Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing.
This week, the war will reach its three-month mark. The U.S. and Iran may be closer to an agreement to end the war but all that can change in an instant. Meanwhile, the annual Hajj pilgrimage has begun in the shadow of the conflict, the FBI has put a bounty on a U.S. military defector to Iran, and the Internet blackout continues – with help from China.
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And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition I’m joined by MBN’s own Yehya Kassem from Israel and MBN China Editor Min Mitchell as we look at the Trump and Putin visits to Beijing and at a groundbreaking story by our chief correspondent in Jerusalem.
Quote of the Week
“Deal isn’t done despite the hype.”
— Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
بودكاست إحاطة إيران من MBN
حوارات معمّقة مع خبراء تستعرض أحدث التطورات في إيران وتداعياتها على الأمن وأسواق الطاقة والجغرافيا السياسية في مختلف أنحاء الشرق الأوسط.
TOP OF THE NEWS
The ground shifts, the rules change, the rhetoric remains the same: The U.S. and Iran continue to tussle over sanctions, the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s nuclear program. The past 48 hours brought hope that the war might end soon. In a busy weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump said that a memorandum of understanding on a peace deal is “largely negotiated,” Pakistan’s army chief traveled to Tehran as Islamabad continued its mediation role, and Iran remained cagey about the prospects of an agreement being near. Today, Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi traveled to Qatar.
Iran and the Hajj. The Hajj – one of the five pillars of Islam – has begun in Saudi Arabia. This year it is profoundly affected by the war. Iran’s pilgrim quota was cut from 85,000 to 30,000, a reduction the head of Iran’s Hajj Organisation attributed to the war and factors “outside our control.” The pilgrimage went ahead despite serious consideration of canceling Iran’s participation entirely. The reduced allocation was a compromise reached between Tehran and Riyadh.
Iran struck Saudi territory repeatedly in the weeks following the Feb. 28 outbreak of war. The first significant attack came on March 2, when drones targeted the Ras Tanura refinery, Saudi Aramco’s largest domestic facility with a capacity of 550,000 barrels per day, forcing a shutdown that halted propane and butane exports for several weeks and sent oil prices higher. Prince Sultan Air Base was struck multiple times. A U.S. soldier was killed by an Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the war, and an attack in late March wounded at least 12 American personnel, two seriously. In early April, the IRGC claimed a strike on the Jubail petrochemical complex, the center of Saudi Arabia’s downstream industrial sector. As I’ve noted in a recent newsletter, Riyadh launched multiple strikes on Iran in late March in retaliation for those attacks.
An Emirates aircraft at Cairo International Airport, Egypt. Photo: Reuters.
It is in this context that Iranian pilgrims were received in Mecca for the Hajj. Over 1.6 million pilgrims are participating in this year’s Hajj, which is an increase over last year. Regional aviation has only partially recovered from the disruptions caused by the war. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has maintained its Conflict Zone Information Bulletin advising European carriers to avoid airspace across eleven countries, including Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, repeatedly extending it through the ceasefire period. Various airlines have sharply curtailed or suspended flights to the region, some for a long time – in the case of Lufthansa, for example, until late October. And several airlines are rerouting flights to avoid Iranian airspace, adding time and cost. Iranian pilgrims traveled on Iran Air.
Photo: FBI.gov
Defectors and spies, part I. Earlier this month, the FBI announced that it’s offering a $200,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Monica Elfriede Witt, a former U.S. Air Force counterintelligence specialist who defected to Iran in 2013. In the words of the FBI special agent in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office’s Counterintelligence and Cyber Division, the FBI “believes that during this critical moment in Iran’s history, there is someone who knows something about her whereabouts.”
Witt, who is believed also to use the aliases Fatemah Zahra and Narges Witt, boarded a plane from Dubai to Tehran in 2013, texting her Iranian contact “I’m signing off and heading out! Coming home.” Her defection came after a career in the U.S. military and as a U.S. government contractor, during which she held a top secret security clearance. She was trained in Persian, had traveled to Iran before her defection, and already converted to Islam in Iran in a ceremony broadcast by Iranian television.
Witt, who grew up in El Paso, Texas, had been deployed to Iraq, Qatar, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and had access to the true identities and locations of undercover American intelligence personnel.
The Times of London believes her gig may be up. “Her value to the regime is decreasing by the day … Perhaps during negotiations the regime may become more willing to work with the U.S. to turn her back over,” it quotes one analyst as saying.
The key figure in Witt’s recruitment has been identified as Marzieh Hashemi, born Melanie Yvette Franklin in New Orleans, who had studied journalism at Louisiana State University before converting to Islam in 1982 and eventually becoming a naturalized Iranian citizen and anchor for Press TV, Tehran’s English-language state broadcaster.
Hashemi served as Witt’s spotter, the term used for someone who recruits on behalf of a foreign intelligence service. The two filmed anti-Western propaganda together that was later distributed in Iran. Hashemi’s Press TV bio identifies her as “a Black American from the south” who “learned the importance of speaking out against injustice.” She identifies herself on X as an “American Journalist, Filmmaker and Activist living in Iran.”
For more on Western defectors to Iran, watch for part II in the next edition of this newsletter.
Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref. Photo: Reuters
Internet blackout, week 13. The blackout entered its thirteenth week with no end date in sight. Last week, a spokesperson confirmed that the regime has no timeline for restoring international internet access, saying only that it was working to “untie the knots” around the issue. Iranians are paying up to 12 times the standard rates for black market VPN connections, while whitelisted officials and approved businesses continue freely to gain access to the global internet.
Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref has criticized the internet restrictions, asking “Where in the world would they block the highway if a truck violates a traffic law?” and “Why should we make a student beg for their internet to be turned on for their academic work?”
A significant disclosure came over the weekend, when Mohammad Sarafraz – former head of Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB and a sitting member of the regime’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace – told an online newspaper that Iran had already imported equipment from China designed for permanent internet shutdowns.
A Muslim pilgrim sits on a rock as he visits Mount Al-Noor, where the Prophet Muhammad received the first words of the Quran through Gabriel in the Hira cave, in the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Photo: Reuters.
ESSENTIAL READING: THE HAJJ UNDER WAR’S SHADOW
“As conflict engulfs the region, Muslims face a more difficult journey to Hajj” – New Arab, May 2026.
“Hajj pilgrims press on despite Iran war uncertainty” – Middle East Eye, May 2026.
“More than 1.5m Muslim pilgrims kick off Hajj as Iran peace deal hangs in the balance” – Euronews, May 25, 2026
“Hajj Was Supposed to Deter Iran. It Binds Saudi Arabia Instead” – House of Saud, April 2026.
Khomeini’s Messengers in Mecca – Martin Kramer. An essay originally published in Kramer’s 1996 book Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival; posted to his website in 2010. Still relevant today.
Andres Ilves
Andres Ilves is Iran Editor and Senior Adviser at MBN. His career as a journalist and writer includes two decades at the BBC and Radio Free Europe.
