Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing. You can read it in Arabic here, and check out MBN’s flagship Arabic-language Alhurra news platform (also in English).
Water and power are running out at the same time. Tehran’s grid has lost thousands of megawatts to war damage while its dams and aquifers empty out under a summer heatwave. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi gave a revealing marathon interview and hardliners are furious about what he said. The communications minister disclosed, almost in passing, that keeping the communications network up during the war cost at least one life. Also in this edition: Kuwait’s all-important desalination plants have now been hit three times in two weeks, and every one of its Gulf neighbors is exposed to the same vulnerability.
And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition I’m joined by Shahin Milani, Executive Director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, as we take up what actually happened during the regime’s massacre of thousands of Iranians in January, why the world’s attention has moved on, and how the regime’s tactics have hardened since the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Shahin also tells me why he believes January’s killings surpass even those of 1988 as the worst massacre in Iran’s modern history, and why the last illusions about reforming the Islamic Republic are now gone for good.
Share your thoughts, analysis and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
The Islamic Republic is engaged in a full-scale war today.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, on Monday
TOP OF THE NEWS
Rolling Daily Blackouts
Tehran’s power distribution company has been publishing region-by-region outage notices almost daily this week, telling residents which districts will lose electricity and for how long. Notices went out for Saturday, again for Monday, and again for Tuesday. Isfahan’s local utility issued its own notice for Saturday. None of these are one-off events. Each tells subscribers to check their district and billing ID through the company-provided app or hotline, since the exact blackout window can shift through the day depending on network loads. Households can’t simply plan around a fixed schedule.
The chief executive of Tavanir, the state company that manages Iran’s grid, said roughly 4,200 megawatts of national generating capacity have been knocked offline and more than 2,000 points of the network damaged, largely from strikes on grid infrastructure and on the gas-supply chain that many power plants depend on. The cost of repairing the damaged grid and equipment has been calculated at more than 600 trillion rials, or roughly $310 million at the current open-market exchange rate.
Chronic pre-existing problems are compounding the damage: roughly 1.2 quadrillion rials (approx. $615–625 million) in unpaid subscriber bills, around 2 quadrillion rials (approx. $1.04 billion) in accumulated government debt to the power sector since 2015, and subsidized power pricing that has encouraged overconsumption for years.
These financial problems are now being aggravated by a summer heatwave pushing air-conditioning demand to a seasonal peak as well as a chronic, years-old legacy of underinvestment and aging equipment. A grievance domestic critics have long raised is Iran’s electricity exports to Iraq. According to one assessment last year, Iraq had run up close to $8 billion in unpaid debt for Iranian gas and power going back to 2018.
Drought is another factor. The Amir Kabir dam that supplies Tehran was under 10 percent capacity as recently as late February. But subsequent heavy spring rains and snowmelt enabled it to reach 90 percent capacity by mid-July. This is roughly double where it stood a year ago. But that recovery is not the whole national picture. Reports put dams nationwide at 62 percent capacity and single out Tehran and Qom specifically as still “worrying,” since rainfall is still roughly 51 percent below normal in Tehran province and 35 percent below normal in Qom.
The Amir Kabir dam’s own recovery hasn’t translated into relief for the city day to day: Tehranis are still using roughly 195 liters of water per person daily, above what the region’s climate can sustain, with roughly 40 percent of piped water lost in the network before it reaches anyone. As I reported in this briefing at the time, Tehran came close to catastrophe only a few months ago. In November 2025, President Masoud Pezeshkian said Tehran might have to be evacuated if water shortages kept worsening. He later said in a speech that “we no longer have a choice” but to move the capital, reviving a long-dormant plan to relocate it to the southern coast at an estimated cost of more than $100 billion.
That crisis passed without an evacuation, and a comparatively wet winter is why this year’s dam levels look healthy now, but the threat remains. As a climate researcher put it, “As long as we only look at heavenly blessings and fail to adapt ourselves to the existing conditions, current population, and today’s demand, these fluctuating situations will continue. One year we say there is little water and we must migrate from Tehran, and the next year when conditions improve, we think the problem has been solved; while the missing link is adaptation to new climatic conditions.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Photo: AFP.
Hardliners Attack Araghchi Over an Interview
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was interviewed at length by documentary filmmaker and Iranian media personality Javad Mogoei in a program called “War Story.” The interview drew direct criticism. Among other complaints, he was accused of revealing secrets by discussing meetings held in a tunnel. As one outlet put it: “It is clear that Araqchi’s disclosure of this information is not correct and will lead to the completion of the enemy’s database.” A second hardline outlet asked even more sharply why Araghchi disclosed commanders’ hiding places.
One conservative outlet published a skeptical piece asking why Araghchi chose to give an interview to Mogoei rather than to an experienced journalist, calling it a “strange and unprofessional move.”
Araghchi also told his interviewer that he had exchanged messages continuously with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff throughout the war, and used the interview to defend resuming negotiations now. He argued that Iran should negotiate from what he described as a position of strength, saying a country negotiates when its flag is flying high, not after a defeat. In his view, Iran having endured the war without the state collapsing is itself a form of victory that makes negotiating now different from negotiating out of fear.
It’s not clear whether this interview will cost Araghchi his standing inside the security establishment. As I reported on Monday, there’s a power struggle afoot at the highest levels in Iran.
Communications Minister Discloses a Wartime Death
Communications Minister Sattar Hashemi, while briefing about free internet access for pilgrims traveling to Iraq, disclosed the wartime death of a staff member trying to keep the systems going: “One of the country’s communications centers was targeted. During these attacks, one of our communications facilities was struck and service in parts of the provinces was disrupted, but our colleagues worked with continuous presence to keep the network stable. We even gave a martyr on the path of trying to maintain the connection.” He added that communications sector staff “are accustomed to round-the-clock, seven-day service, and even give up their lives so that people do not feel a communications outage.”
Smoke rising from Subiya Power and Water Desalination Plant in Kuwait after being hit. Photo: Reuters.
Kuwait’s Desalination and Power Plants Hit Repeatedly
About 90 percent of Kuwait’s drinking water comes from desalination, so repeated strikes on the same category of site, twice in 24 hours and three times in under two weeks, are no small matter. Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy said an Iranian attack struck a power generation and water desalination station on Saturday, sparking a fire in one of its components. On Friday, the ministry said, another power and desalination station was attacked, damaging facilities and a large number of generating units and igniting a fire. Earlier this month, shrapnel from intercepted attacks knocked out several overhead transmission lines. The ministry said it took several generating units offline as a precaution and urged citizens to conserve electricity while repairs continued.
Kuwait Fire Force spokesman Colonel Mohammad Al-Ghareeb said teams from six fire stations, backed by the Kuwait Army and Kuwait National Guard, extinguished two separate fires at sites south of the country after what he called “blatant Iranian attacks.” Separately, the Health Ministry’s undersecretary made an inspection visit to check on people wounded in the attacks.
Kuwait is not uniquely exposed. In addition to the 90 percent it provides Kuwait, desalination supplies 99 percent of Qatar’s drinking water, more than 90 percent of Bahrain’s, 86 percent of Oman’s, 70 percent of Saudi Arabia’s and 42 percent of the UAE’s. The Arabian Peninsula has no permanent rivers and its groundwater reserves are being drawn down far faster than they can recharge. The 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions prohibits attacking or destroying “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” and names drinking water installations and supplies specifically. Repeated strikes on this particular category of site, rather than collateral damage to it, would cross a distinct legal line if they were shown to be deliberate.
Mohamed Ali al-Qahtani, Phase General Manager at the Ras al-Khair water desalination plant in Saudi Arabia, inspects desalinated drinking water from a tap at the facility. Photo: AFP.
ESSENTIAL READING: GULF WATER SECURITY
“Could Iran Disrupt the Gulf Countries’ Desalinated Water Supplies?” – CSIS, March 2026. The most detailed country-by-country breakdown. Makes the case for why Iran might see targeting water as strategic leverage rather than a bid for military victory.
“How desalination became the Gulf’s greatest vulnerability” – Geographical (Royal Geographical Society), May 2026. “The Middle East runs on two liquids – oil made it wealthy; desalinated water made it habitable. The future of the Gulf states hangs in the balance of both.” Puts hard numbers on the hidden costs: More than 30 million cubic meters of hyper-saline brine — the leftover salt concentrate a desalination plant discharges back into the sea — are dumped into the Gulf daily, and roughly half a million barrels of oil are burned every day across the GCC just to run the plants.
“Desalination plants in the Middle East are increasingly vulnerable” – MIT Technology Review, April 2026. Explains why scale is the real risk now. The average Gulf desalination plant is ten times larger than it was 15 years ago, so a strike on one of the newer mega-plants could knock out water for hundreds of thousands of people in a single hit.
“In the Gulf, Water Now Matters More Than Oil” – Fanack Water, March 2026. Traces concerns back to a declassified 1983 CIA assessment that already flagged desalinated water, not oil, as the Gulf’s real weak point, and to the 1990-91 Gulf War, when Iraq fouled Kuwaiti and Saudi intakes with oil rather than hitting plants directly.
