Iraq to amend gazette entry that implied terror designation of Iran-aligned groups

Dec 4, 2025, 09:17 GMTUpdated: 11:42 GMT

File photo of Lebanon's Hezbollah supporters at a ceremony in Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, November 3, 2023

Iraq said it will correct an official gazette entry that appeared to designate Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi movement as terrorist groups and subject them to asset freezes, adding that approvals were limited to listings tied exclusively to Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

The Iraqi News Agency said the Justice Ministry’s Iraqi Gazette notice, the government's official record, will be amended by removing unnamed parties from the list.

It added that Iraq’s approval to freeze assets concerned designations drawn from a UN Security Council list limited to ISIS and al-Qaeda, not other groups.

Later in the day, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani said he had ordered an investigation into a “mistake” that saw Hezbollah and Houthis appear on an asset-freeze list, stressing the government will not compromise its stance on Lebanon and the Palestinians.

The clarification followed publication in issue No. 4848 of the Iraqi Gazette of Decision No. 61 by the Committee for the Freezing of Terrorists’ Assets, which named 24 entities and ordered their funds frozen.

The committee is chaired by Central Bank Governor Ali Mohsen al-Alaq, with members from the anti-money-laundering office and the ministries of finance, interior, foreign affairs, justice, trade, communications, and science and technology, as well as the integrity, intelligence and counter-terrorism bodies.

Publication of the committee’s decision in the Justice Ministry’s gazette led some outlets to report that Hezbollah and the Houthis had been designated terrorist entities, prompting denunciations from politicians aligned with Iran-backed factions.

Lawmaker Mustafa Sanad, who shared the gazette and is aligned with Popular Mobilization Forces-linked blocs, condemned the designations on social media.

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Israel arrests Ashkelon man on suspicion of spying for Iran

Dec 4, 2025, 08:46 GMT

Israeli police and the Shin Bet said they arrested an Ashkelon resident, 37-year-old Amir Malka, on suspicion of spying for Iran over several months, allegedly earning several thousand dollars.

He was detained last month in a joint probe by Jerusalem District detectives and the Shin Bet; police did not detail the alleged espionage.

Malka is to be indicted in the Beersheba District Court.

The agencies said they are intensifying efforts to deter Israelis from spying for Iran following the 12-day war in June, with the Shin Bet working with municipalities.

Bat Yam Mayor Tzvika Brot this week urged residents who contacted Iranian agents to come forward, implying leniency.

Iran boosts gas exports to Turkey despite deepening domestic shortages

Dec 3, 2025, 21:41 GMT

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Dalga Khatinoglu

Despite facing a growing domestic gas deficit and widespread use of highly polluting fuel oil, Iran’s gas deliveries to Turkey have continued to surge according to official Turkish energy statistics.

Newly released data from Turkey’s Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA), affiliated with the Ministry of Energy show that Iran supplied more than 5.5 billion cubic meters of gas to Turkey during the first nine months of 2025—17% more than in the same period last year and 45% higher compared to 2023.

Buffeted by stiff Western and international sanctions, Tehran appears to be seeking revenue from abroad even as it faces severe gas shortages at home.

A confidential Oil Ministry document obtained by Iran International in mid-2025 showed an annual jump by nearly half in fuel oil, or mazut, consumption last year.

This is despite its being one of the most polluting forms of fossil fuel on earth.

It is not yet clear how much mazut consumption has risen this year, but the deputy oil minister says Iran is expected to face a daily gas deficit of 300 million cubic meters during this winter’s peak demand. Last year, the shortfall was 250 million cubic meters; in 2023, it was about 200 million.

Bleak outlook

With the onset of cold weather and rising household gas demand across large parts of the country, industries and power plants have increasingly switched to burning mazut, causing dangerous air pollution in major cities including the capital Tehran.

A recent report by Iran’s Department of Environment on the mazut and diesel supplied to Tehran-area power plants shows sulfur content 10 to 100 times higher than international standards.

Had Iran halted its gas shipments to Turkey, the statistics show it could have reduced domestic fuel oil consumption by roughly 20 million liters per day, given that natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel alternative.

Yet the Islamic Republic insists on maintaining its gas exports to Turkey and supplies roughly the same amount to Iraq.

Last year, Iran exported 15 billion cubic meters of gas, equivalent to 15 billion liters of mazut in energy content. If exports had been suspended, not only would Iran have avoided burning mazut domestically, it would have also saved 7 million liters of diesel per day.

Why does Iran have a gas shortage?

Part of Iran’s gas deficit stems from the slowdown in the development of gas production projects due to the government’s financial constraints and the limited technological capabilities of domestic oil companies.

Stiff Western and international sanctions have made updating the country's already creaky energy infrastructure yet more difficult.

For example, between 2010 and 2020, Iran’s gas output grew at an average annual rate of 5.2%, but growth has dropped to 1–2% in recent years, according to BP statistics.

Another critical factor is the decline in pressure at Iran’s section of the South Pars gas field, shared with Qatar—a decline that began in 2024. South Pars supplies over two-thirds of Iran's gas.

Years ago, Qatar collaborated with major Western energy companies to install 20,000-ton platforms—15 times heavier than Iran’s current offshore platforms—along with huge compressors in the Qatari section (the North Field).

But neither Iran nor its Chinese partners possess the technical capacity to manufacture such large-scale equipment.

Declining pressure

About nine months ago, Iran’s Oil Ministry signed a $17 billion contract with four domestic firms to implement pressure-boosting operations at South Pars. However, instead of installing 20,000-ton platforms, the plan calls for 4,000-ton structures, and for using weaker compressors instead of the massive units required.

An Iranian-British oil and gas engineer—designer of a BP mega-platform in Azerbaijan’s Caspian waters and currently working on the Qatari side of South Pars—told Iran International that the specifications of platforms and compressors outlined in the Iranian contract are inadequate to resolve the field’s pressure decline.

The engineer, who requested anonymity, added that restoring pressure on the Iranian side requires much larger platforms capable of hosting a full power plant, giant compressors and facilities for separating various gas streams and condensates.

The pressure in Iran’s section of South Pars was about 120 bar until two years ago, but has since been dropping by 6 bar per year, significantly reducing gas output.

Mohammad Oliya, CEO of MAPNA—one of the four companies awarded the $17 billion contract—said earlier this month that “no funding has yet been allocated” for the pressure-boosting project.

At the same time, the Revolutionary Guards-linked Tasnim news agency reported that although the contract was signed in March, no action beyond a series of study meetings and initial assessments has occurred.

How Iran's theocratic rule takes hits but persists

Dec 3, 2025, 18:04 GMT

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Ata Mohamed Tabriz

A lopsided war with Israel and the United States in June rattled Iran’s political order, but it survives through smarter coercion and the disarray of forces that might otherwise bring it down.

Internal contestation is harsher than at any time in recent memory, with competing factions trying to preserve or redefine their place in a system that has lost the capacity for reform or institutional expansion.

Yet Iran's nearly 50-year-old theocracy persists, compensating for poor governance with stiff security control and the careful redistribution of shrinking resources.

Just as authorities have slackened enforcement of Islamic social rules, allowing unveiled women and open-air concerts in public, it has stepped up a crackdown on political dissent and alleged spies.

Opposing this order are three forces whose interaction with the securitized state produces neither fundamental change nor imminent collapse, but something closer to endurance through erosion.

Those are: people inside Iran fighting localized economic and professional battles without organized networks, an exiled opposition adept at narrative and symbolism but detached from lived realities inside Iran and foreign actors committed to curbing Tehran’s nuclear and regional strength but not to toppling it.

One system, many channels

The Islamic Republic is structured around the Supreme Leader, whose authority ultimately resolves all major decisions. Around this axis sits an intricate constellation of parallel institutions, security councils, loyalty networks and overlapping hierarchies.

Policymaking is multi-layered. But decision-making is ultimately his sole prerogative.

President Masoud Pezeshkian recently issued a telling statement that unmanageable infighting would ensure should Ali Khamenei somehow exit the scene. It underscores a basic fear: without the Leader’s centrality, the power networks would drift apart.

Nothing illustrates this better than the way “system” is used interchangeably for both the political order and the leader himself.

Khamenei functions less as the manager of a unified apparatus than as the referee of internal conflicts. The state bureaucracy is not the engine of governance but one node among political, security and economic bodies each pursuing their own interests.

The 12-day war intensified these fissures. The removal of influential IRGC figures disrupted long-standing balances and sharpened factional sensitivities.

The Babak Zanjani affair illuminates the power politics at play.

Sprung with little explanation from a death sentence for corruption, the disgraced tycoon now not only walks free but weighs in regularly on politics, even appearing to threaten former President Hassan Rouhani with death in a tweet this week.

Such a rapid rehabilitation could not occur without powerful establishment backing.

Unorganized discontent

The war’s economic toll—passed on to society through inflationary policies—has deepened hardship and widened discontent. Iran’s society today is in ferment but unorganized: protests erupt across workplaces and cities, but without intermediary institutions they remain local and short-lived.

A recent nurses’ strike in Mashhad, much like the truck drivers’ strike before it this spring, showed the pattern clearly: strong anger, weak connective tissue.

The labor market’s collapse into unstable, platform-based work illustrates a society living in permanent emergency. Eight million rideshare drivers do not prove total collapse, but they reveal a mass shift toward insecure livelihoods.

Economic stress drains the psychological capacity for sustained organization; survival overrides solidarity.

Provincial centers skew toward economic protests, while peripheral regions experience conflict mainly through security confrontation.

The recurring demolition of homes in Baluchistan in southeastern Iran is one example of a strategy that provokes local resistance but rarely ratchets up because no networks link periphery grievances to central demands.

Inside Iran, opposition forces function like isolated islands. Outside, the opposition produces abundant media output but struggles to translate daily grievances into a shared political language.

The gap between “voice” abroad and “life” inside has produced an opposition that amplifies frustrations but does not alter the balance of power.

Survival on the edge

The Islamic Republic continues not as an effective state but as a mechanism that defers crises day by day. Security has replaced policy; the cost of maintaining power rises constantly as the quality of governance decays.

The system persists because no countervailing power with organizational depth has yet emerged.

European-triggered international sanctions and intermittent threats from the United States and Israel show that containment—not internal transformation—may be the ultimate priority from outside powers.

External pressure accelerates economic and infrastructural decay but cannot substitute for domestic political change.

For the West, Iran remains a security file, not a political project.

Foreign actors may accelerate or intensify pressure, but the indispensable condition for change is alignment between internal and external forces around a shared language and objective.

Until such convergence forms, the Islamic Republic will remain in a state of endurance through erosion—able to enforce the status quo even as it becomes less capable of maintaining stability or basic services.

Copies of Iranian Shaheds, US suicide drones set to be deployed to Mideast

Dec 3, 2025, 16:32 GMT

The US military has created a task force to field its first squadron of new kamikaze attack drones in the Middle East, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said on Wednesday.

US arms developers reverse-engineered a captured Shahed drone from Iran to produce the new model, CNN reported citing a US defense official.

The unit, called Task Force Scorpion Strike, was formed after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to speed up the delivery of low-cost drone technology to troops.

“This new task force sets the conditions for using innovation as a deterrent,” CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper said in a statement.

“Equipping our skilled warfighters faster with cutting-edge drone capabilities showcases US military innovation and strength, which deters bad actors.”

CENTCOM said the task force has already built a squadron using what it calls Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System drones, or LUCAS, developed by the Arizona-based company SpektreWorks.

'Flipping the script'

The drones can fly long distances, operate autonomously and be launched by catapult, rocket-assisted systems or mobile vehicles.

The LUCAS drones were created after developers reverse-engineered a Shahed drone from Iran, which the US captured a few years ago, CNN reported citing a US defense official.

CNN's report said the defense official acknowledged that the US military’s focus on larger and more expensive precision systems had “put our forces at a disadvantage” against cheap drones like those used by Iran.

“But now we’re flipping the script,” the official added.

The official declined to say how many drones the new squadron has, saying only there were “many” and more would be added. Each drone costs about $35,000, the official said.

'Low-cost option'

The official also told CNN that a damaged Iranian Shahed drone captured by the United States several years ago was examined by US companies, which worked to reverse-engineer elements of the system and use those findings in the development of LUCAS.

The official described the result as a US-produced, low-cost attack drone built to meet the needs of current conflicts.

Task Force Scorpion Strike, which helped lead the development of the drones, consists of nearly two dozen personnel, led by service members from Special Operations Command Central.

Not all of the personnel are based in the Middle East, CNN's report said citing the official.

Where Iranians dare to speak to each other without fear

Dec 3, 2025, 15:46 GMT

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Kambiz Hosseini

In Iran today, the riskiest act is neither protest nor journalism. It's conversation.

Around eleven o’clock on a winter Thursday night in Tehran, when smog hangs low and the city braces for yet another morning of inflation, something improbable happens.

People lift their phones and dial into a live call-in program that invites them to do what the state has discouraged for nearly 50 years, speak to one another without fear. In no other broadcast media do Iranians speak so freely.

Conversation, elsewhere, is a habit. In Iran, it is an act of retrieval. The Islamic Republic has regulated public expression so thoroughly that even a modest exchange, an honest memory, an unfiltered admission can feel subversive.

Authoritarian systems seldom fear noise, they fear permeability, the small openings through which private truth seeps back into collective life.

Conversation cannot, on its own, remake a country.

But it can remind people that they still constitute a public, and that a public, once it begins to speak, is difficult to extinguish.

On Thursday nights in Tehran, beneath a sky thick with pollutants and unspoken truths, that public can be heard, quietly but insistently, returning to life.

Each week I begin my program the same way: "What should Iran talk about tonight?" And the phone lines come alive.

Nostalgia

The first caller, a woman in Tehran named Artemis, speaks with the steadiness of someone who has carried a sentence around all day.

We know what we have lost, she begins, political rights, economic stability, clean air, the artists and scientists driven into exile. But we do not talk enough about what survived. Our culture, our sense of who we were.

She identifies as a monarchist, yet her critique is directed at her own camp. When monarchists scream and insult online, she says, they betray the very values they claim to defend, dignity, coexistence.

She pauses. Iran was once a place where different voices lived safely, she claims: we should try to be those voices again. It is a simple thought, but in a country where political language has been battered for decades, simplicity can sound radical.

Then the tone of the program shifts. A man named Ehsan calls from abroad with the urgency of someone carrying unresolved grief.

The time for talk is over, he declares. Forest fires, a collapsing currency, students expelled from school—none of it, he argues, will change until Iranians swear an oath to reclaim their homeland.

His language is harsh, almost martial, yet the emotion beneath it is unmistakably human: grief straining toward agency.

'I was wrong'

Then, a quieter voice enters the line, one woven deeply into Iran’s cultural memory.

Esfandiar Monfaredzadeh, the composer behind the defining soundtracks of pre-revolution Iranian cinema and several anthems that accompanied the uprising of 1979, speaks with a calm that cuts through the evening’s tension.

To many, he embodies the contradictions of that era, an artist who lent his talent to a revolution that promised liberation and delivered something narrower. What he does next is rare for his generation.

"I was wrong," he says. "I hope the generations after me can forgive us."

The confession does not land softly for everyone. A woman named Irandokht calls in, her voice tight with exhaustion. You left, she tells him. We stayed. And we live with what followed.

Her anger is not directed solely at him, it is aimed at the long silence surrounding his generation, decades in which few publicly reckoned with how a movement born in the language of justice hardened into repression.

Monfaredzadeh listens and responds without defensiveness. Under the Shah, he explains, Iranians had social and cultural freedoms, but not political ones.

Under the Islamic Republic, even those limited freedoms contracted. Until political freedom exists for everyone, he says, monarchists, republicans, leftists, Islamists, there can be no future worth building.

Other callers widen the frame. A woman from Karaj admits that during recent protests many workers stayed home out of fear of losing their salaries, leaving young demonstrators exposed.

Another describes an improvised referendum, the clanging of pots and pans from balconies, a city speaking through metal because speech itself had become unsafe.

I close the program the same way each week, Take good care of the person sitting next to you, I say, and sign off the national dialogue.

Then I sit for a moment longer and think to myself, we have a long way to go, yet the possibility of change feels close.

So close, no matter how far.