The fight inside Iran over the memorandum of understanding with the U.S. hasn’t gone away. A government adviser, a top conservative paper, and a leading economist all defended the MOU this week, accusing critics of bad faith. The hardliners’ real target is Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker who signed the agreement.
Also in this edition: Two more protesters were hanged in Shahrud, a Bahai filmmaker vanished into detention, and Tehran’s stock market logged one of its best days ever.
Find out more below.
Share your thoughts, analysis and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here, or on the flagship MBN Arabic-language and English-language news sites.
And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition I’m joined by MBN Washington Bureau Chief Joe Kawly and seasoned MBN journalist Rami Al Amine, as we examine Lebanon’s role in the broader Iran-Israel-U.S. war, Iran’s direct control over Hezbollah, the troubled ceasefire negotiations, and why the real deadline isn’t the June 22 talks between Israel and Lebanon; it’s the date Washington and Tehran reach an agreement.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Iran’s armed forces will always have their hand on the trigger.”
— Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi on Monday
Ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Photo: Reuters
TOP OF THE NEWS
Friendly Fire
As I reported in this newsletter on Monday, the fight continues inside Iran’s political establishment over the deal with Washington.
Government adviser Ali Rabiei used a column published the day the deal was announced to defend it, and in the process showed how far the hardline backlash has spread. Some critics, he wrote, are treating negotiation as tantamount to surrender, and their real objection has nothing to do with the national interest, but rather comes from resentment that someone else is running the talks. As he put it, “they cannot even tolerate figures such as Ghalibaf,” referring to Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament.
Ghalibaf is not a marginal figure for hardliners to turn on. Since the U.S.-Iran talks opened in Islamabad in April, he — rather than Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi — has been Tehran’s actual point of contact with Washington. It was Ghalibaf, not Araghchi, who digitally signed the memorandum on Iran’s behalf on Sunday. His leading role has been increasingly highlighted by analysts, and U.S. President Donald Trump has praised him, telling CNN in March he was dealing with people he found “very reasonable, very solid” and “very respected.” Trump told ABC News days later that Ghalibaf’s team was “much more reasonable” than Iran’s previous negotiators – before adding that, “We know where he lives. Let’s put it that way.”
Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf. Photo: Reuters
Ghalibaf is not a cleric, and his rise reflects a wider shift inside the Iranian establishment since Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and senior security official Ali Larijani were killed, leaving him one of the system’s most prominent surviving non-clerical figures.
Rabiei is not alone. Writing in the traditional establishment conservative paper Ettelaat, columnist Masoud Razavi warned that the factional splits opening up inside the establishment “are like cracks between the planks of a ship. Breaks that have caused wear and tear, wasted money, and the loss of great opportunities for the country and its people.” The independent conservative newspaper Jomhouri Eslami piled on too, accusing hardliners of trying to paralyze Iran’s own negotiators with empty posturing. People across several different wings of the Iranian establishment are now publicly accusing the deal’s loudest critics of acting in bad faith.
A clear effort at defense of the deal came from economist Saeed Leylaz, who reached for one of the most humiliating moments in Iranian history to make his case. Speaking to the reformist centrist daily Etemad, Leylaz said that even the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, signed after Iran had lost a war to Russia and in which Iran surrendered most of Armenia and parts of Azerbaijan, was still a treaty and not a surrender. If that counted as a real agreement, he argued, so does this one, signed from a far stronger position. People who reject the deal, he said, aren’t thinking about the national interest at all, just their own politics.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Photo: Reuters
An army spokesman said Iran would carry out its duty without trusting the enemy, while continuing to support “our dear brothers” on the diplomatic side. President Masoud Pezeshkian said that after intensive internal debate, the “vast majority of the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps went along with the agreement’s text,” and that “the Supreme Leader’s guidance played the biggest role in securing the clauses protecting Iran’s national interests,” for which he expressed gratitude. He called the memorandum a potentially honorable document for the country if properly implemented, while cautioning that a final agreement has not yet been reached.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that the deal includes a $300 billion private investment fund, with more than half already pledged by companies in the U.S., the Gulf, Asia, South America, and Africa. Vice President JD Vance told CBS News the fund would be backed by Gulf states, while President Trump cast doubt on Iran ever seeing the money at all. Vance separately said on X that Iran would not receive any cash simply for signing the memorandum. In any case, no money moves unless the 60-day negotiating period actually produces a final deal.
Exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi denounced the agreement as “morally wrong and strategically misguided,” noting that Tehran executed two more protesters (see below) from January’s crackdown even as it signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Holly Dagres, curator of “The Iranist,” a weekly newsletter on Iran, wrote that “the Islamic Republic appears to be emerging as the conflict’s biggest victor. Having survived yet another war launched by the U.S. and Israel, the regime has morphed into a more emboldened and hard-line version, with repression climbing and executions carried out at rates not seen since the 1980s.”
A protester displays a poster about imprisoned Baha’i Shakila Ghasemi and the Shah-era Iranian flag outside the stadium at the Iran-New Zealand match on Monday. Photo: Reuters
Meanwhile, outside the stadium in Los Angeles where Iran played New Zealand in its FIFA soccer World Cup opener on Monday, hundreds of Iranian-Americans protested the Tehran government while others organized watch parties. There’s a seeming divide between those who see the national team as indistinguishable from the regime and those who see the players simply as fellow Iranians.
SHORT TAKES
Two more hangings, more feared. Javad Zamani and Abolfazl Saedi, two young men detained in Shahrud during the January 8–9 protests, were hanged before dawn on Tuesday. The provincial judiciary chief, Mohammad-Sadeq Akbari, said the pair were convicted of “waging war against God” and “corruption on earth” over alleged firearms and weapons use, property destruction, and conspiracy against internal security, and that their assets had been ordered confiscated. State television aired a “confession” video with their faces blurred and voices altered. Provincial courts are moving swiftly through closed proceedings that defense lawyers say leave little room for appeal. The executions followed an Amnesty International warning that at least 78 protesters and dissidents remain under sentence of death, including 41 arrested during the January protests.
The regime keeps targeting Bahais. Tehran filmmaker Samira Norouz Naseri, an adherent of the Baha’i faith that has long been brutally persecuted by the Islamic Republic, was arrested without a warrant two weeks ago. Security forces searched her home and confiscated her laptop, phone, and other personal and professional equipment. No charges or stated reason for her detention have appeared.
Separately, an Isfahan appeals court upheld a six-year sentence against Bahai citizen Roya Ostovar: five years for unlicensed religious “promotional activity” run through a WhatsApp group, plus one year for “propaganda against the system.” She was also handed a fine of 165 million tomans (just over 1,000 dollars at the unofficial exchange rate, or ten months of Iran’s minimum wage, which gives a better sense of the real bite) and a 15-year ban on what regime law calls “social rights,” which is a sweeping civil penalty that strips someone of the right to vote, run for office, hold any government job, found or join a political party or professional association, or work as a journalist. This effectively locks her out of public and civic life until 2041.
She had first been questioned at Isfahan airport in 2024, when authorities confiscated her passport and electronics. Human Rights Watch documented more than 750 acts of persecution against Bahais between June and November last year alone, triple the same period a year earlier.
Iranians visiting a large shopping mall in Tehran yesterday. Photo: AFP
Tehran’s stock market euphoria. Tehran’s stock exchange just had one of its best trading days on record. Its main index, a single number that tracks the combined value of all the shares traded on the exchange, similar to how the Dow Jones works in the U.S., jumped by more than 150,000 points in a single day this week, crossing 4.98 million and closing in on 5 million for the first time ever. Iranians poured in more than 9 trillion tomans (tomans being the everyday unit Iranians use in conversation, worth ten rials each) in new money that single day, in one of the largest one-day waves of investment the exchange has ever logged. This is the latest stretch in a month-long climb. The index has risen by roughly a million points since hitting bottom right after the ceasefire, with each new development around the U.S. deal triggering another round of buying.
That same wave of optimism is pulling money out of the places Iranians usually put their savings when they don’t trust the currency or the banking system: gold and U.S. dollars bought on the unofficial market. Eighteen-karat gold, the everyday grade Iranians buy by the gram as jewelry or bullion, has dropped to its lowest price in five months. The Emami coin, a standardized gold coin (about a quarter ounce) that functions as Iran’s most common long-term savings vehicle, has fallen from around 182 million tomans in early June to about 160 million now. This is an 11 percent drop in under two weeks. And the free-market dollar rate, which is the real, unofficial exchange rate most Iranians actually use, as opposed to the government’s official rate, is down roughly 14 percent over that same stretch. In plain terms, people who spent the war stockpiling gold and dollars are starting to sell and move that money into the stock market, betting that the memorandum of understanding holds.
The buyers aren’t a narrow circle close to the regime. Roughly 49 million Iranians hold so-called Justice Shares, a state-distributed stake in formerly state-owned firms handed out two decades ago, so a large slice of the population already has money riding on the index regardless of whether they actively trade. On top of that broad retail base sits a small number of giant institutional shareholders that together control nearly half the market’s total value, but these are mostly state and quasi-state pension and social-security funds.
None of this means the rally points to a healthier economy, and the stock market’s surge should not be mistaken for evidence that Iran’s economic troubles are over. Point-to-point inflation is running above 77 percent, so a nominal index gain in the twenty to thirty percent range over a few weeks is, in real terms, still a loss of purchasing power for anyone holding shares. What’s happening looks less like new wealth than like the same anxious pool of savings sloshing between overheated asset classes. In other words, money that had been parked in apartments, in gold, and in dollars is now betting the U.S.-Iran deal removes the war-risk premium that made hard assets look safer. Investors appear to be repricing political risk and wagering that diplomacy could lower the war and sanctions fears that had previously pushed savings into gold and dollars.
