‘I’ve been dead for 47 years’

Welcome back to MBN’s weekly deep dive into Iran from the premier Arabic-first American news and commentary platform on the Middle East.

A key adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei travels to Oman, the Israeli prime minister comes to Washington, and U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to send a second aircraft carrier strike group to the region. In this edition, we’ll look at the landscape nearly a week after last Friday’s U.S.-Iran talks in Oman. We’ll also see how Tehran is marking 47 years in power by cracking down even harder on the opposition. And we’ll profile some more young people killed in the regime’s brutal suppression of January’s protests.

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Quote of the week

“You’ll be the one who tires out. And I will never fold.”

— Shervin Hajipour, singer-songwriter, “I Am Iran”

TOP OF THE NEWS

Where Negotiations Go Next

Israel is trying to push Washington back toward the brink with Iran. For his part, U.S. president Donald Trump is trying, for now, to keep one hand on the brake.

Jared Kushner looks on as U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff shakes hands with Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi in Muscat, Oman last Friday, Feb 6. Photo: Reuters.

After a nearly three‑hour White House meeting yesterday, President Trump said “nothing definitive” had been decided on Iran except that he had insisted the U.S. talks with Tehran should continue, even as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressed him to expand the talks beyond Iran’s nuclear program to cover its ballistic missiles and support for regional militias.

The Times of Israel suggests that Netanyahu had his Washington visit moved up so he could personally brief Trump on new Israeli intelligence about Iran’s nuclear and missile work and press for contingency planning, including possible strikes if talks collapse.

The U.S. president’s recent language pulls in the same general direction as Netanyahu’s. In an NBC interview just before the Muscat meeting, Trump said that Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei should be “very worried.” On Tuesday, he said in an interview with Axios that he might dispatch another aircraft carrier to the region to supplement the one already there. As he put it, “Either we will make a deal or we will have to do something very tough like last time.” The president also said that “Last time they didn’t believe I would do it. They overplayed their hand.”

Tehran has not been idle. The regime is indicating it wants to shape the terms of any deal, not just react to Trump and Netanyahu. On Tuesday, Khamenei’s top security fixer and veteran nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, was dispatched to Muscat to translate last week’s indirect contacts into a sanctions‑focused, nuclear‑only track, and to push back against U.S. and Israeli attempts to drag missiles and proxies into the talks.

Revolutionary Guard–linked Nour News, which is close to the Supreme National Security Council Larijani now heads, made clear that Tehran has no intention of accepting Trump’s broader agenda for the talks. Its headline on his Muscat visit read: “The only topic of negotiations is nuclear,” and Larijani was quoted insisting that “the focus of the talks is on the nuclear issue, and the American side has also concluded that the talks should be around the nuclear issue [emphasis mine].” In other words, while Netanyahu is in Washington trying to bolt missiles and proxies onto the agenda, Larijani is publicly declaring that Iran will only bargain over the nuclear program and sanctions — and is even claiming, without any corroboration from U.S. officials, that Washington has already conceded that narrow frame.

Conservative site Tabnak, which often reflects pragmatic‑conservative thinking in Tehran, helped decode what Larijani was sent to Muscat to do. It quoted his adviser Mansour Haghighatpour saying that Larijani’s trip to Moscow to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin on Jan. 30 was the “main impetus” for restarting talks and that “The lifting of U.S. sanctions must be accompanied by guarantees, and pursuing compensation for the damages inflicted on Iran [emphasis mine] as a result of past sanctions will be a priority, while military issues will not be addressed during the negotiations.”

Tehran has floated the idea of sanctions compensation before, but putting it so prominently on the table at the very start of this Oman track, and pairing it with an effort to wall off missiles and proxies, shows how maximalist Iran’s opening position remains, even as Netanyahu and Trump push in the opposite direction.

It remains unclear whether Muscat was a one‑off or the start of a real process. Thus far, both sides have agreed only in principle to hold “follow‑on discussions” but no date, venue or format has been set.

Oman is already indicating that it expects a follow‑up round once both sides digest Larijani’s consultations in Muscat and Netanyahu’s lightning trip to Washington. In practical terms, that means a few weeks of maneuvering in public and in private. If both decide they still need Oman to play a role, the next step is likely to be another indirect session, again presented as “technical” and heavily focused on the nuclear issue, with missiles and regional activities pushed into side channels. If not, the fallback position is pressure.

Children stand holding Iranian flags next to a missile on display during the 47th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran, Iran. Photo: Reuters

47 Years

This week every year, the regime marks the anniversary of “22 Bahman,” the Persian calendar date corresponding to Feb. 11, 1979, when armed demonstrators and rebel soldiers overran key sites in Tehran, including police stations, prisons, and the state broadcaster, and the last prime minister appointed by the Shah went into hiding and then fled. The Shah’s state collapsed, the Pahlavi monarchy effectively fell, and Ayatollah Khomeini and his Revolutionary Council asserted control. The regime calls it the “anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution.”

Every 22 Bahman, the government stages nationwide marches. It’s a script familiar to anyone who recalls Soviet commemorations of the “October Revolution:” tightly choreographed, nationwide rituals of mass marches, slogans, and speeches by leaders designed to project an enduring revolutionary legitimacy. Tehran state TV shows orchestrated crowds flowing toward Freedom Square. Bearded old men give set‑piece speeches about “independence” and “resistance.” This week, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Pezeshkian have both issued video appeals for a “massive turnout,” to prove ostensible national unity against foreign enemies and sanctions.

Yet the tough talk can’t hide the reality that this year’s commemoration will be taking place under a dark cloud. The BBC’s Lyse Doucet, reporting from Tehran on Tuesday, noted that she heard chants of “death to the dictator” on the eve of the anniversary. Other sources report similar chants, including in Shiraz and Isfahan. Iranians are unlikely to forget how the regime they are told to celebrate mowed down thousands of people in cold blood only a month ago.

The balance sheet on 47 years of the Islamic Republic? The revolution promised freedom from dictatorship and foreign domination; instead, Iran is more politically closed than under the Shah, with unelected bodies and security services holding the real power. The revolution promised social justice; today, inflation, corruption, and crony capitalism have yielded a mix of mass poverty and well‑connected oligarchs, driving waves of emigration. It promised dignity abroad; the country is heavily sanctioned and diplomatically isolated, its leadership betting on missiles and proxy networks while ordinary Iranians pay the economic price. The 22 Bahman marches will go ahead on schedule, but so will the nightly rooftop chants that say as much about these 47 years as the official banners do.

As one Iranian woman put it during the protests: “I’m not afraid. I’ve been dead for 47 years.”

Still Cracking Down

An empty space showing that Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi was not present during the award ceremony at Oslo City Hall, Norway December 10, 2023. Photo: Reuters

Even as they talk in Oman, Iran’s rulers are keeping up their crackdown on dissent.

On Saturday, Nobel Peace Laureate Narges Mohammadi was handed a fresh seven‑and‑a‑half‑year sentence by a “revolutionary court” in Mashhad, on top of the decade‑plus she is already serving. Her lawyer says the court gave her six years for “assembly and collusion” and eighteen months for “propaganda against the state,” plus a two‑year travel ban and internal exile to the remote town of Khosf once she is released. Mohammadi was arrested in December at a memorial for Khosrow Alikordi, a human rights lawyer found dead under suspicious circumstances in his Mashhad office in early December. Mohammadi began a hunger strike in early February in protest at the regime’s mass killings in January and at the denial of medical care to prisoners. Her foundation says that, with this ruling, she now faces roughly 17 years behind bars.

Now security forces have moved against the Reform Front, a coalition of officially tolerated reformist and moderate parties that has tried to push for gradual change, more social freedoms, a stronger civil society, and renewed talks with the West. The space for “loyal opposition” is vanishing. Azar Mansouri, the coalition’s secretary‑general, and veteran activists Ebrahim Asgharzadeh and Mohsen Aminzadeh were all detained in Tehran this week, accused of acting “in favor” of the U.S. and Israel during last month’s protests. Mansouri is a former MP and a long‑time figure in the reformist camp. Asgharzadeh, once a student leader in the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover, later became a city council member and advocate of gradual political opening. Aminzadeh served as a deputy foreign minister under President Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s reformist president from 1997 to 2005. Their arrests, and others, have effectively decapitated the legal opposition on the eve of the revolution anniversary.

Iran’s media have also come under fresh pressure this week. The Committee to Protect Journalists detailed a series of moves by the authorities in the past week. On Feb. 3, Revolutionary Guard agents stormed the Tehran home of award‑winning photographer Yalda Moaiery, seizing her phone, laptop and cameras as she continued documenting the latest protests. And since Feb. 8, Mohammad Parsi, editor of the literary magazine Kandoo, has been unreachable since security agents raided his home and confiscated his family’s electronics.

CLOSER

As I noted in the most recent editions of the MBN Iran Briefing, behind the figures of thousands killed by the regime, there are names and lives. I’ll continue to profile some of them here.

Photo: Iran International

Iran International reports on 15-year-old footballer Pedram Khalouei, a youth player in one of Iran’s biggest football clubs, based in Isfahan. He was shot in the heart on Jan. 9 as protests swept the city. Khalouei had been preparing for trials at Sepahan’s academy three weeks later, hoping to turn his local talent into a professional career.

Photo: BBC

The BBC has published a page profiling over two hundred people killed during the regime’s brutal crackdown (in Persian here). One of them is Negin Ghadimi, a 28‑year‑old biotechnology student who joined protests in the northern city of Tonekabon despite her father’s pleas to stay home. As demonstrators gathered on the night of Jan. 8, security forces again opened fire; a bullet struck Negin in the side. Witnesses quoted by a family acquaintance say she collapsed into her father’s arms, gasping, “Dad, I’m burning,” before dying on the street.

Two New Videos

Screenshot from YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8zs4UCxZk4

For a young, angry soundtrack to this round of unrest, many Iranians have gravitated to “Soghoot” (“Downfall”), the new protest track by exiled rapper Ashkan “Fadaei” Saranjam. Released a few days ago, “Soghoot” opens with the Simorgh, a mythical Persian bird that symbolizes wisdom, healing, and divine protection, spreading its wings over a country where “our people are no longer massacred.” He sings: “You will die and we will stay / The lion and the sun will rise again.”

Screenshot from YouTube video. Shervin – Iranam | شروین – ایرانم

Some Iran-watchers may recall Shervin Hajipour, the young Iranian singer‑songwriter who gave the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising its defining soundtrack. Lionized abroad, he was sentenced by the regime to three years and eight months in prison plus a two-year travel ban. He has now released a new song called Iranam – “I am Iran” in Persian. It’s a haunting ballad whose video features the faces and names of young Iranians lost to the regime’s recent massacres. “You’ll be the one who tires out,” he sings. “And I will never fold.” Well worth a watch.