Iranian state television cut off its broadcast Friday after a hardline MP claimed on air that classified documents show the supreme leader opposed the U.S.-Iranian deal to end the war. Meanwhile, as talks opened in Switzerland, a new regional diplomatic grouping met in Cairo. And a court meted out a long prison sentence to a prominent Kurdish human rights lawyer as the regime’s suppression of dissent continues unabated.
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“I, as a matter of principle, held a different view.”
— Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, in a public statement saying that he had approved the U.S.-Iran MOU despite some reservations.
Iranian MP Mahmoud Nabavian. Photo: Donya-e-Eqtesad
TOP OF THE NEWS
Hardline MP’s Live TV Revelations
On Friday evening, hardline Iranian MP Mahmoud Nabavian appeared on a program of the Khabar (News) network of IRIB, the state broadcaster, and read what he claimed were excerpts from classified correspondence between Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and senior officials in the Supreme National Security Council. The broadcast was abruptly cut short.
Nabavian, a member of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee who is close to the ultraconservative Paydari Front, said that after the Pakistan talks where the U.S. and Iran hammered out their initial memorandum of understanding, Khamenei wrote in the margin of the team’s report that he was “explicitly expressing dissatisfaction” and that “what has taken shape in the negotiations is fundamentally different from what was supposed to happen and was a condition for the legitimacy of the negotiations.” Nabavian further claimed that on different dates, Khamenei had stressed that the nuclear issue must not become the focus of talks, and that Iran should focus instead on ending the war and obtaining compensation from Washington.
IRIB’s public relations office issued a statement saying the MP’s “incomplete and distorted” references to classified state documents constituted a legal violation and warranted prosecution. The head of the Khabar Network channel resigned. The negotiating team’s media spokesman said Nabavian had “presented old material in distorted form.” Former government spokesman and academic Abdollah Ramezanzadeh posted on X: “This state broadcaster will ruin the country.”
While IRIB deleted the footage, the IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency kept the full interview online, and comments on its site urged people to watch, writing that Nabavian was revealing important details of the supreme leader’s orders to the negotiating team and that people should understand why the leader only reluctantly agreed to the negotiations.
Controversy has continued about Nabavian disclosing what may have been secret internal documents. “This correspondence is either classified as ‘Top Secret’ or not,” an adviser to former president Hassan Rouhani posted on X, and emphasized that if they are indeed top secret, the law covers their disclosure.
What Nabavian did on Friday is best understood not so much as dissent but as a bid to set the terms of what comes next. Khamenei himself wrote to president Masoud Pezeshkian acknowledging reservations about the MOU, but said he had deferred to the president’s judgment, which contradicts Nabavian’s implicit claim that the supreme leader is a suppressed opponent of the deal.
The actual status of the supreme leader remains a key mystery, as he has not been seen in public or on the air and he communicates only via written statements.
Inside Iran, Reaction to the MOU Is Split
Last week’s signing triggered sharply divided responses across Iranian social media, ranging from relief that the fighting stopped to fury that nothing fundamentally changed.
“As an Iranian I am personally very satisfied with this MOU,” wrote cleric Mohammad Ali Abti, a considered part the reformist camp of regime supporters. “A large part of Iran’s rights have been taken into account.” But that satisfaction is not widely shared. The deal has been received with low-level enthusiasm by many Iranians, who doubt it will fix anything that actually affects their lives. “I feel numb. I feel suspended. I can’t let myself believe anything good can happen,” one person told ABC News. Another said: “They kill us. They don’t care about us.”
One comment beneath a domestic news article analyzing the deal captures the anger of those who wanted it to take the United States more to task. “The MOU may have been good for the Americans to get out of the war, but for us – since you invaded and not all of you were killed – it is practically useless, the residue of your aggression,” it said. “You have not paid for the blood you spilled.”
Particularly for the many Iranians who wanted the war to end the regime, the MOU is a letdown. A recurring theme among anti-regime Iranians, especially family members of the thousands killed by the regime during the protests earlier this year, was outrage at the U.S. for dealing with the Islamic Republic at all, particularly after the Iranian people were encouraged to prepare to take over their government. On social media, this reaction was freely expressed by the diaspora opposition, some of whom accused the U.S. of outright betrayal.
Many Iranian struggled to process their feelings at all. The pressure of daily life, one Tehran teacher told ABC, feels like “a non-stop marathon of trying not to commit suicide.” As I noted in this briefing last week, the regime appears to have emerged from the war emboldened, with repression climbing and executions at rates not seen since the 1980s.
Foreign ministers of Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia at R-4 meeting in Cairo on Sunday. Photo: Reuters
New Group Meets
While the United States and Iran were opening their first round of post-MOU talks at Bürgenstock on Sunday, the foreign ministers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan were sitting down in Cairo for the latest session of the “Regional Four,” or R-4.
The four countries’ foreign ministers have met once in each of their respective countries since late March. While the group has no charter, headquarters, or fixed meeting schedule, it has issued joint statements, most recently on Sunday, welcoming the signing of the MOU between the U.S. and Iran.
An IISS analysis describes one of the group’s goals as “push[ing] against Israel’s and the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) growing influence in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi called on the group to evolve into “a more institutionalized framework capable of contributing to regional stability and addressing Middle East crises.”
It’s a formidable group. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia sits on the world’s second-largest oil reserves, Egypt controls Suez, and Turkey has NATO’s second-largest army. All four are on U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. As another analysis noted, none of them wants the post-war Middle East dominated by either Iran or Israel. In the words of a Pakistani site today, “the R-4 grouping is gradually positioning itself as a stabilizing middle-tier platform, bridging Gulf, South Asian and Eastern Mediterranean perspectives, at a time when traditional alliances are being recalibrated in the aftermath of the Iran-U.S. conflict.”
This development comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expresses visions of a regional “hexagon” including Israel, India, Greece, Cyprus, and two countries he has yet to name. From Tehran’s perspective, neither grouping is friendly ground.
The Brokers
Five countries keep being mentioned and serve different roles in brokering a peace. Here’s a quick country who’s who:
Oman. Muscat ran pre-war rounds of shuttling between Iranian and American delegations in separate rooms. On February 27, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi told CBS News he was confident a deal was “within our reach” and that Iran had agreed it would “never, ever” stockpile enough enriched uranium to produce a bomb. Twenty-four hours later, the war started.
Iran had chosen Oman as an intermediary last year specifically to keep Turkey out and limit others from getting leverage in the region. That strategy collapsed, however, once the war started and Pakistan stepped in with a mediation role. Clause 5 of the MOU assigns Oman a named post-war role on Hormuz maritime arrangements: “The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman, to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz, in discussions with other Persian Gulf Littoral States.” Worth noting: Oman was the first Arab state whose head of state sent congratulations to Mojtaba Khamenei on his appointment as supreme leader, despite Iran having attacked Omani territory.
Pakistan. For years Pakistan was a diplomatic afterthought in the Gulf. The working bond Pakistani Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir has built with U.S. Vice President JD Vance changed the equation. In late March, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif publicly offered to host talks, tagging Trump, Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff on X. Days later, Islamabad confirmed it had conveyed a 15-point U.S. proposal to Tehran. “U.S.-Iran indirect talks are taking place through messages being relayed by Pakistan,” Pakistan’s foreign minister said publicly. Though the April 11-12 talks collapsed after 21 hours, Pakistan kept both channels open through two more months of shuttle diplomacy. As Araghchi posted on X on Monday, it was Pakistani and Qatari mediators who narrowed the final gaps on frozen assets and Hormuz.
Pakistan is in a delicate position. It has a large Shia minority at home, a 900-kilometer border with Iran, and a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement with Saudi Arabia signed last September.
Qatar. Qatar was struck by Iranian missiles, had its LNG exports strangled by the Hormuz closure, and publicly insisted it was not mediating. Nonetheless, it’s been reported that Qatar has played a significant role behind the scenes. On Sunday, Qatar joined Pakistan at the table in Bürgenstock as a co-mediator alongside the U.S. and Iranian delegations.
Turkey. Tehran blocked Ankara from hosting talks, undoubtedly to deny Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan leverage. Yet even after Iran fired missiles into Turkish airspace four times, Ankara did not invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty (the collective defense clause that would have obligated allies to treat the strikes as an attack on all of them) and did not retaliate militarily. Iranian gas covers 14 percent of Turkey’s gas imports, giving Erdogan a clear incentive to stay out of the war.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi en route to Switzerland on Saturday. Photo: Reuters
Switzerland. Bürgenstock, Switzerland, was proposed jointly by Pakistan and Qatar as the signing venue. In the event, though, both the American and Iranian presidents signed electronically, Trump at Versailles, France, on the sidelines of the G7 summit, and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran.The June 19 ceremony was then canceled.
The talks started anyway a few days later. On Sunday, the four delegations convened at Bürgenstock and agreed on a roadmap toward a final deal within 60 days, establishing a High Level Committee with political oversight of the mediation. Switzerland retains one unique function: it has hosted the U.S. Interests Section in Tehran since 1980, Iran’s only formal diplomatic channel to Washington.
HUMAN RIGHTS
Sentenced: human rights defender Javad Alikordi. Photo: HRANA
On Saturday, the same day Iran’s negotiating team arrived in Switzerland for the first technical session under the MOU, Branch 1 of the Mashhad Revolutionary Court delivered several multiyear prison sentences for human rights defender Javad Alikordi.
Alikordi is a Kurdish lawyer, university lecturer and former Sabzevar city councilman who has spent years representing political prisoners and families of protesters killed during the 2022 Woman Life Freedom uprising. He was sentenced to five years for “assembly and collusion to act against national security” and 13 years under Article 4 of Iran’s Law on Intensifying the Punishment of Espionage. This legislation has functioned since the war began as a legal tool to enable far longer sentences than standard security charges allow.
The case goes back to December, when Alikordi’s brother Khosrow, also a human rights lawyer who represented political prisoners and families of protesters, was found dead in his Mashhad office. After authorities attributed the death to a heart attack, family members, colleagues and more than 80 lawyers who signed a public statement pointed to physical evidence inconsistent with that account, including signs of head trauma. At a memorial service for Khosrow Alikordi on December 12, security forces arrested six people, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi. Javad Alikordi published a video that same evening protesting the mass detentions and warning that he held confidential documents relating to his brother’s death and would release them if those arrested were not freed. He was arrested that night.
The Human Rights Activists News Agency has documented 40 political and security-related executions between March 18 and June 3 alone.
