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Germany has held multiple rounds of talks with Iran in recent months aimed at a comprehensive understanding, the German Foreign Ministry told Iran International. The discussions cover not only the nuclear program but also other aspects including the missile program, the ministry said.
Iran hemorrhages the value of about four out of every five barrels of oil it manages to export, a former senior US Treasury official told Iran International, as sanctions forced funds to be lost in corrupt smuggling networks.
“They push this oil through corrupt networks and the worst actors in the government— people already sanctioned internationally," said Miad Maleki, former head of the US Treasury’s Office of Global Targeting within the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), "They get paid for only one out of five barrels they ship.”
The United States has maintained sanctions on the Islamic Revolution for decades but the measures were dramatically ramped up in 2018 when Donald Trump launched his so-called maximum pressure campaign.
Tehran has developed elaborate methods to evade sanctions, including a dark fleet of tankers that baffle tracking by switching off their transponders and conduct ship-to-ship transfers to mask the origin of its oil.
Maleki, a US air force veteran, argues these methods renders oil sales extremely costly. “Most of the money is wasted on shipping, discounts and commissions paid to layers of corrupt actors,” he said.
In nearly eight years at OFAC, Maleki helped design and implement the Treasury's sanctions campaigns against the Islamic Republic and its regional allies including Hezbollah and Hamas
'Malign intent'
Maleki said he never saw signs that goal of Iran’s leadership was sustainable growth for its citizenry.
“It was mostly about day-to-day survival and paying political rent to supporters,” he said. Instead, Iran’s oil revenues have been funneled to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), its elite clandestine wing, the Quds Force and other heavily sanctioned actors.
Born in Iran and a first-hand witness to life's hardships there, Maleki said he saw sanctions as a way to ultimately help the Iranian people, since Iran’s rulers would not use oil revenue for public benefit.
“Any value taken away from this cycle is value taken away from corruption and malign intent,” he said.
During President Trump’s first term, Maleki was an architect of the new sanctions regime and helped pushed their remit beyond oil.
“Sanctions on the financial sector were the key,” Maleki said. “Targeting IRGC and Defense Ministry-owned banks tied the regime’s hands in dealing with the global financial system. It was very impactful.”
In 2019, Washington also sanctioned the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Maleki sees it as one of the most impactful measures against the Islamic Republic, citing the vast wealth controlled by sprawling state foundations under Khamenei’s supervision including Bonyad Mostazafan, the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order (Setad) and Astan Quds Razavi.
Enmeshed in critical sectors spanning the economy, many of the entities disguised their activities as philanthropy.
“They invest in metals, petrochemicals and agriculture. But you don’t see much charity work,” he said.
Maleki said the sanctions were designed so that even after Khamenei, the next supreme leader and his appointees will remain under sanctions.
“The Bonyads and foundations and all the subsidiaries are operating Iran's economy and stealing from their own people and also engaging in funding a wide range of nefarious activities, supporting terrorism, instead of using those funds to help Iran's economy," he said.
Nuclear costs and wasted billions
US and Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June destroyed key parts of Iran’s nuclear program and ended tense talks between Tehran and Washington.
The United States urged Iran last week to take "immediate and concrete action" to meet its nuclear safeguards obligations.
France, Germany and Britain last month triggered the the so-called snapback mechanism of a 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran which could soon restore global sanctions unless resumed diplomacy secures a reprieve.
Maleki said it was unclear how damaging the move might be.
“The US sanctions are in place. Adding UN sanctions on top of it, I don't know how much meaningful financial restrictions that's going to bring on the regime, but politically, it's going to increase the pressure," he said. "You are going to see some shifts in governments, their approach to Iran, and how diplomatically they are engaged with Iran."
Estimates of Iran’s nuclear spending range from $500 billion to $1 trillion. Maleki said even per the low-range estimate of around half a billion dollars—equivalent to 17-20 years of oil revenue— the program produced only about 11–12% of Iran’s electricity.
A surge in electricity outages across Iran has caused severe disruption to daily life and economic activity, leaving Iranians frustrated and businesses paralyzed.
For roughly €15 billion (about $16 billion), Maleki continued, Iran could have built enough conventional power plants to avoid worsening shortages.
“Even if the goal was peaceful, the nuclear program never made economic sense."
Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi praised Iranian civil society on the third anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death in morality police custody, saying victims' families have kept the pursuit of justice alive by turning grief into a force for change.
In an exclusive editorial for Iran International, Mohammadi said the slogan Woman, Life, Freedom which became the mantra of the protest movement ignited by her death carries forward a decades-old struggle for human rights in Iran.
"From the image of the Khavaran mother standing tall over an unmarked grave, to the embrace of Mahsa Jina Amini’s parents in a hospital corridor as they endured her final moments in pain and tears, countless scenes have been created that will remain eternal in the history of our nation’s quest for justice," Mohammadi said, referring to mass graves for dissidents executed in 1988.
"In the wasteland of injustice and oppression, justice-seeking is a lamp to light the way, a hope in the darkness of despair, and an effort to resist defeat and passivity," Mohammadi wrote.
She traced a continuous line of activism from executions since the Islamic Republic's earliest days and the so-called chain murders of intellectuals inside Iran in the nineties to student protests, the Green Movement, 2017 and 2019 demonstrations and most recently the Women, Life, Freedom movement.
"Our society, in its pursuit of justice and its struggle to expose oppression and discrimination so that history cannot erase them, stands among the greatest in the world,” Mohammadi said.
Iran’s human rights situation remains dire according to watchdogs, with widespread state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and harsh crackdowns on political activists, journalists and women’s rights defenders.
Ethnic and religious minorities face systemic discrimination, international and Iran-focused rights groups say, and the ruling system continues to suppress protests and civil society movements with imprisonment, torture and executions.
Read the full text: Focus on Society and Justice, by Narges Mohammadi
The Iran-backed armed Houthi group in Yemen is holding back on missile attacks on Israel and are instead launching more drones as smuggling of vital parts from Tehran dwindles amid seizures at sea, security analysts told Iran International.
While the Yemeni militia is launching almost daily drone attacks on Israel, its missile attacks have ebbed as the group struggles to get key supplies from Tehran.
It has recently turned to using Iranian cluster bombs in a bid to make the ballistic missiles more effective while using less missiles as air attacks with drones continue.
“The Houthis possess large quantities of drones and missiles of various types, but they realize that the conflict could drag on for many years," Yemen-based military expert Rashid Maalouf told Iran International. "Therefore, they avoid using these weapons extensively on a daily basis to preserve their strategic stockpile from depletion.”
He said successful interceptions by coastal forces loyal to Yemen's internationally-recognized government have impacted supplies to the group which controls most of the country's population centers since a civil war broke out in 2014.
“Although the Houthis already possess a large stockpile, they are careful to ration it, not because of the immediate shortage, but rather to ensure its long-term sustainability in anticipation of a prolonged conflict.”
On September 4, the Israeli military said it had intercepted five UAVs and two surface-to-surface missiles launched from Yemen.
“In recent months, as part of the cooperation between the Air Force arrays, dozens of unmanned aerial vehicles and surface-to-surface missiles launched from Yemen were successfully intercepted," the statement said.
A day later, Israel announced it had assassinated 12 senior officials from the group who had been gathered together at a meeting in Sanaa.
“The Houthi terrorist regime serves as a central proxy of the Iranian regime, which provides it with funding and weapons for terror activities against the State of Israel and other countries,” the statement said following the airstrike which killed officials including Prime Minister Ahmad Al-Rahawi and other ministers.
Israeli strikes on the Yemeni capital Sanaa and Houthi-held north on Wednesday which in part targeted military and government news outlets supporting the group killed 35 people according to the health ministry and landed on the outskirts of the ancient old city.
On Friday, the Israeli military said 10 Houthi drones had been downed in the previous week. In the early hours of Saturday morning, a Houthi missile was intercepted.
Shortly after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the Houthis announced they would interdict shipping off Yemeni waters in solidarity with Palestine.
Despite frequent Houthi attacks on Israel for much of the last two years, most missiles and drones have been intercepted by air defense systems.
Notable lapses came in the form of a Houthi drone attack which killed an Israeli man in Tel Aviv last year and a missile attack which struck outside Israel's busiest airport in May.
In response, Israeli air attacks have killed scores of people, destroyed Yemen's civilian air fleet and targeted ports and energy infrastructure.
Still importing
Former Israeli military intelligence chief Danny Citronowicz told Iran International that the Houthis are facing logistical challenges to manufacture weapons, seen by the focus on drone attacks.
While drones are mostly made domestically, he said, the group still relies on Iranian equipment such as the GPS capabilities.
“The Houthis are still importing weapons from Iran,” Citronowicz added. “They don’t have the ability to manufacture missiles so they’re getting them smuggled from Iran in pieces and putting them together."
“When the US stops the ships [smuggling parts] we see the capabilities they have, but the Houthis need the Iranians still,” added Citronowicz, who said that senior Quds Force commander Abdul Reza Shahla’i is on the ground coordinating the group in Yemen.
Under sanctions, the US has offered a $15m reward for information on his financial activities, networks and associates.
“The Houthis will find it very hard to sustain this ability to launch missiles without getting them from Iran. The ability to manufacture them in Yemen is very hard. They need the components from Iran," he said.
The more complex, the more Iranian
The Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations think tank said in a report that the Iran connection provides more sophisticated weaponry than the group could acquire on their own for both missiles and drones.
“Iranian support has bolstered the group’s fighting abilities, helping the Houthis gain and maintain military superiority within Yemen," it wrote in March.
Since November 2023, the Houthis have targeted over 100 international merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sunk two ships, seized one vessel and killed at least eight seamen.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the US think tank the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), told Iran International that while the Houthis have local production capabilities, the more complex the projectile, the more likely the Houthis are to remain reliant on whole systems or component parts from Tehran.
"But the cheaper the platform, like drones, the more likely they will be able to develop systems with Iranian guidance in country," he said.
"Marrying that assumption with past US and Israeli strikes against Houthi missile launch, production, and storage sites, it’s apparent that both for strategic and cost purposes the terror group would transition to more drone than ballistic missiles strikes."
The uptake of Iranian oil at Chinese ports hit highs last seen before Donald Trump reentered the White House in early 2025 and revived his so-called maximum pressure campaign, tanker-tracking data obtained by Iran International reveals.
Figures from commodities intelligence company Kpler shows a sharp rise in Iranian oil offloaded at Chinese ports last month in a sign the world's top oil importer was unfazed by attempted US curbs on Tehran's supplies.
The surge was so significant that Iran’s unsold crude stored at sea in Asian waters—which had been building for months— fell by half in just one month, in a sign of stepped up demand.
According to Kpler, Iranian crude offloaded at Chinese ports in August hit 1.68 million barrels per day (bpd)—a 23% jump from July.
Floating storage dropped to 15 million barrels by September 7, down from 30 million barrels in early August, much of it concentrated near Malaysia.
Since the start of the year, the US Treasury has sanctioned 127 tankers along with dozens of individuals, companies and networks accused of skirting US sanctions on Iranian flows, which it says enriches Tehran's aggressive military moves.
Tehran denounces the sanctions as an attack on the livelihood of its people and bid to bend its policy to Western will.
The frenetic pace of new curbs manifested itself at times in near daily new US announcements on entities in the Treasury and State Department crosshairs for allegedly moving Iran's oil.
Yet the administration’s pledge to “bring Iran’s oil exports to zero” appears to have fallen far short of its intent, the data indicates.
Both loading and discharging volumes of Iranian crude are higher than last year.
While month-to-month fluctuations in Chinese port discharges have been sharp, the overall trend shows growth. On average, China has discharged 1.45 million bpd of Iranian crude over the first eight months of 2025, slightly above the same period last year.
This transpired despite Washington blacklisting more than a hundred “ghost fleet” tankers linked to Iranian smuggling operations.
China holds the key
US efforts to dismantle Iran’s smuggling networks—through monitoring ship-to-ship transfers, forged documents and hidden financial channels—could eventually slow Tehran’s trade.
But Beijing’s willingness to greenlight purchases of Iranian oil appears to have carried the day. Without Chinese cooperation, Washington’s “maximum pressure” strategy could face failure.
Chinese Premier Xi Jinping hosted Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian along with heads of state from Russia, North Korea and other nations not aligned with the United States for an international conference and military parade this month.
The spectacle was widely interpreted as a show of strength and defiance toward American preeminence in global politics and trade and a sign that sharp policy swerves by the Trump administration on sanctions and tariffs were rejected.
Beijing’s insistence on importing Iranian oil is not driven by supply shortages or price discounts alone. The market is oversupplied, and prices are lower than last year.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) noted in its September 11 report that global oil production this year is expected to rise by 2.7 million bpd, while demand will increase by only 700,000 bpd.
Analysts estimate Tehran grants Chinese refiners discounts of $4-6 per barrel to keep crude moving. Yet China’s persistence in overlooking US sanctions may also serve as a bargaining chip in trade talks.
Since returning to office, President Trump has reimposed multiple layers of tariffs on Chinese goods, and US Census Bureau data shows imports from China fell 19% year-on-year in the first seven months of 2025.
China’s refusal to enforce US oil sanctions against Iran could thus be part of a broader strategy to leverage concessions from Washington in its trade disputes.
Oil-for-goods nexus
Another key factor is that Chinese exports to Iran are closely tied to oil imports. Crude shipments underpin China’s status as Iran’s largest trading partner, with part of Tehran’s oil payments settled through barter with Chinese goods.
Beyond crude, China is also the main buyer of Iran’s petroleum and petrochemical products, which together account for about half of the country’s total exports.
Despite US sanctions this year on nine tankers carrying Iranian liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), consultancy Vortexa reports Iran’s LPG exports rose to 1.1 million tons in August. Kpler data indicates China absorbs around 80% of that trade.
By relying on imports of Iranian oil and petroleum products, China now accounts for more than a quarter of Iran’s total goods imports—underscoring how central Beijing has become to Tehran’s economic survival.
