held by oil intermediaries trusted by the Islamic Republic, known as “trustees,” and transferred $1.5 billion in Iranian oil revenues through Russia’s banking system.

Hours after the report, Paknejad resigned and President Masoud Pezeshkian accepted his resignation.

The two sources said Paknejad’s removal and the change in the money-transfer route were part of an effort to preserve the IRGC Intelligence Organization’s oil-sales corruption network.

Got my hands on an IRGC instructor training package for the IRGC/Basij terrorist apparatus which contains 2,521 files, including 266 presentations, 122 PDFs, 207 Word documents and 342 videos.

The material covers weapons, sniping/counter-sniping, ambushes, guerrilla and counter-guerrilla warfare, night combat, explosives and booby traps. Alongside that: psychological operations, urban patrols, checkpoints and dedicated urban unrest-control courses:

The 43-slide “Pacification” presentation lists “shooting by skilled marksmen” and “use of firepower” among the measures commanders may employ to control unrest. That’s slide 24, in the unrest-control course.

Same presentation classifies post-election crowds as “abnormal.” A companion deck lists wage disputes, unemployment, rising living costs and political grievances as causes of unrest.

A separate 61-slide presentation, attributed to an IRGC security unit, covers urban unrest operations and operational-control responsibilities involving the police and IRGC.

The Basij urban-patrol course details training qualifications for patrol personnel and leaders, mission orders, judicial-officer credentials, compensation insurance and an office providing legal support for Basij members facing problems during their missions. (!)

Combat training, protest suppression, ideological conditioning and the administrative machinery supporting the personnel carrying it out.

https://x.com/hey\_itsmyturn/status/2106432352222376211

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has penned an open letter to Americans, calling on U.S. civilians to “wrest control back from corrupt politicians.”

The letter, published Tuesday, comes weeks before the U.S. midterm elections in November. Addressed to “the honorable people of the United States of America,” the letter accuses the Trump Administration of lying to the American public about the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran, which has just entered its eighth month, and calls on them to enact change through their votes.

“Americans need to wake up,” the letter reads. “Now is the time, as the American political system is at its weakest.”

IRGC spokesperson Hossein Mohebbi told reporters that the letter is not intended to sway the Trump Administration, but rather appeal to American voters.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said the Iranian government was seeking to sabotage the electoral outcome by prolonging the war, which is broadly unpopular with Americans. Energy prices around the world have skyrocketed since Iran disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the U.S. and Israel’s strikes on Feb. 28, stoking inflation worldwide.

Trump, however, said the Iranian government is nearing collapse and would seek an end to the war immediately after the midterms. He repeated the prediction at the U.N. General Assembly last week, while threatening that he could “annihilate” Iran if no agreement is reached to end the war. After a cease-fire agreement collapsed in July, the two sides have continued to exchange threats and intermittent attacks, while mediators struggle to revive negotiations.

But the IRGC insisted that it has already “won the war,” arguing in the letter that the U.S. has failed to achieve its objectives. It claimed that, despite U.S. claims of victory, Iran has retained control of the Strait of Hormuz and that its nuclear program survived. It also asserted that Iran has gained “cultural influence” around the world. The IRGC claimed that the war has tarnished the U.S.’s global image, citing a U.S. strike that hit an elementary school in Minab, Iran, on Feb. 28, which a U.N. fact-finding mission said earlier this month could constitute a war crime. (The U.S. rejected the mission’s findings. The Pentagon said in March it was investigating the strike.)

According to Hengaw, a Norway-based group that covers human rights in Kurdistan and Iran, another singer, Hiwa Seyfizade, was also reportedly sentenced last month to four years in prison over a performance on charges of “promoting corruption and prostitution”.

Despite years of arrests and prosecutions aimed at enforcing the law on mandatory hijabs, women continue to appear without headscarves in public. Some Iranians attribute this change not to a relaxation of the regime’s policy, but to women continuing to defy the restrictions.

Leili said: “What you are seeing on social media about women freely walking around is true, and I see fewer and fewer women wearing the hijab. But the regime has no contribution here; it’s us women who continue to push. We aren’t scared to go protest [against] this.”

In what appears to be a renewed wave of protests against mandatory dress codes and worsening economic conditions, students at Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran demonstrated this week. Protesters chanted: “Exploitation, unemployment, compulsory hijab for women” and “Top academic rankings, but crumbling dormitories”.