Iran is living through America’s 2022 inflation shock almost every month

The survey by the Iranian Students Polling Agency (ISPA), conducted between June 15 and June 21, found that 46.1% of internet users said the shutdown of international internet access made them "very" or "to a great extent" angry and frustrated. Another 47.1% said it caused little or no anger.

The poll found that 89.3% of Iranians aged 15 and older use the internet.

Among users, 38.8% said losing access to the global internet created serious difficulties communicating with friends and family, while 33.6% said the main impact was on entertainment, including watching videos and listening to music.

Almost one-third, or 29.6%, said their work and income would have been completely disrupted if international internet access had not been restored, underscoring the reliance of many Iranians on online connectivity for their livelihoods.

The survey also suggested the restrictions did not drive most users to state media. During the outage, 39.2% said they followed news through state television, while 21.3% relied on domestic social media platforms such as Baleh and Eitaa and 14.5% turned to satellite television channels.

The findings also highlighted widespread dissatisfaction with internet services. Some 72.3% of users said they were little or not at all satisfied with internet speed, while 56.9% said increasing internet speeds would be their top policy priority. Another 21.5% said reducing internet filtering should be the priority.

The survey found 61.1% opposed unrestricted, unfiltered internet access for government officials, while 24.6% supported such access.

The communications ministry has estimated the internet shutdown cost Iran's economy about 5 trillion rials ($58 million at the official exchange rate) a day, according to the report. The survey also found that 58% of respondents viewed internet-based businesses as a key driver of job creation.

The survey was conducted on behalf of the communications ministry among a sample of 4,545 people.

Between March and June 2026, Iran's non-oil trade with China totaled just $830 million, down from $3.3 billion during the same period last year—a decline of roughly 75%.

Kpler shipping data reviewed by Iran International also point to a sharp decline in Iranian oil exports to China.

Average daily unloadings at Chinese ports fell from 1.74 million barrels per day in April to around 550,000 barrels per day in the first half of July.

Together, the figures suggest the Strait of Hormuz closure has dealt a severe blow to Iran's economic ties with its largest trading partner.

China remains the only major buyer of sanctioned Iranian crude and was by far Iran's most important commercial partner in 2025.

The disruption has also sharply increased transportation costs. According to the head of logistics at Iran's Trade Promotion Organization, shipping a container from China to Iran now costs $8,000–$9,000, up from $2,500–$3,500before the conflict.

Transporting goods through Central Asian rail corridors has become even more expensive.

Iran hit harder than regional rivals

Although trade between China and other Persian Gulf states also declined after the Strait closure, the contraction was far less severe than in Iran's case.

Chinese customs data show Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recorded a combined $109 billion in bilateral trade with China during the first half of 2026, a 29% decline from a year earlier.

By contrast, total trade between Iran and China during the same six-month period fell 59%.

Trade between China and Oman proved even more resilient, remaining virtually unchanged at around $16 billion during the first half of the year.

The figures indicate that Iran has borne a disproportionately large share of the commercial costs associated with disrupting one of the world's most important shipping lanes.

Broader trade slowdown

The impact extends well beyond China.

Last year, Iran’s Arab neighbours accounted for roughly 51% of Iran's total non-oil trade. Since March, trade between Iran and all of those countries except Iraq has effectively come to a halt.

Iran itself has stopped publishing monthly foreign trade statistics since the regional war began, leaving customs data from trading partners among the few remaining indicators of the country's external commerce.

Data from other major economies point in the same direction.

According to Eurostat, trade between Iran and the European Union fell by more than half during the first three months of the conflict, dropping below €430 million.

India offered one notable exception. A one-month US sanctions waiver allowed Indian refiners to receive two cargoes of Iranian crude in May, lifting India's imports from Iran by more than 340% to about $950 million during the first five months of the year.

Even so, India's exports to Iran fell 17% to $470 million, reflecting weaker non-oil trade.

Official Turkish data painted a steadier picture. Despite a doubling of Iranian natural gas exports, overall trade between Iran and Turkey remained broadly unchanged at around $1.9 billion during the first half of the year.

The Chinese customs figures, shipping data and trade statistics from Europe suggest that while the Strait of Hormuz crisis has disrupted commerce across the region, Iran has so far paid a markedly higher commercial price than many of the countries it sought to pressure.

Iran currently produces about 105 million liters of gasoline a day while consuming approximately 135 million liters, according to Reza Sepahvand, a member of parliament’s energy committee. He said in May that wartime damage had reduced domestic production while fuel imports had also declined.

Before the US-led war that started on February 28, Iran covered part of its fuel deficit through imports and barter arrangements, particularly with traders in the United Arab Emirates.

Those regular seaborne channels have been largely cut off by the ongoing US naval blockade, which bars maritime traffic entering or leaving Iranian ports. Tehran has diverted some trade through Oman’s Khasab port and Iraq’s Umm Qasr, but trade sources say those indirect routes are slower, more expensive and have far less capacity than conventional shipping, making them ill-suited to replacing large fuel deliveries.

The disruption has left Iran more dependent on a narrower pool of non-Western suppliers and alternative trading networks. That pool is now facing additional demand from Russia, which has turned to gasoline imports after Ukrainian drone strikes damaged its refining sector and disrupted domestic supplies.

Reuters reported that Russia was seeking as much as 400,000 metric tons of gasoline a month from countries including India, Belarus and Kazakhstan. At least 60,000 tons had been shipped from India to Russia by early July.

Where Russian and Iranian demand overlaps

Not all those purchases directly compete with Iran. Fuel from Belarus and Kazakhstan largely reaches Russia through established regional and overland networks that Tehran does not normally use.

The more relevant overlap is in India and the wider seaborne fuel market, where Russian purchases could increase competition for available cargoes, tankers, insurance and financial intermediaries.

Miad Maleki, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former senior sanctions strategist at the US Treasury, told Iran International that Russia and Iran were increasingly looking to overlapping parts of the non-Western energy market.

“Both countries are now drawing from the same pool of non-Western refiners with spare export capacity, but Russia is a far bigger buyer,” Maleki said.

India has sharply increased its exports of gasoline and other refined fuels in response to international shortages. Its exports of light and middle distillates were expected to reach 1.55 million barrels per day in July, almost double the 866,000 barrels per day recorded in May, Reuters reported, citing data from the commodities intelligence firm Kpler.

But the additional Indian supply has not fully relieved pressure on the Asian market. Kpler estimated that Asian imports of light and middle distillates would reach 5.8 million barrels per day in July, about 18% below levels seen before the latest conflict-related disruptions.

The Financial Times reported that a 42,000-ton gasoline cargo originating at India’s Vadinar refinery was scheduled to arrive at a Russian terminal. More than 90% of the crude processed at Vadinar this year had come from Russia, according to Kpler, effectively allowing Russian oil to be refined in India and shipped back as gasoline.

For Iran, the concern is not that Russia has already taken cargoes intended for Tehran. There is no public evidence that Moscow has directly displaced a specific Iranian purchase.

Rather, Russia is adding substantial demand to a market in which Iran already faces limited suppliers, restricted banking access and higher transportation and insurance costs.

Why Tehran has fewer options

Iran’s reliance on imported fuel had been increasing even before the war. A confidential Oil Ministry report obtained by Iran International showed that the country imported nearly 5 billion liters of gasoline and diesel combined in the Iranian year ending in March 2025, twice the volume recorded a year earlier.

The figure covers both gasoline and diesel and does not establish the volume of gasoline imports alone. But it illustrates Iran’s growing dependence on foreign fuel as domestic consumption outpaces refinery production.

The report said Iran had increasingly relied on barter arrangements because sanctions restricted its access to international banking and conventional payment systems. Tehran exchanged fuel oil for gasoline and diesel, particularly through traders operating in the United Arab Emirates.

Russia’s greater purchasing power and established commercial relationships could give it an advantage where the two countries’ needs overlap.

“Russia’s economy and import bill dwarf Iran’s, giving it far more purchasing power and better logistics networks with India, Kazakhstan and Belarus,” Maleki said.

Any resulting pressure inside Iran would probably not appear first through an official increase in gasoline prices. Fuel is heavily subsidized, and the government has historically been reluctant to raise prices because of the risk of public anger.

Instead, a prolonged shortage could lead to tighter quotas, uneven distribution, longer lines at filling stations and greater reliance on unofficial markets.

Drivers in several parts of Iran were already reporting tighter rationing, long queues and gasoline being sold outside the official distribution system at sharply higher prices in May, according to Iran International.

Russia’s gasoline imports do not mean Iran will lose access to foreign fuel. But they introduce another large buyer into parts of the market Tehran relies on at a time when Iran is already struggling with damaged production capacity, rising consumption and restricted access to international trade.

"The country will certainly face significant unrest among workers by the end of the summer if the current trend continues," Akbar Shokat, executive secretary of the Workers' House in Qom province, told the ILNA news agency.

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  Inflation leaves Iranian pensioners unable to cover basic costs

Many workers, according to ILNA, who were temporarily laid off during the conflict and turned to jobs such as ride-hailing to make ends meet have since been recalled to factories, only to find that wages for June and July remain unpaid. Having returned to work, they are also no longer eligible for unemployment benefits.

Most Iranian workers, Shokat said, already live below the poverty line after years of wage suppression, leaving them with little capacity to absorb further economic pressure.

Employers accused of withholding wages

Shokat accused some employers of exploiting the current economic conditions by reducing production and delaying wage payments despite having sufficient raw materials and finished goods in storage.

"Some employers are taking advantage of the current situation," he said, adding that businesses which accumulated wealth over previous decades had a moral responsibility not to shift the burden of the crisis onto workers.

He urged the government to introduce emergency economic measures, including customs exemptions for imported raw materials and bank financing for manufacturers, to help companies continue operations and prevent further wage delays.

Shokat also called for legal action against employers who withhold workers' wages while stockpiling goods.

Strikes spread across sectors

ILNA has reported a growing number of labor protests in recent weeks.

On June 23, the agency reported that 1,600 workers at Tabriz Machinery Group stopped work after two months without pay, demanding payment of wages owed for May and June.

Earlier, healthcare workers in Islam-Abad-e Gharb of Kermanshah province gathered to protest low wages, delayed payments and worsening living conditions, criticizing what they described as unequal pay across Iran's health system and incomes that remain well below the poverty line.

Economic pressures deepen

The labor concerns come as Iran's economy faces mounting pressure following the conflict with the United States. The rial has weakened sharply against foreign currencies in the open market, with the US dollar trading above 1.91 million rials.

Separately, Saeed Shojaei, deputy planning minister at the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade, told the Ettelaat newspaper on July 15 that financial losses from electricity shortages affecting industry are expected to increase from about 3,030 trillion rials in the 2024 to 4,730 trillion rials in 2025.

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  Iran faces region’s harshest mix of wartime contraction and inflation

Shojaei warned that if current conditions persist, unemployment could increase during the second half of the year.

“The new site that they’re talking about, they’re trying to possibly reconstitute a site, we’ll hit that site,” Trump told reporters Tuesday during an Oval Office meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun.

“Any site where they’re even thinking about nuclear, we’ll be hitting it very, very powerfully.”

Hours after the US president’s warning, Iran’s joint military command warned that any US attack on Iran’s nuclear or other sensitive sites would widen the regional war, according to state media.

US interests and those of countries supporting Washington would face a “powerful assault” by Iran’s armed forces, Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said.

Raja News, a hardline Tehran outlet, went further, calling for Iran to publish a list of vital infrastructure across the region, particularly in the United Arab Emirates, and strike the targets if the United States attacks Pickaxe Mountain.

The outlet said Iran should not wait for an attack before responding and urged officials to present a practical plan for withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Trump’s warning followed an Israeli intelligence assessment, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, that Iran moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into Pickaxe Mountain last fall.

Israel shared the assessment with Washington, but the allegation has not been independently verified, and neither country has publicly disclosed the evidence supporting it.

If accurate, the reported transfer would make Pickaxe one of the most strategically important surviving sites in Iran’s nuclear program.

Centrifuges enrich uranium by spinning uranium hexafluoride gas at extremely high speeds and are essential for producing nuclear fuel or weapons-grade material.

“When you assemble centrifuges like that, the next step is to put them in an enrichment plant,” David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told Iran International.

Iran began building Pickaxe Mountain after an explosion in 2020 damaged an above-ground advanced centrifuge assembly facility at Natanz in an attack widely attributed to Israel. Tehran said the underground complex would replace the damaged assembly plant.

Satellite imagery has shown years of continued construction. Albright said the underground complex appears significantly larger than would be required for centrifuge assembly alone, leading his institute to assess that it could eventually also house a uranium-enrichment plant.

If centrifuges are being stored there, experts say the facility could provide Tehran with a pathway to restore uranium enrichment despite months of US and Israeli military strikes.

A difficult target

Its depth also makes Pickaxe one of Iran’s most difficult nuclear facilities to attack.

Andrea Stricker, deputy director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Nonproliferation Program, said the facility is estimated to sit roughly 300 to 450 feet beneath a granite mountain, potentially placing it beyond the reach of conventional US bunker-buster bombs.

“Essentially, Pickaxe is where Iran could reconstitute a nuclear weapons pathway,” Stricker told Iran International.

Rather than attempting to penetrate the mountain itself, experts say military planners could seek to disable the facility by targeting its tunnel entrances, ventilation systems and electrical infrastructure.

“You don’t look to get a bunker buster to pass through the mountain. I mean, that’s just not possible,” Albright said.

But he added that the complex was “not immune from destruction or shutting it down.”

“If they have centrifuges in there and they can’t use them, then that is a step forward to try to keep Iran from building nuclear weapons,” he said.

Stricker said another option would be to destroy access through the eastern and western tunnel entrances, preventing Iran from re-entering the complex while allowing the site to be monitored for renewed activity.

Preventing reconstitution

For Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Pickaxe represents a different phase of the military campaign.

While Washington still has conventional military targets it can strike from the air, Heinrichs said Pickaxe presents a more complex challenge because of its depth and its potential role in rebuilding Iran’s nuclear program.

If Trump concludes that airpower alone cannot prevent Iran from restoring its nuclear capabilities, Heinrichs said any use of US forces on the ground would more likely involve a limited special-operations mission than a conventional invasion.

"This would be a special operations mission on the ground," she told Eye for Iran, suggesting any such operation would likely be conducted alongside Israel to secure or remove sensitive nuclear material.

There is no public evidence that Washington is planning such an operation.

Heinrichs also suggested that the United States may have deliberately avoided striking Pickaxe so far to preserve the possibility of entering or securing the complex, although Washington has not publicly indicated that this was its reasoning.

Whether Trump ultimately orders an attack remains uncertain, and his warning may be intended partly to deter Iran from activating the facility.

But the president’s remarks, the Israeli intelligence assessment and mounting concern among nuclear experts have placed Pickaxe Mountain at the center of a broader strategic question: how to prevent Iran from rebuilding its nuclear program after months of military strikes.