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). If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe.
Inflation and gasoline rationing keep squeezing ordinary Iranians while a new consumer credit card meant to soften the blow is running out of government support. The UAE, once Iran’s prime neighboring target, is opening channels to Tehran even as it deepens its ties to Israel and Washington. At Evin Prison, three men vanish without paperwork as Iran’s monthly execution count keeps climbing. And a new Central Asian transit corridor bears the fingerprints of a serial sanctions-evader with a decades-long history of laundering money for Tehran.
Find out more below, and share your thoughts, analysis, and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com.
And watch for the next Iran Briefing podcast. I’ll be talking to author and scholar Dr. Mehrzad Boroujerdi, author of a piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times entitled “This Is What My Father’s Assassination Taught Me About the War in Iran.”
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
If the Strait were to open today, it would take up to 18 months at an average rate of 2.1 million barrels a day to replenish depleted inventories.
Aramco CEO Amin Nasser
TOP OF THE NEWS
1. More Inflation, Less Cheap Gas
Iran’s Statistical Center reported that Iranian households paid 87.9 percent more on average in the most recent Persian calendar month than they paid a year earlier for the same basket of food, rent and other everyday needs. The cost of ordinary life in Iran has nearly doubled in a year.
This is but one of the economic challenges Iranians face. The rial has lost nearly 40 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar since January. The U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has continued to disrupt Iranian shipping, choking off the imports Iran depends on for everyday goods. And the war has damaged ports and other infrastructure the country would otherwise rely on to move goods domestically.
Gasoline rationing adds to the squeeze on consumers. The Iranian government confirmed in late July that the “second tier” gasoline ration, the higher-priced allotment drivers can buy each month after exhausting their subsidized quota, has been cut again, from 70 liters to 50. The quota stood at 100 liters before the war, then dropped to 70 once wartime rationing began.
Only the amount of the ration has changed. The second tier’s price, 30,000 rials (approx. two U.S. cents) a liter, stayed the same. The first, fully subsidized tier, was left untouched, both in amount and price: 60 liters a month at 15,000 rials (approx. one U.S. cent) a liter. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said any future change to free-market gasoline prices would be announced before it takes effect.
The reduction in the second tier ration is itself a price increase in disguise. Once a driver burns through both rationed tiers, gasoline reverts to the pricier free-market rate, several times the subsidized cost, and the reduced second tier ration just means drivers get there faster than before.
There’s new strain beyond the gas pump. Several poultry sellers on Tehran’s Khorshid Street, along with other supermarkets and butcher shops across the city, have stopped accepting kalabarg, the government’s commodity credit card. The kalabarg gives households a credit balance to spend on staples like chicken, meat and rice at approved stores: the store hands over the goods right away, and the government is supposed to pay the store back within seventy-two hours. Those payments are now badly behind schedule, with reimbursement delays of roughly two weeks.
An Emirates Airbus A380 passenger aircraft prepares for landing at Dubai International Airport. Photo: AFP.
2. The UAE Bets on Tehran – and Jerusalem and Washington Too
In the opening weeks of the war, the majority of all Iranian strikes was against the UAE. That proportion is now down to 17 percent. The UAE appears to be shifting its own stance as well.
Direct flights from Iran into Dubai have resumed, and some of the roughly 20,000 Iranians whose UAE residency was suspended when the war began are getting their permits restored. The UAE’s president has delegated contacts with Tehran to three of his brothers to manage, and there have been recent calls among UAE leaders and Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and foreign minister Abbas Araghchi.
UAE oil exports have bounced back and trade with Iran has partially reopened. In the words of an Emirati businessman interviewed by the Financial Times: “If you tell me I should stop trading with Iran because of what is happening … it’s not impossible but it’s not easy. I can substitute a lot of items, but a box of tomatoes for five dirhams will only come from Iran.”
At the same time, Israel’s embassy in Abu Dhabi has doubled in size since the war began and Israeli defense companies now operate in the UAE on a permanent footing. In July, the U.S. Commerce Department announced that it had eased export controls for Abu Dhabi. The measure made advanced AI chips more accessible to the UAE. This action came in recognition of the UAE’s support for Operation Epic Fury.
A veiled Iranian inmate works on her sewing machine in the female section of the infamous Evin prison, north of Tehran. Photo: AFP.
3. Beating and Killing
Guards at Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison beat three political prisoners and removed them to an undisclosed location on Saturday. The three are Amirhossein Moradi, a Sharif University of Technology physics student arrested by intelligence agents in April 2020 and currently serving a sentence of six years and eight months; Ehsan Rostami, a cultural and publishing-sector activist arrested last August who has since gone on hunger strike to protest the open-ended uncertainty of his case and now faces the capital charge of armed rebellion against the state; and Afshin Rangriz, an expelled university student whose case remains unresolved.
A source told the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) that prison officials, including the deputy director of health and the head of the guard unit, were present for the assault. The source said that all three men’s clothing was torn and they were visibly injured. As of publication – no one, not the men’s families, or fellow inmates – had been told where they were taken or in what condition. The transfer fits a well-documented pattern at Evin, where political prisoners are periodically pulled from their wards with no paperwork and no announced justification, often resurfacing days or weeks later, if at all, in solitary confinement or a different facility altogether.
At least 67 prisoners were executed across Iran in July, according to a monthly count published on Sunday by the independent monitor Hengaw, which verified each identity individually. Only eight of those 67 deaths were officially announced by Iranian authorities or media affiliated with the judiciary. The rest were documented independently, including seven carried out in complete secrecy, without notice to the prisoner’s own family or a chance for a final visit.
Nine of the total were political prisoners or prisoners of conscience, among them Kurdish prisoners of conscience Mohieddin Abdollahi and Hossein Palani Jaf, hanged the same day at Kermanshah Central Prison, and Meysam Irandegani, a Baloch man executed at 18 for an offense committed when he was 16. Two women were executed during the month as well, Setayesh Mohammadipour on drug charges in Shiraz and Azam Gerami, convicted of murder, in Yasuj.
Map: tasnimnews.ir
4. New Transit Corridor Masks Deepening Role of Sanctioned Network – by MBN Contributor Tara Rad
On Sunday, the Tasnim News Agency reported that Tajikistan’s Ministry of Transport had announced the launch of the pilot phase of a new Dushanbe-Kabul-Tehran transit corridor.
A trilateral agreement was signed in Mashhad, Iran last month. The project aims to facilitate the passage of Iranian and Tajik goods through Afghanistan. A permanent working group has been established to streamline border and customs procedures, with officials praising the route’s potential to boost regional economic cooperation. No details about which Iranian companies are involved have been published.
There are indications, however, that the project involves an Iranian who has been sanctioned multiple times by the U.S. and the EU. Babak Zanjani, who has a decades-long history of circumventing international sanctions on behalf of Tehran, had insider knowledge of the project. Two weeks ago, Zanjani’s holding company, his rail network, his romantic partner, and a group of business associates were hit with fresh sanctions by the U.S. Treasury.
Zanjani’s connections to Tajikistan run deep. His initial sanctions-evasion operations in the mid-2010s, which involved laundering billions of dollars in Iranian oil revenues, began with his establishment of Arzesh Bank in Tajikistan. Although he was famously sentenced to death for embezzling billions from the Iranian state, his sentence was eventually commuted to imprisonment. Reports indicate that while he was incarcerated, Zanjani built a cryptocurrency empire for Iran, which laundered billions within a year before being sanctioned by the U.S. Exerting some sort of leverage on the state, Zanjani apparently secured a shortening of his sentence. Following his release, the administration of President Masoud Pezeshkian swiftly awarded a massive rail contract to Dot One, a holding company heavily affiliated with Zanjani.
In recent months, Zanjani has used social media to rebrand his geopolitical logistics network as standard private-sector entrepreneurship, under the guise of job creation for young people. In a post on social media platform X on Tuesday, he claimed that the youth working for his logistics firm kept Iran’s economic routes active across Turkey, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, China, and Afghanistan during the war via thousands of truck transits.
The Afghan leg of the newly announced corridor was telegraphed by Zanjani well in advance. In April last year, he posted that Dot One Rail would soon open a transit route moving cargo from Iran’s Amirabad and Sarakhs ports to Rozanak, located 62 kilometers inside the Afghan border. The post was notably accompanied by a photograph featuring an individual appearing to be a Taliban official.
Zanjani’s latest ventures suggest the new trilateral corridor is more than a standard trade route. Rather, it appears to be a critical new puzzle piece in a state-backed infrastructure designed to facilitate economic activity and bypass international sanctions.
