الخميس 18 ديسمبر 2025
Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing.
This week, we look into the violent rearrest of Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi and follow the revealing travels of the Iranian foreign minister. We’ll also explain the plummeting value of the rial, learn about a controversial shopping spree by the president’s daughter, and find out about a new, virtuous way to spend your cryptocurrency.
The Iran Briefing is a new offering from the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, the Arabic-first media platform for and about the region. You can reach me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the newsletter, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here.
Quote of the week:
“This inclination towards theft is apparently genetically inherent in many of our Western colleagues.”
— Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, referring to Western countries’ freezing of Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan assets
TOP OF THE NEWS
Nobel Jailing
Only two Iranians have ever won a Nobel prize in any category (both for peace). On Friday, one of the two, Narges Mohammadi, walked into a memorial ceremony in Mashhad for a human rights lawyer who had died under suspicious circumstances. Mohammadi later left in an ambulance for reasons that remain murky, then disappeared into the security system she has spent most of her adult life fighting.
Plainclothes agents grabbed her during the memorial service, beat her around the head and neck badly enough that she was twice taken to hospital emergency wards, then moved her to an undisclosed detention facility. For several days her family and lawyers had no idea where she was. When she finally managed a brief phone call, she told them she was in poor physical condition, under interrogation, and facing new national‑security charges that now include “cooperation with the Israeli government” — in Iran, an accusation that can lead to the death penalty.
Yesterday, Reuters posted an update from her brother in which he expressed the family’s concern. He said that they have little information about her welfare and said that “it is confirmed that she has been hit by police clubs on the face, on the head and on the neck. She has bruises on her neck and face.”
For more than two decades, Mohammadi has worked on political‑prisoner cases, campaigned against the death penalty, and documented torture and sexual violence in Iranian prisons. This has earned her at least thirteen arrests, sentences totalling more than thirty years, 154 lashes, and long stretches in Tehran’s Evin prison. When the Nobel committee gave her the 2023 Peace Prize “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” she had already spent two years in notorious Evin prison. She smuggled out the text of her Nobel lecture to be read in Oslo by her teenage twins, Ali and Kiana.
All told, the 53‑year‑old Mohammadi has spent over a decade in prison. Now she is serving a sentence that began in 2021 and, through a series of new sentences, has been extended to over thirteen cumulative years for “propaganda activity against the state” and “collusion against state security.” In the past, she had been released on temporary medical furlough because of serious heart and lung problems, including multiple heart attacks and related complications that required surgery.
Her family and supporters describe her as a “heart patient” who has suffered several heart attacks in prison and underwent heart surgery in 2022.
When the other Iranian Nobel laureate, Shirin Ebadi (2023 Peace Prize), won a different human rights award in 2010, she dedicated that prize to Mohammadi, saying “This courageous woman deserves this award more than I do.”
It’s worth noting that the funeral Mohammadi was attending before her arrest was for Khosrow Alikordi, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer who was found dead in his office on Dec. 6 under circumstances widely described as suspicious. Officials said he died of a heart attack, but colleagues and rights groups say there were signs of head trauma and blood on his face, and cite the seizure of his office CCTV footage as evidence suggesting a state‑sponsored killing linked to his work defending political prisoners and families of those killed in protests.
Condemnation of Mohammadi’s rearrest was swift. The Norwegian Nobel Committee issued a statement condemning “the brutal arrest” of the Iranian Nobel laureate, while the European Union called for her release and noted her “fragile health condition.” Reporters Without Borders and myriad other groups also criticized her arrest.
For the regime’s take on her rearrest, this headline pretty much sums it up: “Narges Mohammadi: A Nobel Prize-winning pawn in West’s ‘regime change’ game.” That particular article explains that “Narges Mohammadi’s latest arrest for inciting unrest at a memorial service in northeast Iran’s Mashhad city underscores a career defined by alignment with Western elements who seek to [sow] seeds of destabilization and chaos in the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Hardline IRGC-aligned site Tasnim News headlined an article with “39 people arrested during norm-breaking behavior at the funeral of the late Alikordi in Mashhad” and described Mohammadi as among “political activists with criminal convictions.”
The pre-Islamic Persian name Narges signifies the narcissus or daffodil flower, which in classical Persian poetry stands for beauty, longing, and the deep, watchful eyes of a beloved. Now the world is watching what becomes of her in the system’s latest assault upon her.
THIS JUST IN
Another Way to Spend Your Rials: In case you were wondering, you can now donate to the holy shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Shia Imam, with cryptocurrency. Donations are now being accepted “in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Tether.”
IRAN ABROAD
Tehran–Minsk–Moscow Axis
It’s been a busy week for Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
On Sunday, Araghchi embarked on a two‑leg eastern tour, from Tehran to Minsk and then on to Moscow. In Belarus he got the full treatment: a wreathlaying at the Victory Monument, followed by a long meeting with President Aleksander Lukashenka at the Independence Palace. Then the two leaders signed three documents: a declaration on cooperation against sanctions, a joint statement on “strengthening international law,” and a multi‑year consultation plan between the two foreign ministries.
The hardline, semi-official Tehran Times made the connection between the countries clear in its headline: “’A very positive path’: Iran and Belarus strengthen alliance against sanctions,” noting that “Tehran and Minsk have endured a Western vise for years, with the pressure intensifying significantly in recent times” and that the “U.S. and its Western allies have … attempted to hinder development in both countries.”
For its part, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry site offered this: “As states subject to sanctions pressure, Belarus and Iran condemn the use of economic restrictions that contradict the principles of international law, harm, first and foremost, ordinary people, and provoke an escalation of tensions.”
Relations between the two countries have ramped up since 2020, when Belarus came under sweeping US and EU sanctions after the rigged 2020 election and the crackdown that followed.
From Minsk, Araghchi flew straight to Moscow. There the schedule was even heavier: talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, meetings with senior Duma and Federation Council figures, and a review of the new Iran-Russia “comprehensive strategic partnership” treaty that was signed in January and took effect in October. The agreement is meant to last twenty years.
Russian readouts of Araghchi’s visit highlight “coordination against illegitimate sanctions and the freezing of Iranian assets” as well as nuclear collaboration, Gaza, and the Caucasus, while Lavrov has been railing in interviews at Western “theft” of both Russian and Iranian frozen funds, adding (without irony): “This inclination towards theft is apparently genetically inherent in many of our Western colleagues,” whom he described as “swindlers” and “thieves” for good measure.
In an op-ed piece in yesterday’s Kremlin-leaning business daily Kommersant, Araghchi made reference to Moscow’s veto power as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and underscored the two countries’ shared victimhood: “Both Iran and Russia have been subject to unilateral, extralegal and inhumane sanctions that not only violate international law but also trample on the fundamental rights of states.”
Tehran … Minsk … Moscow … a ‘sanctions club,’ perhaps? The countries affected prefer the term “unilateral coercive measures (UCMs)” to “sanctions,” usually preceded by the words “illegitimate and unlawful.” Lest there be any doubt who’s friends with whom on this issue, check out the title of this release a while back: “Joint Statement by Belarus, China, Cuba, DPRK, Iran, Nicaragua, Palestine, Russia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela.” Stay tuned.
And on that note, Iran is offering aircraft maintenance services to “sanction-hit Venezuela.”
Then There’s Tehran–Riyadh–Beijing
If Araghchi’s Minsk–Moscow swing was about shoring up the response to sanctions in the Russian orbit, his diplomacy at home has been testing a different triangle: Tehran-Riyadh-Beijing. Tehran hosted the latest meeting of a committee set up by the three countries in 2023, when Beijing mediated an agreement between the two others.
The next round of Iran-Saudi Arabia-China talks will be hosted by Beijing.
Money, Money, Money
Family Fashion: A small but telling storm this week has swirled around a grainy video from Almaty, Kazakhstan. A local boutique selling Kazakh traditional clothes posted CCTV‑style footage of the daughter and son-in-law of Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian trying on outfits during the latter’s official bilateral visit to Kazakhstan last week.
Within hours the video was bouncing across Persian‑language social media, with captions contrasting the presidential in‑laws’ lavish shopping with a plunge in the value of Iran’s currency.
High-circulation Tehran daily Hamshahri quotes Seyyed Mohammad Balaghi Mobin, Director General of Media Productions of the President’s Office, in response to the controversy: “[I]n order for you to know how ridiculous and ugly the behavior of the claimants is, I would like to state that Ms. Zahra Pezeshkian visited several cultural centers in the city of Astana at the invitation of the President of Kazakhstan, and these visits are common during diplomatic trips.”
Plummeting Rial. What gave the clip extra sting for Iranians was the backdrop: The rial is in free fall again. In early November one dollar bought roughly 900,000 rials on the open market; this week traders in Tehran are quoting around 1.3 million. Under the headline “The value of the national currency has fallen since the beginning of the Pezeshkian government,” reformist site Fararu published a table plotting the downward spiral in the exchange rate since the current president assumed office in late July of last year, noting that the drop in value of “over 100 percent … has affected the lives of millions of Iranians.” As the Washington Post put it in an analysis of the situation this week: “Economists warn that the rial’s accelerating decline risks feeding a vicious cycle of higher prices and reduced purchasing power, particularly for staples such as meat and rice that are central to Iranian diets. For many Iranians, the latest record low reinforces concerns that relief remains distant as diplomacy falters and sanctions tighten.”
Andres Ilves
Andres Ilves is Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives at MBN. His career as a journalist and writer includes two decades at the BBC and Radio Free Europe.
