7 Stories that Made Iran in 2025

Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing, a new offering from the premier Arabic-first American news and commentary platform about the Middle East..

This week, we look at the seven moments and themes that defined Iran in 2025 – a year that saw war, drought, executions, and the regime still standing, if bruised.

Also check out this must-read from MBN’s Editor-in-Chief Leila Bazzi, who looks back on a year that changed so much in the Middle East – and ahead to the challenges and the biggest story lines that will play out in 2026. 

You can reach me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the newsletter, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here, or on the flagship Alhurra Arabic-language and English-language news sites.  

This is the final edition of the MBN Iran Briefing for 2025. See you again on January 8th!

Quote of the year:

“From the first day we came, catastrophes are raining down, and it hasn’t stopped.”

— Masoud Pezeshkian, President of Iran, speaking to officials 

 

Seven Developments That Defined Iran in 2025

First off, of course, it bears remembering that the Iranian calendar doesn’t start on Jan. 1. Instead, the beginning of the year is pegged to the spring equinox: March 21. Pretty much everything else in Iran follows from that, from the government budget year to annual administrative work plans. Iran is currently in year 1404, or ۱۴۰۴

The huge Nowruz (“new day”) celebrations across the broader Persian cultural sphere that mark the new year long predate the arrival of Islam. The number seven plays an important role in the Nowruz celebrations and is, in fact, deeply significant across Persian culture and literature. 

And so in this edition of the MBN Iran Briefing, I’ll group my look at 2025 into seven parts.

War With Israel

Aftermath of Israeli strike on Sharan Oil depot, Tehran, Iran, June 15, 2025. Photo: Reuters

Hands down, the 12-day war with Israel in June was the nexus of everything that made 2025 such a punishing year for Iran. It wasn’t just another spike in the long, gray trajectory of the “axis of resistance.” When, in the early hours of June 13, the Israeli Air Force hit a wide set of Iranian nuclear and military sites in a coordinated operation, the long shadow war between the two countries emerged into full view. As one Iranian put it, “My parents are scared. Every night there are attacks, no air raid sirens, and no shelters to go to. Why are we paying the price for the Islamic Republic’s hostile policies?” 

For years, Tehran had sold the “axis of resistance” to its population as a form of cost‑free heroism. This consisted of deterrence on the cheap, fought at arm’s length in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere in the region. June’s war blew that narrative apart. Israeli and US strikes hit deep inside Iran, including nuclear sites the leadership had wrapped in a thick layer of mythology. Iranian President Pezeshkian later admitted that Israel had the upper hand in that round.

It wasn’t just a military setback; it was a psychological one as well. For many Iranians, the war stripped away the veneer of safety that they had long felt protected them from a conflict happening somewhere else. All those “Death to …” chants have not made the blackouts, lines for fuel, and the scramble to get families out of Tehran worth it.

The war also reset how the outside world calculated risk with Tehran. Allies and adversaries alike saw an Iran that could absorb heavy blows yet had limited options to respond without risking even greater damage. That, in turn, led to the old UN sanctions being switched back on (known as sanctions “snapback”) and renewed the appetite in Western capitals for squeezing a weakened but still truculent power.

At home, the shock of the war coming home fused with the other signs that things were continuing to unravel, from the tumbling rial to wage protests to rolling strikes. It became easier for ordinary Iranians to connect the dots between a regime obsessed with projecting power abroad and authorities increasingly unable to provide basic security and dignity at home. In that sense, the consequences of those twelve days continue to echo into the present.

Inside the system, those twelve days also reinforced a growing anxiety about the succession to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who will turn 87 in four months’ time. While the war played out, a younger and more loyal Assembly of Experts settled in for a term that will almost certainly have to pick his successor. The June war may have strengthened the case for a hard‑line “continuity” leader when the time comes. Meanwhile President Pezeshkian spent the year learning how little power he actually has when the Supreme Leader, the Guards and the security council close ranks.

A Plunge in the Quality of Life

Filling up motorcycles at a gas station in Tehran following the new gasoline pricing scheme, December 2025. Photo: Reuters

The war produced a domestic aftershock. Rolling blackouts, panic‑buying, and late‑night lines at gas stations all made abstract talk of “strategic depth” sound empty. The war defined the rest of the year, as the resumed UN sanctions, missile drills, the plummeting rial, and protests all took place under the shadow of a regime that had just been forced to reveal to its citizens the real price of its chosen role on the global stage.The long shadow of the 12‑day war made 2025 feel smaller, poorer, and more precarious for most Iranians. Rolling blackouts became a fact of life in big cities, not only during the fighting but in the months that followed. Late‑night lines for gas featured cars snaking around blocks, with drivers sleeping in their cars or pushing them by hand to save the last drops in the tank.

The economy, which had already been in a fragile state, slipped from slow‑motion crisis to free fall. People’s wages and savings took a hit as the rial’s slide accelerated. Strikes and protests by truckers, nurses, retirees and teachers became near‑weekly occurrences. 

Even basic information became a battlefield. In the first week of the June war, the regime cut off access to the global internet for more than two days, leaving most people with only state TV and a sluggish national intranet to turn to. Millions of Iranians continue to piece together what’s really happening to them through a patchwork of foreign Persian‑language satellite channels and websites, Instagram reposts and forwarded Telegram messages. Even getting the news has become another form of daily stress.

Environmental Crisis

Checking out the drought in the Amirkabir dam supplying water to Tehran, November 2025. Photo: Reuters

Water, power, and weather concerns exacerbated the misery ensuing from sanctions and war. By early summer 2025, Iranians in cities from Tehran and Gorgan to Shiraz and Ahvaz were living with rolling blackouts and water cuts that began unusually early in May and stretched through the hottest months of summer. Officials admitted to an electricity shortfall of nearly 20,000 megawatts. Some neighborhoods saw two‑ to four‑hour cuts twice a day, while some people complained of going without running water for up to three days in 104-degree Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) temperatures.

The crisis was partly structural, aggravated by drought and dried‑up dams that left hydro plants producing far less than they were supposed to. It was also, to an extent, political, the product of years of overpumping aquifers and pouring water into steel mills in desert provinces. When the system started to crash, the impact was direct. Protests followed. Residents of Sabzevar, Rasht, Kazerun and other towns rallied outside governorates with slogans like “Water, electricity, life – our basic right.” By year’s end, winter floods killed at least eight people, underlining the destructive confluence of climate change and bad governance.

As Israeli strikes hit Tehran and other cities, highways out of the capital jammed for miles, gas stations ran dry, and families decamped to the Caspian or provincial towns with whatever they could stuff into a car. That “exodus from Tehran” lasted days, but for many, it echoed a broader urge: the desire to leave the country for good.

Migration researchers and professional bodies describe an “unprecedented” surge in emigration by students and skilled workers: doctors, nurses, engineers, IT workers and professors are applying for licenses and jobs abroad, often in OECD countries and the Gulf. Ministers admitted that thousands of physicians and a significant share of top medical students have already left the country. 2025 was not the year people first thought about leaving, but it was the year many finally decided they’d had enough.

The Nuclear Program

Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi holds a press conference on the opening day of his agency’s quarterly Board of Governors meeting in Vienna, Austria, November 19, 2025. Photo: Reuters

Iran’s nuclear program played a prominent role in the year’s events, whether directly or as the backdrop to other developments. Israel and the U.S. explained their June strikes as a last‑ditch effort to stop Iran from crossing the threshold from a large enrichment program to a weapons‑ready one. Stockpiles of 60% uranium climbed to levels with no plausible civilian use, and IAEA monitoring had been gutted. In the leadup to the war, European governments were already warning that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was more than forty times the JCPOA cap, and that thousands of advanced centrifuges were spinning at sites the deal had proscribed.​

The war flipped the script. Strikes on Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan wrecked key installations and utilities, with Western and Israeli assessments talking of setbacks measured in years rather than months. Iranian officials insisted the program remained intact. Five months later, satellite and IAEA reporting still showed the main facilities largely idle or focused on damage control. Construction appeared to shift to deeper, better-hidden sites. It was this continued activity that prompted the Europeans’ decision to reactivate sanctions. The argument was that Iran’s pre‑war nuclear escalation and post‑war stonewalling had left no alternative. 2025 ended with a paradox: the nuclear program has been severely damaged and sanctions  stiffened — yet the regime seems more convinced than ever that only developing a bomb could guarantee its survival.

The Worsening Human Rights Situation

Evin Prison. Photo: Reuters

Rights groups and UN officials say Iran executed more than 1,000 people in the first nine months of 2025 alone. This was the highest annual toll in at least a decade, with an execution rate that averaged well over 100 people a month. More than half of those killings were for drug offenses, often after rushed trials in revolutionary courts that disproportionately targeted poorer and minority communities. Others were accused of “corruption on earth,” “espionage” for Israel, or protest‑related crimes.

Alongside this execution spree, the year saw a steady drumbeat of torture allegations and harsh sentences for students, journalists and ordinary protesters. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi was rearrested in December at a memorial in Mashhad, with witnesses describing plainclothes agents beating her before hauling her away. The fact that this could happen showed how little space is left even for globally-recognized figures. In the background are dozens of less famous detainees: activists and alleged “spies” describing electric shocks, suffocation, and sexual violence as tools to extract confessions on camera. Together these developments turned Iran’s 2025 human rights record from grim to grotesque, and made the death penalty one of the regime’s most reliable forms of messaging.

The “Axis of Resistance” Weakened

 Pieces of shredded documents scattered on a poster of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, December 2024. Photo: Reuters

2025 was the year the “axis of resistance” looked exhausted as well as dangerous. After the fall of Bashar al‑Assad in December 2024, and the arrival of a new Syrian leadership that moved to curb Iranian and Hezbollah activity while Russia concentrated on safeguarding its own bases, Tehran effectively lost Syria as the easy forward operating platform it had enjoyed for more than a decade. Tehran still leaned on its partners in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, but the way they fought changed. Along the Lebanese border, Hezbollah and Israel got into a pattern of near‑daily exchanges. Hezbollah fighters launched anti-tank missiles, guided rockets and drones at Israeli outposts, the Israelis responding with artillery and airstrikes, but the Lebanese militants refrained from unleashing their heavier missile arsenal (and starting a broader war)..

In Iraq, militias linked to Iran kept up low‑level rocket and drone harassment of U.S. bases and convoys, but stopped short of the kind of large, lethal barrages that once risked major escalation, even as they weathered a steady rhythm of Israeli and American strikes on their depots and commanders. In Yemen, the Houthis used anti‑ship missiles and drones to harass Red Sea traffic and remind everyone they still mattered, but in a manner that avoided triggering a full‑scale Western campaign in response. 

Gulf governments pushed hard to keep this managed chaos off their own soil, closing airspace, issuing “not our war, not on our soil” statements, and leaning on Washington for a ceasefire so Gaza and Lebanon did not spill into Bahrain, Dubai or Riyadh.

By the end of the year, the axis looked less like a single instrument in Tehran’s hand and more like a network of armed clients, each with its own limits and bargaining chips.

The Sanctions Club

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian shake hands as they meet in Moscow, January 2025. Photo: Reuters

2025 was the year Tehran stopped pretending it could get back into the Western tent and truly joined the “sanctions club.” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s recent carefully-choreographed swing through Minsk and Moscow captured the approach, with a joint declaration on resisting sanctions and talk of “strengthening international law” that everyone understood as code for pushing back against U.S. and EU measures. In Russia, Araghchi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov touted a twenty-year “comprehensive strategic partnership” that now rests as much on shared isolation as on shared interests. Frozen assets, oil discounts, and drone deals are all part of the picture.

At the UN and other forums, Iran aligned with Russia, China, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba and others in statements denouncing “unilateral coercive measures” and casting sanctions not as punishment for behavior but as a kind of Western economic warfare against sovereign states. Beijing’s mediating role between Iran and Saudi Arabia furthered the narrative that there is now an alternative diplomatic universe in which Washington matters less. For ordinary Iranians, this pivot didn’t lift sanctions, but it did clarify whom their rulers see as their real audience.

The Year Ahead

In a country and region where surprises abound, anything can happen. At this time in December 1978, the Shah of Iran had been gravely weakened by months of strikes and mass protests, but he was still on the throne. Weeks later — on January 16th, 1979 — the Shah left Iran and on February 1st the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in France.

And the generally calm late December period can still yield the unexpected: one of the deadliest urban earthquakes in modern Iranian history struck the city of Bam on December 26th, 2003. For that matter, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas, 1979. 

As for the year to come, we have the clues to what may happen next in the seven themes above. I’ll be looking at the coming year in the first edition of MBN Iran briefing in two weeks’ time.

Happy new year! 

!سال نو میلادی مبارک