An Iranian police officer was killed and another wounded on Friday night when gunmen from a Sunni militant group opened fire on a military vehicle in the southeastern city of Iranshahr, local police said.
The police have identified the victims as Sgt. Ramin Sadeghi.
The gunmen exchanged fire with police before fleeing, according to the IRGC-affiliated Fars News.
The shooting occurred when a passing car opened fire on security forces moving through the city, according to a report by Haalvsh, a human rights organization that focuses on the restive Sistan-Baluchestan province.
A heavy security presence followed, with dozens of military and plainclothes forces dispatched to the scene, according to witnesses. Checkpoints were set up at the entrances and exits of Iranshahr, where drivers were stopped and asked for identification.
The Sunni militant group Jaish ul-Adl claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement on its Telegram channel.
The incident comes less than three weeks after a deadly assault on a courthouse in Zahedan, the provincial capital of Sistan and Baluchestan, in which nine people were killed — including three attackers — and 20 others wounded.
Jaish ul-Adl said it carried out that attack, which involved gunmen storming the judiciary compound and setting off an explosion.
Sistan and Baluchestan, bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan, has long experienced unrest involving Sunni militant groups, drug traffickers, and security forces.
Jaish al-Adl, designated a terrorist organization by both Iran and the United States, says it fights for the rights of Iran’s Baloch minority but is accused by Tehran of ties to cross-border militant networks.
On June 22, the United States joined Israel’s campaign against Iran and carried out airstrikes on its key nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
"President Trump said the [Iranian] nuclear program is obliterated. They seem to have put it in the ‘mission accomplished’ category,” Eyre told Iran International's podcast, Eye for Iran.
Under Obama, Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman worked closely with world powers to keep the 2015 nuclear deal alive, balancing many interests through complex diplomacy — a sharp contrast to today’s one-track coordination with Israel, Eyre said.
"There’s pretty much one person in the foreign affairs who he is coordinating with, and that’s Prime Minister Netanyahu," Eyre said, "The gentleman in charge, Mr. Witkoff, has a lot of other stuff on his plate to include Gaza and Ukraine. We’re really not paying any attention to the Iran portfolio. We have sort of outsourced it to Israel.”
Signals of a renewed fight
Tehran’s decision to revive its Supreme Defense Council — a wartime command body not convened since the Iran–Iraq War — is widely seen as a signal it expects the ceasefire with Israel to be temporary.
The move suggests Iranian leaders are bracing for renewed conflict and working to reestablish what Eyre described as “some type of strategic deterrence,” from rebuilding air defenses to restoring missile and nuclear capabilities.
Tehran at a crossroads
Weakened by war and diplomatic deadlock, Iran’s clerical elite faces a stark choice: defy pressure to halt its nuclear activity and risk further Israeli and US attack or concede and risk a leadership fracture.
A fragile ceasefire ended the 12-day war in June. Both sides claimed victory, but the war exposed vulnerabilities and punctured Iran’s image of deterrence.
Three Iranian insiders told Reuters the political establishment now views nuclear negotiations with Washington as the only way to avoid further escalation and existential peril. The Israeli strikes began just a day before a planned sixth round of talks with the US.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iran’s political leadership have agreed in principle to resume nuclear talks with Washington, seeing diplomacy as essential to preventing further US–Israeli strikes.
E3 Snapback Threat Adds Pressure
Britain, France, and Germany have warned they are prepared to trigger the UN’s “snapback” sanctions mechanism if Iran does not return to talks by the end of August.
Eyre said that even after the attacks, Iran retains the industrial capacity, enriched uranium, and technical knowledge to produce a nuclear weapon if it chooses.
“The fork in the road now is — does it try to reconstitute what it had before, or does it try something else… like moving toward a nuclear weapon?” he said.
You can watch the full episode of Eye for Iran on YouTube or listen on any major podcast platform like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, or Castbox.
On the fourth day of the Israeli 12-day war on Iran, the SNSC meeting attended by the heads of Iran’s three branches of power was hit by six bombs or missiles. Iranian state media later reported that President Pezeshkian and some other officials sustained minor leg injuries when trying to flee.
“I immediately ran out of the meeting and saw Pezeshkian walking about four meters away. He was on his feet, with a slight injury to his leg,” Mohsen Haji-Mirzaei, chief of staff to the Iranian president, said in an interview aired by the state TV on Friday.
He said that despite his injured leg, President Pezeshkian took a shower that day and met with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The next day, he visited a doctor to drain a swollen hematoma from his leg.
“Israel had a calculated plan to kill Pezeshkian, but God did not will his death,” Haji-Mirzaei said.
Israel targeted the building’s entrances and exits with six missiles or bombs to block escape routes and cut off airflow, Revolutionary Guards affiliated Fars News reported last month.
“Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni had inhaled so much dust that he was struggling to breathe, and medics were helping him," Pezeshkian's chief of staff said.
“I saw General Mousavi (Abdolrahim Mousavi, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces) with his face and body covered in dust and his clothes torn,” Haji-Mirzaei added.
Israel launched a surprise military campaign on June 13 targeting military and nuclear sites, assassinating senior Iranian commanders and killing hundreds of civilians.
During the 12-day conflict, Israel killed more than 30 senior security officials and at least 11 senior nuclear scientists. According to an Iranian government spokesperson, 1,062 Iranians were killed, including 786 military personnel and 276 civilians.
Iran retaliated with missile strikes that killed 31 civilians and one off-duty soldier. On June 22, the United States joined the campaign by carrying out airstrikes on Iran’s key nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
A US-brokered ceasefire put an end to the conflict on June 24.
