A Syrian court convicted former President Bashar al-Assad of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death on Tuesday in a case over killings, torture and arbitrary detention during the government's crackdown on protests that began in 2011.
The Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus delivered its verdict in a case against former security official Atef Najib, Assad, his brother Maher al-Assad and other defendants accused of crimes against Syrians, according to Syria's state news agency SANA.
Assad, his brother and several other defendants were tried in absentia and remain at large. Assad has been living in Russia since fleeing Syria in December 2024 after rebel forces seized Damascus and ended his family's decades-long rule.
At the previous hearing on August 4, prosecutors asked the court to convict Najib, Bashar al-Assad, Maher al-Assad and the other defendants on charges including murder, torture and arbitrary detention and impose the maximum penalty of death, SANA said.
Najib, a cousin of Bashar al-Assad and former head of the Political Security Branch in the southern province of Daraa, was accused of direct responsibility for repression and arrests in the province after protests against Assad's rule began in 2011.
According to SANA, the accusations against Najib included the detention of children in Daraa in March 2011, taking part in the suppression of peaceful protests with live ammunition and responsibility for killings at the Omari Mosque.
He was also accused of systematic mass killings and torture that led to the deaths of detainees in detention centers.
The trial began on April 26 as part of what SANA described as a process aimed at establishing the truth, providing justice for victims and holding those responsible to account.
Tuesday's hearing was attended by Syria's prosecutor general, the head and members of the National Commission for Transitional Justice, representatives of international legal and humanitarian organizations and relatives of victims, SANA said.
Messages sent to Iran International on described medical bills consuming much or all of a typical monthly income, even for people covered by Iran’s Social Security Organization, the country’s main state-run social insurer.
One person undergoing tests for an abdominal and pelvic mass said CT and MRI scans, with and without contrast, cost 210 million rials ($113) despite having Social Security insurance.
“How are we supposed to pay these costs with such meager incomes?” the citizen said.
Many Iranian workers earn around 200 million to 250 million rials ($108-$134) a month, meaning the scans alone can cost roughly a month’s income. The rial trades at around 1.86 million to the dollar on the free market.
Another said an echocardiogram, electrocardiogram and clinic appointment cost 120 million rials ($65), with the medical provider requiring payment upfront rather than accepting Social Security insurance.
The patient was given documents to seek reimbursement from the insurer but said the process involved extensive bureaucracy and could result in only around half the money being returned.
A 33-year-old said the cost of dental treatment had left him without half his teeth.
“I feel like I’m 60,” he said. “The bitter part is that this humiliating way of life has become normal for me.”
Another worker earning 10 million rials ($5.40) a day said an appointment with an ear, nose and throat doctor cost 5 million rials ($2.70), followed by 8.6 million rials ($4.60) for medicine.
“We really cannot afford to live anymore,” the worker said.
Lawmaker says shortages could worsen
The accounts echo comments from Salman Es’haghi, spokesman for parliament’s Health and Treatment Committee, who said shortages and rising prices were already causing some patients to stop treatment.
Around 43 medicines are in “critical shortage” and nearly 1,000 pharmaceutical products face some degree of shortage, Es’haghi told the Tabnak news website in an interview published Saturday.
Prices for chemotherapy drugs and medicines used by patients with cancer, hemophilia and thalassemia have risen enough to reduce consumption, with some patients stopping treatment because they cannot afford it, he said.
Es’haghi said patients now pay more than 70% of their healthcare expenses themselves, despite policies intended to leave individuals covering around 30% and the government and insurers paying the remainder.
Some hospitals and pharmacies are also refusing to provide certain services or medicines because insurers have delayed reimbursements or failed to pay them in full, he added.
The difficulties described by Iran International’s audience reflected those problems. One viewer said a packet of Sertraline tablets that previously cost 500,000 rials had risen to 8 million rials, a sixteen-fold increase.
Another said the cost of healthcare had left the family worried about something as routine as a child catching a cold during the winter.
“We’re stressed about where we would get the money for treatment if, God forbid, we or our children even catch a cold,” the audience said.
Drug subsidy faces uncertain future
The pressure could intensify if the government removes preferential foreign currency for medicines and medical equipment from the budget for the Iranian year beginning in March 2027, Es’haghi warned.
Iran has used preferential exchange rates to lower the rial cost of importing medicines, pharmaceutical ingredients and medical supplies. Removing that support can expose producers and importers to much higher exchange rates and ultimately increase prices for patients.
Discussions about eliminating the preferential rate have been under way since late 2025, with the government viewing the change as a possible way to address corruption and preferential access to subsidized foreign currency, Es’haghi said.
“If the currency allocated to medicines and medical equipment is removed from next year’s budget, it could become a ‘year of patient slaughter,’” Es’haghi said.
Iran International reported in April that prices for some domestically produced insulin had risen by as much as 212% compared with before the Persian New Year in March, while some imported varieties had increased by as much as 271%.
Pharmaceutical industry figures have attributed rising production costs to a combination of exchange-rate changes, the rial’s depreciation, more expensive raw materials and packaging, higher wages and financing costs, and disruption to supply chains from war.
Es’haghi said more than 70% of medicines had increased in price and argued that authorities should tackle corruption through closer oversight of the pharmaceutical supply chain rather than eliminating subsidized currency.
For patients confronting medical bills comparable to their monthly earnings, however, the pressure is already being measured in delayed care, abandoned treatment and anxiety over whether they can afford the next illness.
Tindex, an Iran-focused economic data platform tracking housing listings and other market indicators, put average advertised monthly apartment rent in Tehran at about 723 million rials, or roughly $389 at an open-market exchange rate of 1.86 million rials to the dollar, in its late-July data.
The figure is based on advertised properties rather than completed rental agreements, but provides a snapshot of prices confronting tenants searching for homes in the capital.
Monthly salaries for many Iranian workers are commonly put at around 200 million to 250 million rials, equivalent to roughly $108 to $134 at the same exchange rate. That means the average advertised rent can approach three times the upper end of that monthly salary range.
Rent increases reach 100%
The pressure becomes greater when tenants seek to renew their leases.
Rokna News reported on Sunday that rents have risen by 70% to 100% in parts of Tehran, far exceeding the 25% ceiling set for the capital by the Supreme Housing Council.
The findings point to a wide divide between restrictions imposed by authorities and the increases some landlords demand from tenants.
A member of parliament’s construction committee also acknowledged that government rent restrictions are widely disregarded.
“The 25% rent increase is clearly not being observed, and in practice landlords do not implement it,” Alireza Novin said.
Some landlords justify increases of more than 50% by pointing to inflation of around 60%, but rents should not simply rise at the same rate as broader prices, Novin said.
Weak government oversight has left the housing market largely unchecked, according to Novin, who called for stronger enforcement against those who disregard the restrictions.
“If we identify 10 violators and close their places of business, others will also understand that the law must be implemented,” Novin said.
Tenants can file complaints against landlords who breach the ceiling, but pursuing a case can lead to legal proceedings and uncertainty over whether the landlord and tenant can subsequently reach an agreement, according to Novin.
Housing costs reshape how Iranians live
Iran has been grappling with a prolonged housing affordability crisis as property prices and rents have risen faster than wages. Years of high inflation, currency depreciation and rising construction costs have pushed homeownership beyond the reach of many ordinary Iranians while increasing pressure on renters.
The pressure is particularly acute in Tehran, where roughly half of residents are renters.
Buying a home presents an even greater obstacle. Tindex put the average advertised value of a Tehran home at more than 240 billion rials, or about $129,000 at the open-market exchange rate, in late July, placing ownership far beyond the purchasing power of households dependent on ordinary salaries.
The widening gap between incomes and housing costs has also changed how some Iranians live. Tenants have moved from Tehran to cheaper cities or peripheral areas, returned to their parents’ homes or begun sharing smaller apartments with others to divide housing costs.
Housing experts have warned that continued movement toward cheaper areas on the outskirts of major cities could contribute to further expansion of informal settlements.
The government has sought to ease the burden through rent ceilings, deposit loans and measures intended to protect tenants. But the increases documented in Tehran show how difficult those policies are to enforce when housing costs continue to outrun earnings.
For workers earning around 200 million to 250 million rials a month, an average advertised Tehran rent above 720 million rials amounts to roughly three months of individual pay – before food, transport and other basic household expenses are considered.
President Masoud Pezeshkian's government has sent the 2018 Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea to parliament for ratification, ending years in which the treaty sat untouched and reviving a charged argument over the country's historical rights, energy interests and position in the strategically vital basin.
The convention, signed by the leaders of Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in the Kazakh port of Aktau in August 2018, takes effect only once all five littoral states ratify it. The other four completed the process long ago. Tehran, alone, held back.
The charge that shadows the bill is older than the bill itself: a belief, widely held in Iran and rooted in readings of its 1921 and 1940 treaties with Moscow, that the country was entitled to half the Caspian and stands to end up with barely a tenth.
The convention in fact allocates no national shares at all, but the ghost of the fifty percent has trailed every Iranian discussion of the sea since Aktau.
The timing sharpens the argument. The move lands in the middle of a war that has set Iran's southern coast under nightly strikes and closed the Strait of Hormuz, leaving the Caspian corridor to Russia carrying an outsized share of the country's commerce and its strategic weight.
What the treaty actually does is narrower than either its champions or its critics suggest.
It defines the Caspian as a "special and unique landlocked body of water," placing it outside the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Each coastal state receives 15 nautical miles of fully sovereign territorial waters and a further 10 nautical miles of exclusive fishing rights, with the remaining surface designated a shared navigation zone.
The wealth, however, is postponed. Article 8 leaves ownership and delimitation of the seabed and its oil and gas to "bilateral or multilateral agreements between the states concerned."
Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have largely settled their boundaries in the sea's north; the lines involving Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan remain unresolved, tangled in the complexity of dividing energy-rich waters.
A century-old dispute over Iran's share
Before the Soviet collapse, the Caspian was governed by the 1921 and 1940 treaties between Tehran and Moscow, which recognized equal navigation and fishing rights but drew no maritime boundaries.
The Soviet breakup turned two littoral states into five, and Iran has argued since that the sea should be divided equally, 20 percent to each.
Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan instead adopted a modified median-line method, a formula that, because of Iran's concave coastline, would shrink Tehran's share of the sea and its bed to roughly 11 to 13 percent. Iran has never accepted that division.
The government's case: a sealed northern flank
The government presents ratification as completing the Caspian's legal framework, deepening cooperation among the littoral states and, above all, keeping outside powers away.
Officials point to Article 3, which bars the armed forces of non-coastal countries from the Caspian, as the convention's central security prize, a provision long championed by both Tehran and Moscow.
Defa Press, an outlet affiliated with Iran's armed forces, wrote that the clause would "turn Iran's northern borders into a secure region, far removed from scenarios of foreign military intervention," at a moment when the country faces pressure along its southern and western frontiers.
The critics' case: ratifying before the real negotiation
Opponents argue parliament is sequencing the deal backwards: locking in the framework before the seabed, where the money lies, has been divided.
They note that the northern states have already parceled out much of the seabed and pressed ahead with oil and gas development, while fields shared with Iran, including Alborz, remain in limbo.
Dariush Safarnejad, an international affairs analyst, told the Revolutionary Guards-linked Javan newspaper that lawmakers should return the bill to the government, since supplementary agreements that were meant to be completed within six months of the 2018 signing have never been finalized.
Approving the convention without them, he warned, "could provide other Caspian states with legal grounds in the future and influence the security, political and geopolitical dynamics of the Caspian region."
Shoaib Bahman, an international relations analyst focused on Eurasia, told the same paper that ratifying before the seabed boundaries are set would "effectively reduce Iran's legal leverage in future negotiations and could undermine its claim to a 20% share of the Caspian Sea."
Pipelines, corridors and the Turkic map
The critics' second front is Article 14, under which undersea pipelines require the consent only of the states whose sectors they cross, not all five. Bahman argued the clause could open the way for eastern Caspian producers to export oil and gas directly toward Europe, eroding Iran's transit position.
Mehdi Seif-Tabrizi, a Russia specialist, offered a more measured reading to the news website Fararu. Iran's 15 miles of territorial waters and 10 miles of fishing rights are guaranteed, he said, and "the real dispute concerns the seabed and subsoil," not the surface percentages that dominate the public argument.
Yet he shares the strategic worry: that the long-discussed Trans-Caspian pipeline from Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan could finally be built.
"That could strengthen Azerbaijan's position and, in turn, reinforce the Zangezur corridor and the so-called Turkic World project," he said. "If Iran ratifies the convention, it would remove one of the most important legal obstacles to implementing those projects."
The opposition joins the attack
Criticism has come from beyond the establishment's factions. Exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi wrote on X that ratifying the agreement without the Iranian people's mandate and without "a clear and comprehensive guarantee of Iran's historic rights" is "deeply concerning and constitutes a serious threat to Iran's national interests."
Iran's rights in the Caspian, he added, "are not negotiable, nor can they be relinquished. Any action that undermines these rights will be recorded in the historical memory of the Iranian nation, and those responsible will ultimately be held accountable by the people of Iran."
Saeed Ghasseminejad, a senior Pahlavi adviser, went further, alleging that Hassan Rouhani's government had already "ceded Iran's share of the Caspian Sea" and that Pezeshkian and parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf now seek to "legalize and make that concession permanent."
He called the move "the biggest surrender of Iran's land and waters to foreign powers since the Qajar-era humiliations."
Judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on Saturday that legal proceedings began immediately after Kharrazi's recent remarks and that he had now been summoned to the court, which handles cases involving members of the clergy.
“Immediately after his recent remarks, legal action was initiated to prosecute him,” Jahangir said, adding that Kharrazi's case was under criminal investigation and further details would be released after the proceedings.
‘Islamic Republic doesn't work anymore’
In a video released this week, Kharrazi said the Islamic Republic had “reached a stage where, in this form, it simply doesn't work anymore” and said his organization had already drawn up plans for replacing it with an “Islamic government.”
Kharrazi, who heads the Hezbollah of Iran organization, said his group had produced 60 volumes of plans covering state institutions and had maintained what he described as a “shadow government.”
He also outlined a recruitment drive intended to build a nationwide network of 250,000 supporters, saying it could “surround all the ministries” and converge on Tehran following a single announcement.
“Mr. Khamenei and the government must understand that a 250,000-strong organization stands ready to move,” he said.
Kharrazi also attacked President Masoud Pezeshkian, calling him a “buffoon” who “understands nothing,” and said his government “will not reach its end.”
Claims about Khamenei
Kharrazi is tied by marriage to Iran's ruling family: his sister is married to Masoud Khamenei, a brother of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
He has also presented himself as a longtime confidant of the new supreme leader, saying he has known him for four decades and held numerous private meetings with him. In his latest remarks, Kharrazi said Mojtaba Khamenei's thinking was “far more radical than his father's.” His accounts of private conversations and the supreme leader's views cannot be independently verified.
The leader's office had already publicly rejected earlier remarks Kharrazi attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei, including that Pezeshkian's next resignation would be accepted, describing them as unauthenticated and false.
