Trump says not satisfied with Iran's latest proposal

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said the designations target Opal Exchange, Radin Exchange and Tahayyori Guarantee Society, also known as Arz Iran Exchange, along with their owners and associates.

“Iran is the head of the snake for global terrorism, and under President Trump’s leadership, Treasury is moving aggressively, through Economic Fury, to sever the Iranian military’s financial lifelines,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

“We will relentlessly target the regime’s ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds, and pursue anyone enabling Tehran’s attempts to evade sanctions,” he added.

The Treasury said Iranian exchange houses facilitate billions of dollars in foreign currency transactions each year and play a critical role because Tehran primarily settles its oil sales in Chinese yuan. The department said the exchange houses help convert those revenues into currencies more usable by Iran’s military, partners and proxies.

OFAC said Iran’s shadow banking networks handle tens of billions of dollars in trade annually, much of it linked to overseas oil and petrochemical sales.

The sanctioned individuals include Pedram Pirouzan, Hossein Mohammad Rezaei, Masoud Mohammad Rezaei, Nasser Ghasemi Rad and Ehsan Tahayyori.

The Treasury said Pirouzan and Ghasemi Rad used citizenship from Dominica and Saint Kitts and Nevis, respectively, to obscure their Iranian ties while setting up foreign front companies and bank accounts.

OFAC also designated a series of front companies, including entities registered in jurisdictions such as the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere, saying they helped Iranian exchange houses conduct transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of sanctioned Iranian persons.

Since February 2025, OFAC has sanctioned more than 1,000 Iran-related individuals, vessels and aircraft as part of the campaign, the Treasury said.

“The enemy should know that we will not let them go and will avenge Khamenei and every single person killed,” Tehran’s Friday prayer leader Mohammad-Javad Haj Ali-Akbari said.

“We have still not taken revenge for Qassem Soleimani, and we have many things to do,” he said during his sermon in Tehran.

He also praised Iran’s negotiating team, led by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, saying they had rejected the enemy’s demands.

“We thank the negotiating team and its head, Mr. Ghalibaf, and the foreign minister for rejecting the enemy,” Haj Ali-Akbari said. “If Haj Bagher manages to fire at the heart of Satan with his missile of diplomacy, all the better. Otherwise, Seyed Majid (Mousavi) will fire at the heart of Satan with his launcher and real missile,” he said, referring to the IRGC aerospace commander.

Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Nobitex, was founded by brothers Ali and Mohammad Kharrazi, members of a powerful clerical and political dynasty closely tied to the country’s leadership, Reuters reported on Friday.

The brothers are the grandsons of an ayatollah who taught Iran’s current supreme leader and later served on the Assembly of Experts. Their father, Ayatollah Bagher Kharrazi, founded a political-religious group and was involved with early Revolutionary Guards structures, while a great-uncle served as foreign minister and adviser to successive leaders. The family is also linked by marriage to the supreme leader’s relatives.

Nobitex has processed transactions tied to sanctioned entities including Iran’s central bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, while serving millions of users seeking access to global markets under sanctions. The company denies government ties.

Senior clerics in Iran said the Strait of Hormuz is not open to negotiation and warned against engaging with the United States.

“The Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are no longer negotiable,” Mohammad Javad Haj Ali Akbari said on Friday, adding a new legal framework would be pursued with Oman.

“Negotiating with America means surrender,” Mashhad Friday Prayer Imam Ahmad Alamolhoda said, adding Iran could leverage control of Hormuz without talks.

The Iran war shows how smaller powers can still disrupt much stronger militaries and economies through cheap drones, cyber tools and chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued in an opinion piece.

Friedman wrote that President Donald Trump is betting the US blockade of Iranian oil exports will force Tehran to negotiate on Washington’s terms, while Iran is betting that pressure on the Strait of Hormuz and higher energy prices will eventually force Trump to retreat.

The columnist argued that the larger lesson is not only about Iran, but about the changing nature of power. He said the war has shown how asymmetric warfare has evolved, allowing states and armed groups to use relatively cheap tools to create major disruption.

Friedman cited Iran’s use of low-cost drones to strike Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, saying the attacks caused far larger economic and service disruption than the price of the weapons would suggest. He also compared Iran’s tactics to Ukraine’s drone attacks inside Russia and Hamas’s use of improvised rockets against Israel.

He said the next stage could be even more dangerous as artificial intelligence gives smaller states, militant groups and hackers access to far more powerful tools. Friedman warned that AI agents could make cyberattacks cheaper, faster and more autonomous, giving actors that once had few options new ways to threaten advanced societies.

The argument, he wrote, is that Trump may be misreading the conflict if he assumes Iran has “no cards.” In Friedman’s view, the war is a preview of a world where even weakened states can use drones, cyber capabilities, infrastructure attacks and AI to create what one expert called “mass disruption.”