100 days

Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing.

Today marks 100 days since the war began. Iran and Israel struck each other again last night. But why now? Meanwhile, the frozen-assets dispute has hardened into a direct collision between Iranian preconditions and American counterclaims. And with Marjane Satrapi’s death last week, Iran lost one of the few voices capable of making the life of the people of Iran understandable to the outside world.

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

“We are the people of a sovereign nation that refuses to serve as a mailbox for the messages of others or as an open battlefield for their wars.”

—Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam

 TOP OF THE NEWS

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which holds Iranian sovereign assets frozen under U.S. sanctions. Photo: AFP

Reparations. Economists have estimated the global total of Iranian frozen assets at $100 billion. The dispute over these assets has become one of the greatest points of contention in negotiations to extend the ceasefire, with both sides taking public positions in the past few days that are incompatible.

Speaking to CNN on Friday, Mohsen Rezaei, military adviser to the Supreme Leader, said the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian funds is a trust test Tehran wants to put to Washington before any broader agreement can proceed. The structure Iran has in mind is $12 billion released upon the signing of an interim deal, with a second $12 billion tranche at a later, unspecified stage. In his words, “If he wants to reach an agreement with Iran, this $24 billion is a test of trust that Iran wants to have with Trump – this is a test that America must pass and the path will be opened. This is our own money, not America’s money.”

On Saturday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent directed his team to assess the full cost of damage Iranian strikes have inflicted on Gulf allies since February, and to examine whether Iranian assets held under U.S. control could be redirected to fund reconstruction in Kuwait and Bahrain. In a post on X on Sunday, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs, Kazem Gharibabadi, dismissed the idea, saying “Iran’s assets are neither war spoils for Washington nor a payment fund for its allies.”

In April, Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani put Iran’s war losses at around $270 billion, describing the figure as preliminary and covering both direct and indirect damages. She said the matter of war reparations was being actively pursued by Iran’s negotiating team and had been raised in the Islamabad talks. Iran’s UN Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani sent a letter to Secretary-General António Guterres demanding full compensation from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, on the grounds that those governments had allowed their territory and airspace to be used for attacks on Iran.

In the CNN interview Rezaei also made clear that there is no prospect of a Trump-Khamenei meeting at this stage. Perhaps that would require acknowledging the supreme leader’s whereabouts and condition.

Marjane Satrapi arrives at the 60th Cannes Film Festival, where she was awarded the grand jury prize for the animated film version of her book Persepolis. Photo: Reuters

Marjane Satrapi. With the death in France last week of Marjane Satrapi, Iran lost a voice hugely responsible for transforming the country’s story, in international eyes, from one of global politics and news headlines to one of a people doing the best they can under an oppressive regime and system. As MBN’s Henry Reichman puts it in his moving tribute to the life of the author of the graphic memoir that showed the world Iran’s Islamic Revolution through the eyes of a child, “Persepolis introduced American audiences to surprising and unfamiliar images of Iranian life, and the miseries that the regime had wrought on its own people.”

Inside Iran, Persepolis remains banned. Outside it, the book has probably been read by more non-Iranians than any other work of Iranian literature.

Her death was covered, by the Iranian press, either minimally or with an ideological take: Mehr News Agency, the semi-official state outlet, for example, described her as an “Iranian-French animator and Oscar-nominated director” and then noted that “she is known for the anti-Iranian animation ‘Persepolis,’ which depicted an unrealistic image of the Iranian people.” What was absent in every case was the reason she mattered: no mention of her decades of public criticism of the Islamic Republic, nor of her support for the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022-23. And no mention of the fact that Persepolis remains banned in Iran. The press generally treated her death as a film industry news item.

Iranian exiles have felt a particular attraction to France for more than a century – not just since 1979 but as early as the Constitutional Revolution of 1905, when the first generation of modernizing Iranian intellectuals discovered Paris as the place where their forbidden ideas could be expressed out loud.

Ali Shariati, the intellectual whose writings did as much as any cleric’s sermons to inspire the 1979 revolution, studied at the Sorbonne in the 1960s, where he read Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre and forged the synthesis of Islam and anti-colonialism that a later generation took into the streets. Ayatollah Khomeini himself spent the final months of his exile outside Paris in Neauphle-le-Château, in 1978.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, once celebrated inside Iran as a model revolutionary filmmaker, left for Paris in the 2000s after years of mounting restrictions. His daughter Samira, herself a filmmaker whose work competed at Cannes, followed. Sepideh Farsi, whose film The Wall reconstructed the first days of the revolution from exile, made Paris her base. Satrapi arrived in Paris as a teenager, studied there, and never truly left.

France is only part of the picture. The United States absorbed an entirely different wave of emigration. Shirin Neshat, who had left for California before the revolution and could not return, became the most internationally prominent Iranian visual artist of her generation, working out of New York. Azar Nafisi, whose Reading Lolita in Tehran reached audiences Satrapi’s graphic novel did not, settled in Washington DC. Shahrdad Rohani built a conducting career across American orchestras. Los Angeles absorbed the entertainers, singers, and pop musicians for whom the revolution meant the overnight cancellation of an industry. Googoosh, one of Iran’s most beloved pre-revolutionary voices, was silenced inside the country for two decades before leaving in 2000 and resuming her career abroad. Ebi, Dariush, Andy, and Kouros built what became in effect a parallel Iranian popular culture in California, consumed inside Iran through smuggled cassettes and later satellite dishes.

In its obituary for Satrapi, Radio Free Europe’s Radio Farda highlights a video she made with renowned French performers singing Shervin Hajipour’s Baraye, which became the anthem of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system at work earlier today. Photo: Reuters

What’s Behind The Latest Iranian Escalation With Israel

Israel and Iran returned to a tense ceasefire after exchanging strikes over the weekend, jeopardizing Tehran’s two-month-old ceasefire with the United States.

On June 7, Tehran initiated the exchange by firing some 30 cruise missiles in response to Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah in southern Beirut. In retaliation, Israel bombed targets in Tehran and several other Iranian cities, including the Mahshahr petrochemical complex near the Persian Gulf, highlighting the vulnerability of Iran’s energy infrastructure.

I turned to my colleague Abubakar Siddique to explain how to make sense of the latest developments:

Analysts say that Tehran is signaling a shift in strategy, now treating attacks on its non-state allies as attacks on Iran itself. Yet this also reveals Iran’s vulnerability. It must directly intervene to defend its loyal Shia militants in Arab nations who were originally organized as a “forward defense” for Tehran.

“Tehran could be moving beyond its traditional ‘forward defense’ doctrine toward a broader security concept in which Hezbollah, the Houthis, and allied Iraqi groups form part of an extended Iranian security perimeter,” Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington, told MBN.

Farzan Sabet, an Iran expert at the Geneva Graduate Institute, says Tehran is attempting to establish new rules by compelling Israel to connect the Lebanon front to the Iran front. This strategy aims to prevent Israel from degrading Hezbollah. Israel’s recent relentless military campaign against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is aimed at further weakening the group.

In 2024, Hezbollah, one of the most powerful non-state militias in the world, suffered thousands of casualties, including its leader Hassan Nasrallah, at the hands of Israel.

“Iranian leaders feel they are in a good position to pressure Israel to stop attacks on Hezbollah, because they think [U.S. President Donald] Trump won’t go back to war, and he wants a deal,” Sabet told MBN.

The Wall Street Journal has reported on the growing rift between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Lebanon. The U.S. president wants to preserve negotiations with Iran, but Netanyahu wants to press Hezbollah militarily, as Israel views it as a vital military threat from neighboring Lebanon. 

Sabet pointed out that by launching these attacks, the Islamic Republic also sought to placate its hardline base inside the country, who are not happy over negotiations with Washington. “The regime told its base that it had won a significant victory, and so they expect that victory to somehow be demonstrated,” he said.

In Iran, Sadegh Amoli Larijani, the head of Iran’s Expediency Council, a powerful advisory body to the supreme leader, suggested that attacks on members of the so-called Axis of Resistance, Iran’s network of regional proxies, are increasingly being viewed as attacks on Iran’s own national security.

Vatanka said it will be significant if such statements reflect genuine strategic thinking rather than wartime rhetoric.

“Such a shift would make regional conflicts far harder to contain,” he said. “It will blur the line between proxy warfare and direct confrontation and raise the risk that a local crisis could rapidly become a wider regional conflict.”