Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing.
The United States and Iran on Sunday announced a deal to end their war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with a formal signing set for this Friday in Switzerland. Iran’s leaders lost no time telling their subjects what it means: total victory. The Supreme National Security Council presented the memorandum of understanding as proof that the Islamic Republic had broken Washington. But not everyone in Iran agrees.
Also in this edition: The war’s aftershocks are reshaping South Asia. From Balochistan to Bangladesh, the human and economic costs of a conflict fought thousands of miles away continue to rise.
Find out more below.
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Quote of the Week
“With what logical justification and acceptable explanation are these gentlemen going to give up this fateful lever [of the Strait of Hormuz]?!”
—Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of Kayhan, hardline establishment mouthpiece, attacking those behind this weekend’s agreement with the United States
Pakistani newspapers this morning. Photo: Reuters
TOP OF THE NEWS
“America Was Forced.” Just before midnight yesterday in Tehran, the Supreme National Security Council issued a statement that opened, as all official Islamic Republic communications do, with a Quranic invocation. What followed was a victory proclamation. The Islamic Republic, the statement declared, had “completed its supremacy over the American-Zionist enemy” through the “guidance of its martyred leader” — a reference to the elusive Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s late father, Ali Khamenei. The war and the military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, had ended “immediately and permanently.”
The headline on Mehr News Agency’s website last night stripped the interpretation down to its bluntest form: “America Was Forced to Sign the End-of-War Agreement.” State television ran a lower-third banner reading: “The U.S. was forced to sign an agreement to end the war.” The entire domestic communication effort around the deal is built on a single premise: that Iran did not negotiate an exit from a war it was losing, but rather it accepted the surrender of a superpower that had run out of options.
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi speaks on state TV in an audio interview today about a deal between the U.S. and Iran to end the war. Photo: Reuters
Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi was dispatched to spell out the terms and the narrative simultaneously. Iran had held out at the negotiating table, he told Mehr (a state-affiliated Iranian news agency controlled by an office under the Supreme Leader), until its “final considerations and demands” were in the text. In his words, “The Islamic Republic of Iran forced the other side to retreat in the military field, and the result of this power was that the United States committed to ending the war in this memorandum.” The negotiations, Gharibabadi said, continued until about an hour before Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced the deal. The 60-day talks that follow, he added, would cover the lifting of all sanctions and United Nations Security Council resolutions against Iran, a nuclear framework, a reconstruction mechanism, and a monitoring body.
Mashhad MP Meysam Zahoorian put it in starker terms: Whatever the content of the MOU, Iran had stood in an unequal war against two nuclear powers and seven regional powers and emerged with its head held high. Even “the domestic opponents of the Islamic Republic” now understand that the system is durable. A university researcher writing a guest column in Mehr called the deal the fruit of “resistance and steadfastness,” while adding that the road ahead remained “complex, difficult, and long,” and that Israel was still working to destroy the agreement.
Not everyone in Iran has been celebrating, though. Even before the deal was announced, street protests against it had broken out in Tehran and Mashhad. Demonstrators gathered outside the Foreign Ministry in Tehran and chanted slogans against Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. A sample: “Araghchi, be ashamed and leave the country.” A separate protest took place outside a Foreign Ministry office in Mashhad.
Women walking past a currency exchange office in Tehran today. Photo: AFP
Politics in the Islamic Republic involves different factions. The Paydari Front is the most hardline faction in Iran’s parliament, ideologically closer to the Revolutionary Guards than to the government of President Pezeshkian. They had opposed any negotiated settlement with Washington long before Sunday night, and the announced deal has done nothing to change that. Their objections fall into three distinct areas.
The first is the strait: By agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz before sanctions are actually lifted, they argue, Iran has surrendered its single most powerful bargaining chip for nothing concrete in return. The second is reparations: The agreement sets no compensation for the destruction caused by the war, despite this having been a stated demand of the revolution’s leadership. The third is the nuclear issue: Still entirely unresolved, it will now be negotiated over the next 60 days from a position of diminished leverage.
Behind the Paydari MPs stands a wider array of opponents. The night before the deal was announced, hardline clerics in Qom held protests outside the offices of senior ayatollahs. Figures close to the IRGC circulated a “we will not accept” hashtag on social media. Meysam Nili, brother-in-law of the late President Ebrahim Raisi, called on Iranians to take to the streets against what he described as a “humiliating agreement with the devil.”
Hussein Shariatmadari, head of the hardline Kayhan publishing group. Photo: Reuters
The most articulate hardline critique came from Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of Kayhan, a newspaper that functions as a reliable indicator of what the most uncompromising faction of the establishment is thinking. In an angry open letter addressed to Ghalibaf and Araghchi, Shariatmadari emphasized that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz had been one of Iran’s primary sources of leverage in the war, and then asked, “With what logical justification and acceptable explanation are these gentlemen going to give up this fateful lever?!” He added: “They say ‘We will charge service fees from passing ships’! That’s it?! America and its allies have martyred the great leader of Islamic Iran and the Islamic world, shed the blood of dozens of nuclear scientists and high-ranking military commanders, hundreds of innocent people and oppressed students. They have caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.”
Securing reparations, he wrote, had been a stated demand of the revolution’s leadership, and he wanted to know how it would be obtained once the strait was reopened and the main source of leverage was gone.
The Fars News comment section, a useful indicator of mood among the regime’s own base, was split. Some users wrote, “We won.” Others were sharper: “America has not left the region, we got no reparations, no frozen funds released, no sanctions lifted — just a strait, and we’re supposed to be grateful.” One commenter, more despairing than angry, wrote: “This is a sad victory. When you look from a distance, we won — but the price. Our martyred leader. Our fighters. The children who died.”
Family mourning an Indian seafarer who was among three crew members killed in one of the U.S. attacks on Indian-crewed tankers this week amid a blockade of Iran-related shipping. Photo: Reuters
South Asia Stunned by Iran War Aftershocks. India has lodged repeated diplomatic protests with the United States after three Indian seafarers were killed and several others injured in U.S. strikes on ships as part of its campaign to enforce a naval blockade of Iran.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs “conveyed its deep concern over the use of lethal and deadly force against civilian shipping” to the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in New Delhi and urged Washington to ensure that its forces “take all necessary measures to prevent the loss of civilian life.”
During a Friday telephone call with Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, his Indian counterpart, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized the importance of all commercial vessels complying with U.S. forces in the Strait of Hormuz. Rubio said, “Violations of the U.S. blockade and the illicit transport of Iranian oil will not be tolerated.”
I asked my colleague Abubakar Siddique to explain how South Asia is grappling with the consequences of the Iran war. He will be contributing an irregular series about the global secondary impacts of the conflict. Here is what he shared:
Residents of one of the world’s most populous regions have spent much of this year grappling with the fallout of a war in which their countries are not directly involved, yet it threatens their prosperity.
Post by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on “X” about the United States and Iran reaching a deal to end their war. Photo: Reuters
Pakistan, which shares a porous and unstable 550-mile-long border with Iran, has been the most affected country in South Asia. Given its emerging role in the Middle East, its government pursued mediation and played a key role in reaching a framework agreement for ending the war between Tehran and Washington.
However, not all countries in the Gulf were happy with Pakistan’s efforts. Thousands of Pakistanis, mostly members of the minority Shia sect, have been deported from the United Arab Emirates. They were among some four million Pakistanis whose jobs in the oil-rich Gulf monarchies are crucial to their economies back home because they send home remittances. There are already indications that the most vulnerable among them, unskilled workers reliant on manual labor, may lose their jobs as Gulf nations reassess their labor policies.
On Friday, Pakistan’s new budget increased defense spending by 18 percent and allocated less money for development. Rapid hikes in fuel prices, taxes and inflation put a significant strain on the country’s middle class.
Neighboring India, the country with the world’s largest population, is also bracing for a possible return of large numbers of its estimated nine million workers in the Gulf region as repercussions of the Iran war devastate Gulf economies. The conflict has drastically reduced demand for goods manufactured in India, a major source of income and employment.
New Delhi, one of the world’s leading energy consumers, imports 90 percent of its oil and more than 50 percent of its gas from abroad. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has also jeopardized its fertilizer supplies. As one economist noted, “India is set for a series of supply shocks.”
Bangladesh, South Asia’s third-largest nation, recently raised electricity prices by 16 percent. Rising energy prices have threatened agricultural and industrial output for the nation of 170 million.
According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), which tracks conflict and protests, economic shockwaves from the war in Iran have prompted some 1,200 protests in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
In Pakistan’s restive southwestern Balochistan province, which borders Iran, the war has a more direct impact. Last Thursday, traders and transporters began a complete strike across the vast region, which also borders Afghanistan and the Arabian Sea.
Vendors preparing to transport jerrycans filled with smuggled Iranian petrol on their motorcycles, on the outskirts of Quetta in Balochistan province. Photo: AFP
Last month, in a concession to Tehran, Islamabad opened a land corridor for Iran through Balochistan. However, as predicted, the new trade route soon came under attack from secular Baloch separatist militants, who have targeted vehicles and infrastructure associated with the corridor as part of their longstanding insurgency against the Pakistani state. There have been no major reports attributing these attacks to bandits, foreign militaries, or other armed groups. The protesters were reacting to the rising number of attacks on cargo trucks transporting goods between Iran and Pakistan along this route.
There are indications that this violence is now exacerbating ethnic tensions in Balochistan, Pakistan’s multiethnic southwestern province. Mehmood Khan Achakzai, the province’s most prominent ethnic Pashtun politician, warned against the burning of cargo trucks, many of which are owned or operated by Pashtuns. His remarks reflected concerns that attacks on the trade route could inflame tensions between Baloch militants and the province’s sizeable Pashtun community.
