Things Fall Apart

Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing.

Iran struck Kuwait’s international airport overnight as the ceasefire continues to unravel. Inside Iran, the regime is using the conflict as cover to execute protesters, freeze the assets of journalists, and leave cancer patients hunting for medicine on the black market.

Find out more below.

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And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this episode, I talk to Ilan Berman, longtime analyst of Iran, Russia, and Eurasian security. Our wide-ranging discussion covers Iran’s propaganda efforts and messaging in the West, how the regime controls the flow of information in and out of the country, and even draws some wisdom from boxer Mike Tyson.

Watch here or listen here.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Three Iranian attacks on Kuwait in a week even when none of the three U.S. attacks on Iran came from Kuwait.”

— Bader al-Saif, Assistant Professor of History at Kuwait University

TOP OF THE NEWS

War as cover. Iranian authorities have used the war as a pretext to accelerate a crackdown that was already underway before the first U.S. and Israeli strikes on Feb. 28. In a major report published last Thursday, Amnesty International documented how the Islamic Republic has weaponized wartime emergency language to justify mass arbitrary detention, fast-tracked death sentences, and the systematic seizure of assets from people it labels enemies of the state.

The head of the judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, has been central to this effort. Within a week of the strikes, he warned that anyone acting in the interests of the “aggressor enemy” would be dealt with severely. He did not ease off after the fragile ceasefire was declared in April. Provincial prosecutors across Hamedan, Khuzestan, Qazvin, and Khorasan received instructions to speed up proceedings against what he called “foot soldiers and accomplices” – language that has since been applied to labor activists, teachers, and trade union members alongside anyone suspected of protest activity.

Saham. The regime also deployed a digital asset-seizure tool called “Saham,” through which it has frozen the bank accounts, properties, and financial holdings of more than 750 people, including journalists living abroad. Iran’s judiciary rolled the tool out in March. Saham is designed to identify, freeze, and seize the assets of people it labels terrorist agents and enemies of the state.

The tactic isn’t entirely new. Asset seizure has been used as political intimidation since the early years of the Islamic Republic. But now the regime has increased its speed and scale. Saham automates and accelerates a process that previously required individual judicial orders.

6,500 arrested. In mid-May, Iran’s police chief Ahmadreza Radan announced that more than 6,500 people had been arrested since Feb. 28 on charges of treason and espionage. Those detained include not only protesters but journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders, and members of religious and ethnic minorities – categories that, under international law, the state has no business prosecuting on national security grounds.

What happened to many of these people after they disappeared into detention is now being pieced together through testimony gathered outside Iran. Amnesty documented methods including mock executions through simulated hangings, beatings, and prolonged suspension of detainees from their limbs. The nationwide internet blackout, which lasted for most of 2026, was explicitly designed in part to prevent this information from reaching the outside world. Amnesty’s researchers were forced to rely on informed sources outside the country.

55 executions in May; espionage charges surge. In its report for May, published on Monday, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) counted 55 executions during the month. Thirteen were on political or security-related charges, and five of those were for espionage – a category that has expanded sharply since the war began and that rights groups say is being applied to cover a wide range of perceived dissent. Courts issued 18 new death sentences during May alone, including four handed to protesters originally arrested during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests. HRANA also recorded the killing of two protesters by the IRGC Intelligence Organization during the month, and noted a rising number of convictions targeting ethnic rights activists in Kurdish and Baluch regions.

Executed: Mehrdad Mohammadinia and Ashkan Maleki. Photo: Iranian media

Two more hanged. On Monday, Mehrdad Mohammadinia and Ashkan Maleki were executed. Both had been convicted of charges linked to an attack on a mosque that also served as a Basij base during the January protests. Amnesty International said the two men brought to at least 41 the number of people executed on political charges since Feb. 28.

Iran’s Home Front

Reports from the domestic Iranian press over the past month sketch four crises that don’t make many headlines in the foreign press.

Photo: Rokna.net

“There is no medicine.” The phrase – daru nist (دارو نیست) “there is no medicine” – is heard frequently around Iran. From the first days of the new Iranian year in March through late May, Rokna, one of Iran’s social affairs outlets, documented the drug shortage systematically. “Prescriptions that remain unfilled, patients who wander from pharmacy to pharmacy, and families who are faced with new prices every day, have now become a constant part of people’s daily lives,” it writes.

Patients with chronic or life-threatening conditions arrive at pharmacies to find their medications either unavailable or priced beyond reach. Cancer drugs are the most visible case. The price of some cancer drugs rose from the equivalent of roughly $17 to $270 in a single year — a 15-fold increase that, for most Iranian households, de facto means the effective end of treatment, as a $270 drug represents many months’ wages for ordinary Iranian workers. Iran’s minimum monthly wage is roughly $97.

Some patients have been driven to black-market suppliers offering drugs of unknown provenance. The head of the parliamentary health commission, Hossein Ali Shahriari, said that pharmaceutical companies “must consider the country’s conditions” when setting prices rather than from “a casual view of the pharmaceutical market.”

Multiple sclerosis patients are faring no better: The MS Society reported a 30 percent rise in clinic visits since the war began, with stress and economic disruption accelerating the disease. Supplementary insurers have, in many cases, simply stopped covering MS patients altogether.

Shad online education platform. Photo: Fararu.com 

School interrupted. On the first day of the war, students were sent home before midday. Classes migrated from classrooms to screens. Iranian site Fararu published a piece entitled “School, war, and unfinished education.” The feeling among students who were interviewed for the article was uniform: “I think they should hold this [school] year again. We practically learned nothing.” One student added: “The teachers didn’t teach anything and just showed up … They said, ‘Read these topics yourself.’” Iran has a state-built online education platform called Shad, which was launched during Covid in 2020 as a domestic alternative to such foreign platforms as WhatsApp and Google Classroom etc. It’s essentially Iran’s official virtual classroom system, through which teachers post lessons, assignments, and conduct live classes. However, Shad has been plagued by outages and poor performance since its launch, now exacerbated by the war: Internet disruptions during the conflict knocked it out repeatedly. Students have had to resort to private messaging apps or simply disconnect. Students with money can fill in the gaps with private tutors.

The mother of a teenage girl described parents’ dilemma for an Iranian website: “All the mothers who had been directing their children to study and homework by saying, ‘Put down your phone, enough playing, go get it right’ … now had no choice but to say, ‘Pick up your phone, focus on your studies!’ so that education could continue.”

Photo: Mehrnews.com

Counting the invisible wounded. Iran’s welfare organization, Behzisti, has started running what it calls a National Mental Health Screening Project: an online assessment portal open to the public through the end of the month, with cases flagged for free follow-up treatment through the Red Crescent, the Ministry of Health, and the Relief Committee. Noting mental health issues arising from the war, the head of Behzisti, Seyed Javad Hosseini, highlighted that “If effective intervention is not carried out in the first one to two months after the occurrence of psychological trauma, these problems can become chronic.” Behzisti has 500 mobile teams deployed across the country, monitoring what Hosseini calls “the pulse of society.”

Photo: Ilna.ir

Locked out of the safety net. Unemployment insurance is supposed to compensate workers who lost their jobs when businesses shuttered during the fighting. ILNA, the Islamic Republic’s labor news agency, reported that the system is barely functioning. The Labor Ministry’s online portal for benefit applications has suffered repeated crashes. ILNA’s site tells of inspectors cutting off payments to anyone caught doing informal motorcycle taxi work on the side, treating survival gigs as proof of full employment, or flagging bank accounts for any deposit, however small. Radio Free Europe’s Radio Farda carried this excellent analysis of the collapse of the Iranian economy.

Tehran street, yesterday. Photo: Reuters

 

ESSENTIAL READING: LIFE IN WARTIME IRAN

“Where the Iran War Could Disrupt Pharmaceutical Supply Chains” – Think Global Health, March 2026.

“Three Months of Classes Held Online in Iran Because of the War” – Al-Monitor, May 2026.

“Iran’s Wartime Economy: Inflation, Unemployment Soar” – Marketplace/APM, May 2026.

“Iran’s Economy Was in a Dire State Before the War. Now Millions Face Job Losses and Poverty” – CNN, April 2026.