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.
Here is what you need to know this week: Iran’s military command is now filled almost entirely with IRGC veterans and personal loyalists after the supreme leader decreed six new appointments across the armed forces, the IRGC and the Basij, in the broadest reshuffle since the war began. The U.S. has designated both the IRGC and the Basij as foreign terrorist organizations.
In other news: Iran executed Marziyeh Nayeri, a woman forced into marriage at 17, after courts rejected her account of killing her husband in self-defense. Transfer season exposes how deep corruption runs through Iranian soccer, from top clubs to the federation chief. And the country’s medicine shortage, worse than when we last covered it, looks driven as much by mismanagement as by sanctions.
I’m joined by our new Iran reporter Tara Rad, who is writing under a pseudonym, for this edition of the MBN Iran Briefing. Share your thoughts, analysis, and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com.
And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition I’m joined by author and scholar Dr. Mehrzad Boroujerdi, author of an article in last Sunday’s New York Times entitled “This Is What My Father’s Assassination Taught Me About the War in Iran.” We discuss how the revolution’s assassins are now running the country and how desperate they are to cling to power at all costs.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Today, the American-Zionist enemy, faced with the strong fist of the Armed Forces, has practically realized that reopening the Strait of Hormuz has no military solution and must submit to the new regional order.
—Deputy Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Nikzad
TOP OF THE NEWS
More Changes in Iran’s Wartime Command
‘Tis the season for leadership changes in Tehran. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei signed decrees this week naming six new commanders across Iran’s armed forces, the IRGC and the Basij. In the broadest wartime reshuffle of Iran’s military command since the war began, the appointments follow on the major change at the top of Iran’s security apparatus that I covered in Monday’s edition of this newsletter, when former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaei was named as the new secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and as Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s personal representative on the same body. He replaced Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who was reassigned the same day to be a political advisor to Khamenei.
A number of the new appointments are to posts left vacant after strikes by the U.S. and Israel at the outset of the war.
Taken together, the two moves within days of each other point toward Khamenei concentrating Iran’s wartime leadership around a small circle of IRGC veterans and personal loyalists.
Worth noting, of course, is that all these major leadership decisions are officially attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei – but with no sign of him in the five months since his appointment, we have no evidence that he is in a position to make these decisions.
The six latest promotions:
- The Survivor: Ahmad Vahidi, IRGC commander-in-chief. Founding commander of the Quds Force and a former interior minister. As I’ve reported in this newsletter before, he’s been wanted by Interpol since 2007 in connection with the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were killed, and is sanctioned by both the U.S. and the EU. He had already been running the IRGC on an acting basis since his predecessor, Mohammad Pakpour, was killed on the first day of the war.
- The Comeback: Hossein Taeb, Basij commander. Ran IRGC intelligence for thirteen years until the late supreme leader Ali Khamenei removed him in 2022 after Israeli media had linked him to alleged Iranian plots to kidnap or kill Israeli tourists in Turkey. He replaces Gholamreza Soleimani, killed in an Israeli strike in March.
- The Bureaucrat: Ali Abdollahi, chief of staff of the armed forces. A career IRGC officer who joined in 1979, he also served as governor of two different provinces and as deputy interior minister under president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, eventually returning to the military. As I reported in this newsletter a few weeks ago, as commander of Khatam al-Anbiya (the joint command overseeing Iran’s armed forces), Abdollahi vowed retribution against the killers of Ali Khamenei. As chief of staff he replaces Abdolrahim Mousavi, who was killed in the combined U.S.-Israeli strikes on the first day of the current war. Abdollahi is under U.S. Treasury sanctions.
- The Outsider: Kioumars Heydari, Abdollahi’s deputy. An army (Artesh) officer rather than IRGC, unlike the other five, he commanded the regular army’s ground forces from 2016 until he was named deputy commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya headquarters following the 12-day war. He has been under U.S., EU and UK sanctions since 2022-23 over the repression of Iran’s 2018-19 protests.
- The Understudy: Ali Ozmaei, IRGC Navy commander. A naval officer who headed the IRGC Navy’s Fifth Naval District from 2012 to 2025, he was named deputy Navy commander under Alireza Tangsiri last year, and took over on an acting basis after Tangsiri was killed in March. He has been under U.S. sanctions since 2019.
- The Veteran: Mostafa Izadi, deputy IRGC commander. A four-decade IRGC veteran who commanded its ground forces after the Iran-Iraq war and later ran the Khatam al-Anbiya command’s cyber and emerging-threats headquarters, he now becomes deputy IRGC commander, the post Vahidi vacated in moving up to the top job.
An Iranian on a swing as vendors sell cold drinks and ice cream along the seashore in the port city of Bandar Abbas, in southern Iran on Monday. Photo: AFP.
Why Tehran Doesn’t Want the War to End
The regime’s strategy doesn’t aim at victory. Instead, Tehran wants a perpetuation of the conflict.
As I see it, genuine peace will weaken the pillars propping up the regime. Ending the war will strip the newly-strengthened IRGC of the wartime emergency that has allowed it to run roughshod over the country’s president, parliament, and foreign ministry. A weak Mojtaba Khamenei diminished by injury will eventually have to emerge from hiding in peacetime. A state of relative normalcy will expose the parlous state of the Iranian economy and its root causes in mismanagement and corruption rather than war.
Every path to negotiation threatens the regime’s wartime model of control. the argument I make in an upcoming piece for MBN. Stay tuned!
Executed: Marzieh Nayeri. Photo: HRANA
Forced Child Bride Hanged for Defending Herself
Iran executed Marziyeh Nayeri, 24, at dawn on Saturday, at Qazvin’s Choobindar Prison. She was executed for killing her husband, whom she said she stabbed while trying to stop one of his friends from sexually assaulting her inside their home. Judges rejected her self-defense claim after the friend survived and disputed her account, and her husband’s family declined to forgive her.
Nayeri had been forced into the marriage at age 17 by her family. According to Iranian human rights monitors, her own repeated claims in court (that she had faced unwanted advances from her husband’s friends before the killing), were weighed against nothing more than the surviving friend’s competing account that she had a lover and wanted her husband dead.
Iran defender Ramin Rezaeian celebrates scoring his team’s first goal during the 2026 World Cup Group G football match between Iran and New Zealand at Los Angeles Stadium in June. Photo: AFP.
Shady Business Behind Iranian Football
Soccer, or football as it is known in Iran and the rest of the world outside North America, is a popular sport in Iran. Currently it’s transfer season for Iran’s professional football league, and it offers a reminder of how one of the shadiest businesses in the Iranian economy works.
Unofficial contracts, and manipulation of agreements and payments, have always plagued Iranian football. Last year saw a case of football corruption that involved numerous people, including the former head of the committee of referees in Iran, an advisor to the chief of the Iranian football federation, several Iranian sports reporters and journalists, and club officials engaged in embezzlement, bribery, forgery, manipulation, and price fixing. Eventually nine people were convicted. And there are more cases that do not end up in court.
In June, the General Inspection Office of Iran announced that it will continue to oversee football contracts, monitor clubs’ budgets, and prevent payments made outside established regulations.
The corruption in Iranian football actually starts from the top. Mehdi Taj, the Iran football federation chief, has been involved in several corruption cases, but he has survived and is still in charge of Iranian football.
Agents, brokers, officials, journalists, and chaotic management styles converge to make this business even more corrupt than other sectors in Iran.
One factor is the high salary of football players. While the average salary of workers in Iran in 2026, including all benefits, is around 200 million rials (approx. $117 per month), football players live glamorous lives, with stratospheric sums of money exchanged during the transfer season. Iranian football players playing in foreign leagues draw salaries of several million dollars a year. This affects the domestic market.
Iran’s official state news agency IRNA reported that one of the capital’s major clubs has reportedly paid 1.2 trillion rials (approx. 640,000 dollars) just to secure the release of one of its transfer targets, noting that “this is a player who is neither particularly well-known nor a member of the national team. Add the player’s salary to the 1.2 trillion rials, and it becomes clear that the club has spent more than 2 trillion rials (approx. 1 million dollars) on an ordinary player.”
Iran’s Worsening Medicine Crisis
As reported in this newsletter last week, the shortage of medicines in Iran is getting worse.
A member of the Iranian parliament recently called for an investigation into the country’s medicine situation and raised questions about whether the foreign exchange allocated by the government for the purchase of medicines is actually being used for that purpose.
Medicine shortages and rising prices are not a new phenomenon. These problems have plagued Iran for at least a decade, even though the country has its own pharmaceutical industry.
But the war has made everything worse. Scarce drugs are increasingly ending up in the hands of brokers and on the black market rather than on pharmacy shelves. Both brokers and patients have begun hoarding medicines.
In recent months, Iranian media have reported shortages of even commonly used medicines, including drugs for diabetes, high blood pressure, and neurological conditions.
For patients with rare diseases, the situation is even worse. Prices can be so high that the cost of treatment is beyond what an average family can afford.
The Iranian newspaper Ettelaat offered a grim take on the situation a few months ago. One person interviewed by the newspaper said he had witnessed a man offering his wristwatch to a pharmacy in exchange for an important medicine.
IRNA, in a report published before the war, wrote that “three hundred medicines are in short supply. Of these, about one hundred are practically unavailable to the public and extremely difficult to find.”
