Israel displays Iranian weapons seized from Hamas, Hezbollah
Israel’s military displayed a vast arsenal seized from Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah, including Iranian-made mortars, cannons, sniper rifles and anti-tank launchers, as well as weapons manufactured in Russia, China and other countries.
Fox News Digital was given rare access to the Israeli Defense Forces’ Tzrifin base in central Israel, where the captured weapons are stored. The arsenal includes rockets, drones, machine guns, grenades and other military equipment seized from the two groups.
Among the weapons displayed was a German-made MG 34 machine gun dating to World War II that the IDF said was seized from a Hezbollah compound in Lebanon. Israeli military officials also showed Iranian-produced weapons and an Iranian replica of an Austrian Steyr sniper rifle.
Relatives of some of Iran’s most powerful security figures, including Mohsen Rezaei’s son, were among nine people tied to an oil-sales network that sources say failed to return about $11 billion in proceeds, an Iran International investigation found.
The major corruption network involved in the sale of Iranian oil has been operating within the Islamic Republic’s Intelligence Ministry, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
The network was built around trusted intermediaries, known in Iran as “trustees,” who were given oil to sell as part of efforts to circumvent sanctions and were expected to return the proceeds to the state.
Iran International’s investigation found that the nine included the relatives of senior current and former officials, including a son of Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei and the sons-in-law of two former intelligence ministers.
On August 9, the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA), quoting Hossein Samsami, a member of parliament’s Economic Committee, named one of the trustees who he said had failed to return Iran’s oil revenue: Hossein Aghayari.
A day later, ILNA provided further details, saying Aghayari was born in 1982 and operated in Tehran using Iranian and Afghan passports. It said he had purchased 40 Iranian oil tankers, taken delivery of 90 million barrels of oil, sold it on the market and failed to return the proceeds.
Aghayari has been based in the United Arab Emirates since before the start of the 40-day war. Two oil-industry sources told Iran International that five months ago, he stayed for several days at the Ritz hotel in London using a Dominican passport.
According to the sources, Aghayari’s name and details of his activities were deliberately provided to Iran’s domestic media as part of a security operation intended to conceal the identities of the principal figures in a much larger network of Intelligence Ministry trustees.
The sources identify the leader of the network as a senior Intelligence Ministry official known as Shayan, the ministry’s director-general for fuel and energy. He was dismissed 10 days ago and, according to three sources, is expected to be arrested.
The sources say the group, known as the Shayan Network, was responsible for about $11 billion in oil-sale proceeds not being returned to the state.
How the network operated
Since the administration of former President Ebrahim Raisi took office, Iran’s budget laws have allowed executive agencies and state, military and Social Security pension funds, in coordination with the Oil Ministry, to receive Iranian crude oil and gas condensate for sale as part of efforts to circumvent sanctions and return the proceeds to Iran.
The individuals and companies entrusted with selling the oil and transferring the revenue are commonly known in Iran’s political and economic terminology as “trustees.”
The administration of President Masoud Pezeshkian has continued to use similar mechanisms for oil sales.
According to Iran International’s sources, several large patronage networks emerged around the system, including one operating within the Intelligence Ministry through the cooperation of three figures.
One was Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad, who previously headed the Oil Ministry’s Fuel Supply Oversight Headquarters.
The other two, according to the sources, were the principal organizers of the alleged network. One was Shayan, the Intelligence Ministry’s director-general for fuel, who had previously served as a senior ministry interrogator in major oil cases.
Sources say that Shayan used his influence over cases ranging from the missing oil rigs scandal to the Crescent case to accumulate considerable wealth.
The third figure was Meysam Darzinejad Rami, director-general of the Intelligence Ministry Pension Fund, through whom the sources say legal cover was provided for the oil sales. He previously headed security at the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order (EIKO), the vast economic conglomerate controlled by the office of Iran’s supreme leader.
According to Iran International’s sources, Shayan and Darzinejad built an extensive oil-sales operation around nine influential trustees, one of whom was Aghayari.
Mohsen Fallahian, son of an ex-intelligence minister
One of the best-known members of the alleged network is Mohsen Fallahian, the son of Ali Fallahian, who served as intelligence minister under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Ali Fallahian has been widely accused of being one of the architects of the Islamic Republic’s campaign of assassinations against opponents abroad, including during the period when Shapour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was killed in Paris.
Mohsen Fallahian runs a company in Iran called Sepehr Sanat Negin, whose stated business activities were changed to include oil and gas operations in October last year.
Iran International’s sources say Fallahian obtained authorization to establish an oil-storage facility at Shahid Rajaei Port in Bandar Abbas through his father’s influence and subsequently joined the Shayan Network’s oil-selling operation.
According to the sources, Mohsen Fallahian lives in the UAE and trades oil under another identity, “Mohsen A.,” using a Turkish passport. In one instance alone, the sources say, he converted 200 million dirhams in Iranian oil revenue into cryptocurrency and transferred it to a European country.
Ali Rezaei, son of Mohsen Rezaei
Ali Rezaei, son of Iran’s newly appointed security chief Mohsen Rezaei, is also identified by the sources as one of the Shayan Network’s trustees.
Rezaei is married to the daughter of Leili Boroujerdi, a granddaughter of Ruhollah Khomeini. For years, he served as deputy for communications at the Secretariat of the Expediency Discernment Council, effectively serving as his father’s deputy.
Iran International’s sources say Rezaei has for some time been living at the Address Mall hotel in Dubai, where he works as an oil trader. They allege that he is among the Shayan Network trustees who have failed to return hundreds of millions of dollars in oil-sale proceeds.
Ali Bayandarian, a trustee for several networks
Another member of the alleged network identified by Iran International’s sources is Ali Bayandarian (also spelled Bayandorian), 52, who was born in Tehran and lives on Morvarid Street in Tehran’s Saadat Abad neighborhood, although he spends much of the year in the UAE.
The United States sanctioned Bayandarian in January 2020 over his links to Triliance Petrochemical, a Hong Kong-based broker that the US Treasury said facilitated sales of Iranian petroleum and petrochemical products on behalf of the National Iranian Oil Company.
Iran International’s sources say Bayandarian sells oil and petrochemical products through a network of companies registered in Iran and Southeast Asia. They also allege that he handles financial transactions related to sanctioned oil sales and pays kickbacks to Shayan through an account in the UAE belonging to one of his wife’s relatives, a woman named Neda.
Before joining the Shayan Network, according to the sources, Bayandarian was a trusted intermediary for a network associated with the Supreme National Security Council.
Because he worked with several parallel networks, the sources say, he sometimes failed to pay Shayan’s share on time or in full. Shayan therefore created a rival for him: Ahmad Maroufkhani, chairman of the board of the Oil Products Exporters’ Union, whom the sources describe as one of the Intelligence Ministry network’s second-tier trustees.
Ehsan Sakhaei, son-in-law of Rouhani’s intelligence minister
Ehsan Sakhaei is another person identified by the sources as a trustee in the Shayan Network. He is 51, a Swiss citizen and the son-in-law of Mahmoud Alavi, who served as intelligence minister under President Hassan Rouhani.
According to Iran International’s sources, Sakhaei lives in Dubai’s Vision Tower.
Six years ago, during a Bank Mellat corruption trial, Sakhaei was accused of acting as a fixer who used his father-in-law’s influence to secure multibillion-toman debt write-offs for major bank debtors.
Iran International’s sources say Sakhaei has failed to return several hundred million dollars in proceeds from Iranian oil sales.
Ehsan Tahayori, son of an IRGC brigadier general
Ehsan Tahayori is a well-known Iranian currency dealer who, according to Iran International’s sources, failed to hand over $700 million in Iranian oil revenue in one case alone.
Tahayori, owner of the Arz Iran currency exchange, is the son of IRGC Brigadier General Shams-Ali Tahayor, also known as General Tahayori.
Iran International’s sources identify Tahayori as the principal suspect in a one-billion-dirham fraud involving Iran’s NIMA foreign-exchange system. They also allege that he was released and helped to flee with the assistance of the Intelligence Ministry.
Two sources told Iran International that authorities in the UAE arrested Tahayori during the war and that he is now in prison.
Photographs published earlier and reported to show his luxury cars at his villa in Lavasan had caused controversy in Iran.
Rouhollah Razavi, son-in-law of a Paydari Front spokesman
Another figure identified by the sources is Rouhollah Razavi, the son-in-law of Majid Mottaghifar, spokesman for the hardline Paydari Front.
Iran International’s sources say it was through this political connection that Razavi became one of Shayan’s trusted intermediaries and describe his office in Tehran’s Kamranieh neighborhood as a hub for backroom oil deals.
The sources allege that Razavi has retained more than $1 billion in oil-sale proceeds and provided information about rival trustees in an effort to push them out of the market.
Mohammad-Hadi Momenin, major bank debtor and oil broker
Another trustee identified by the sources is Mohammad-Hadi Momenin, born in 1989.
Iran International’s sources allege that Momenin controls approximately $2 billion in Iranian oil revenue that has not been returned. His name has appeared on the boards of more than 40 companies in Iran.
Last year, when the names of major bank debtors were released, it emerged that Momenin owed Karafarin Bank 743 billion tomans.
The sources say he fled the UAE for Oman during the war and later traveled from there to China, where they say he is refusing to respond to his creditors.
Ehsan Dastgheyb, son of Iran’s ‘Bribery King’
The ninth individual identified by the sources is Ehsan Dastgheyb, son of Abdollah Dastgheyb, a nephew of a former Shiraz Friday prayer leader who is known as Iran’s “Bribery King.”
Ehsan Dastgheyb lives in Dubai and sells fuel oil for the Shayan Network, according to Iran International’s sources. They allege that he, too, has failed to return a large sum of money to Iran.
Network comes under pressure
Following Shayan’s dismissal, Iran International’s sources say both he and Meysam Darzinejad Rami are expected to be arrested and that the network has come under increasing pressure.
The sources say the Shayan Network is only one of several networks of trustees involved in Iranian oil sales and estimate that intermediaries across these networks have collectively failed to return as much as $110 billion in oil revenue.
They also say Oil Minister Paknejad could soon be dismissed, although he has mobilized his political connections in an effort to remain in office.
Iran's oil minister Mohsen Paknejad
On July 24, Tehran prosecutor Ali Salehi said 59 cases had been opened against managers of trustee companies, with 43 reaching the indictment stage. He said 22 defendants had been sent to prison and that Interpol Red Notices were being pursued for 15 fugitives.
The prosecutor did not publicly identify the 15 fugitives, making it impossible from the announcement to determine whether any members of the Shayan Network were among them.
Iran International’s sources expressed doubt that the alleged network would be fully pursued, pointing to the powerful connections of those involved: they include sons and sons-in-law of former intelligence ministers, the son of the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and people connected to the Paydari Front and influential clerical families.
According to the sources, the Shayan Network alone was responsible for about $11 billion in Iranian oil-sale proceeds that were not returned to the state.
An Iranian military pilot gestures from the cockpit of a fighter jet in this file photo.
Qatar on Saturday dismissed the Iranian military’s claim that it had detained and held three pilots from two Su-24 bombers shot down in March, saying it recovered only one pilot’s remains and had invited Tehran to review the search.
Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed Al Ansari said in a post on X that Doha was “surprised by these misleading statements” amid ongoing diplomatic efforts to de-escalate regional tensions.
The denial came after Mohammad Bagherzadeh, commander of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff’s committee for missing personnel, said three pilots had been captured alive and held by Qatar for about six months.
Bagherzadeh identified the pilots as Javad Salehi, Abdolmajid Dashtian and Omran Beh-Raveshian in a letter to the International Committee of the Red Cross published by IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency.
Al Ansari said Qatari forces established contact with the Iranian pilots after they violated Qatar’s airspace and their targeting trajectory had been confirmed.
He said the pilots failed to respond to attempts to communicate and that Qatar then took “the necessary measures” to defend its territory in accordance with international law and its rules of engagement.
Qatar’s Defense Ministry said in March that two Iranian Su-24 aircraft had been shot down during an operation that reportedly targeted Al Udeid Air Base, which hosts US troops.
CNN reported at the time, citing two sources briefed on the operation, that Qatari forces warned the Iranian jets by radio but received no response before a Qatari F-15 engaged them and shot them down.
Qatar says one pilot’s remains were recovered
Al Ansari said Qatari search-and-rescue teams subsequently searched for the pilots’ remains.
He said Qatar coordinated with Iran to hand over the remains of one pilot who was found and invited an Iranian team in April to visit Qatar and review details of the search-and-rescue operation.
Al Ansari said Tehran had yet to respond to the invitation.
Iranian officials had previously said the fate of the three pilots remained unclear. Earlier this month, a senior Iranian Air Force official said authorities still lacked definitive information about them.
The dispute comes as Qatar remains involved in mediation between Tehran and Washington, with Al Ansari pointing to ongoing diplomatic efforts to reduce regional tensions.
Iranian protestors met with security forces during January uprisings.
As Iran confronts military pressure abroad and mounting economic strain at home, signs are emerging that the Islamic Republic is increasingly turning its attention to another potential threat: renewed unrest on its own streets.
While veteran hardliners are returning to key positions overseeing forces responsible for domestic repression, cobblestones are being ripped out of historic pedestrian areas and replaced with asphalt.
Municipal officials have described the work as traffic management, but Iran International reporter Mehdi Sepahvand’s reporting suggests it could make the areas easier for security forces to penetrate and control during unrest.
Analysts say the developments, against a backdrop of uncertainty over the country’s new leadership, suggest the state is thinking beyond the current war to the possibility of another confrontation at home.
The return of Hossein Taeb, one of the Islamic Republic’s most feared security figures, to command the Basij is perhaps the clearest signal.
Omid Memarian, a senior Iran analyst at the think tank DAWN, said Taeb’s return shows the state is prioritizing control of the population.
Photo of Hossein Taeb
‘An undeclared coup’
“They are very much nervous, concerned about people and their demands,” Memarian told Eye for Iran, adding that the leadership understands “the domestic situation can explode at any moment.”
Taeb, Memarian said, was brought back not to reconcile with Iranians, but to consolidate loyalists and signal that authorities are prepared to “crush any dissent.”
For Kamran Bokhari, a senior resident fellow at the Middle East Policy Council and strategic forecaster, the reshuffle raises a more fundamental question: who is making these decisions?
With Iran’s new Supreme Leader remaining unseen and unheard publicly, Bokhari questioned the extent of his authority and argued that a small group within the security establishment may effectively be running the system.
“The point is who is making these appointments?” he said.
Bokhari went further, describing the emerging arrangement as an “undeclared coup” by the Revolutionary Guards, in which he believes the IRGC is consolidating authority while preserving the appearance of a functioning constitutional system.
Jason Brodsky, policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, offered a different reading, seeing a diffusion of power in the absence of a visible Supreme Leader capable of imposing decisions across the system.
Survival is not stability
Former CIA Iran specialist Mark Fowler said the Islamic Republic has absorbed severe military damage without collapsing.
“Surviving is winning for the Iranian regime right now,” Fowler told Iran International’s Eye for Iran.
But survival does not mean stability. With Washington seeking to intensify economic pressure, Fowler said there was no single inflation rate or economic threshold at which unrest became inevitable.
“It’s just a question of who cries uncle first,” he said.
Authoritarian governments can tolerate considerable hardship among their populations because their leadership is insulated from much of it, Fowler said.
“They’re more than happy to allow people to suffer,” he added.
Economic hardship does not automatically produce revolt. But the longer it persists, the more consequential the state’s ability to contain discontent becomes.
Beneath people’s feet
Perhaps the most striking sign cited by those who see preparations for future unrest can be found not in the leadership compound, but beneath people’s feet.
In central Tehran, cobblestones are being removed from historic pedestrian areas and replaced with asphalt.
The changes affect parts of central Tehran around District 12 and the Grand Bazaar, historically an important center of political mobilization, as well as areas near universities where students have repeatedly participated in protests.
Cobblestones can be dislodged and used as projectiles. Pedestrian streets also contain bollards, benches, trees and restaurant tables that can impede motorcycles and security vehicles while giving protesters places to congregate or seek cover.
Turning them into vehicle-accessible thoroughfares could change that equation.
“By changing these pedestrian zones into thoroughfares for cars, they are actually paving the way for swift action during protests,” Sepahvand said.
The changes, he added, create “plain sight and direct shooting range” for security forces.
Sepahvand said authorities have also put pressure on restaurants and gathering places where Iranians, including women appearing without mandatory hijab, have carved out small spaces of social freedom.
Those spaces allow communities to form, he said, something authorities understand can eventually translate into collective action.
“The government is sure that they are going to be facing more and more protests,” Sepahvand said.
The Islamic Republic is bringing veterans of repression back into senior positions, positioning the Basij for a greater domestic role and, according to Sepahvand’s reporting, altering public spaces in ways that could make future protests easier to suppress.
The Islamic Republic has survived the war so far. Its next test may come not from across its borders, but from the streets at home.
File Photo: Shipping containers at Shahid Rajaei port in Chabahar, southeastern Iran.
Iran says its non-oil trade has fallen by around 30% since the war began, but figures from several of its biggest trading partners point to far steeper declines in some of the country’s most important commercial relationships.
Trade with China has fallen to roughly a quarter of last year’s level by one measure, while commerce with Turkey, India and the European Union has also contracted sharply as war and disruption in the Strait of Hormuz reshape Iran’s foreign trade.
Mohammad-Sadegh Ghanadzadeh, a senior official at Iran’s Trade Promotion Organization, said both non-oil exports and imports fell by roughly 30% during the first four months of the current fiscal year, from March 21 to July 22.
The government has stopped regularly publishing detailed foreign trade statistics since the war began, making a fuller assessment difficult.
Iranian customs data show the country recorded slightly more than $34 billion in non-oil trade during the same four-month period last year, including $15 billion in exports.
China trade plunges
China is Iran’s largest trading partner, accounting for roughly one-third of the country’s non-oil foreign trade.
Chinese data put non-oil bilateral trade at around $10 billion in 2025—substantially lower than Iranian figures, in part because the two countries classify and record parts of their trade differently, including sanctioned Iranian commodities.
According to Chinese customs records, trade with Iran totaled less than $823 million during the first four months of the war, from March through June. That is roughly one-quarter of the level recorded during the same period a year earlier.
The disruption has also sharply increased transportation costs.
Majidreza Hariri, chairman of the Iran-China Chamber of Commerce, said transporting goods from China to Iran by sea or land now costs four times as much as before the war, with shipping a container costing as much as $13,000.
Major partners hit harder
Trade with several of Iran’s other major partners has also contracted sharply.
The United Arab Emirates, Iran’s second-largest trading partner, has largely halted trade with Tehran. Before the war, annual trade between Iran and the UAE stood at around $27 billion, about 80% of it Emirati exports to Iran.
The precise impact on trade with Iraq, Iran’s third-largest trading partner, remains unclear. But official data from Turkey, its fourth largest, show Turkish exports to Iran fell by almost half between March and June to around $716 million, while imports from Iran dropped 37% to $907 million.
India has recorded a similar decline. Its exports to Iran fell by around 60% during the first four months of the war to approximately $150 million.
Indian imports from Iran moved sharply in the opposite direction, reaching around $1 billion in the first half of the year — four times the level recorded during the same period last year—after India bought several shipments of Iranian crude oil and liquefied petroleum gas.
Health Minister Mohammad-Reza Zafarghandi recently said India, Iran’s largest supplier of pharmaceutical raw materials, had stopped shipments after the IRGC closed the Strait of Hormuz.
He said India had made the resumption of pharmaceutical exports conditional on free passage for Indian vessels through the waterway.
Where has the trade gone?
Taken together, available data suggest Iran’s trade with several of its largest established partners has contracted substantially more than the 30% overall decline reported by Tehran.
The discrepancy suggests commerce with other countries may have partly cushioned those losses.
Russia, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asian states are among the possible destinations, though the absence of regularly published Iranian customs figures makes it difficult to establish how much trade has shifted or where.
The broader picture nevertheless shows the economic fallout from the war extending well beyond Iran’s oil exports, weakening some of Tehran’s most important commercial relationships even as the full extent of the shift remains obscured by the lack of detailed Iranian data.
Kerri Bitsoff (left) in an interview with Iran International's Kambiz Tavana in Washington DC on August 13, 2026.
Sanctions can make Iran’s military and nuclear activities costlier and more difficult but cannot bring down the Islamic Republic on their own, former US Treasury official and weapons procurement expert Kerri Bitsoff told Iran International.
“Sanctions can't topple a regime on their own. That's not what they're for,” said Bitsoff, who previously worked at the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the agency responsible for administering and enforcing US economic sanctions. “They are intended to increase pressure.”
For Bitsoff, who worked on nonproliferation and weapons procurement at OFAC and is now executive director of investigations at TANGOS, the distinction is central to understanding what decades of US sanctions against Iran can and cannot accomplish.
Rather than expecting sanctions themselves to produce political change, she said their effect should be measured by how much they increase the cost and difficulty of the activities Washington is trying to constrain.
“They make everything that the regime does related to those more expensive, slower and more difficult to obtain,” she said, referring to activities such as Tehran’s nuclear and weapons programs. Sanctions, she added, are also intended “to set conditions for something else to happen” and “can't be alone.”
That argument comes after years in which successive US administrations have expanded, eased or more aggressively enforced different layers of sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Washington restored broad nuclear-related sanctions after withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal in 2018, targeting areas including Iran’s banking, energy and shipping sectors. President Donald Trump launched a renewed “maximum pressure” policy in February 2025, directing the Treasury Department to pursue a “robust and continual sanctions enforcement campaign” aimed at denying Tehran and its allied groups access to revenue.
Bitsoff said those measures should not be judged simply by how many Iranian individuals, companies or organizations Washington places on sanctions lists.
Enforcement matters more than numbers
“Numbers are not a good measure of the impact of sanctions and whether they are important,” Bitsoff said. “You can sanction thousands of individuals and entities within Russia, within Iran, within North Korea, and that's not really the answer.”
The more meaningful test, she said, is whether sanctions change the behavior of actors outside the targeted country — the banks, buyers, suppliers, shipping companies and intermediaries that allow sanctioned governments to continue obtaining money and material.
That often requires Treasury officials to identify specific weak points in complex networks rather than simply placing restrictions on an entire sector. Bitsoff described sanctions policy as operating on two levels: broad measures designed to restrict areas such as oil revenue or access to the financial system, and day-to-day operational measures targeting individual transactions, companies and procurement networks.
Weapons procurement provides one example of how that pressure works. Sanctions may not stop Iran from producing a missile or drone, Bitsoff said, but they can increase the cost of securing the components needed to build them and force manufacturers to rely on inferior alternatives.
“You raise the cost of procuring parts and components,” she said. “You force them to get worse parts and components, so their finished weapons are less effective.”
The effects can take years to become visible, she said, and may eventually be measured in missile failure rates or the ability of adversaries to jam drones and develop other countermeasures.
Iran’s reliance on foreign components has remained a focus of US sanctions. Treasury actions in 2025 and 2026 targeted networks in China, Hong Kong, the UAE and elsewhere accused of supplying Iran with drone components, missile propellant ingredients and other military goods. In June, OFAC sanctioned another group of China- and Hong Kong-based individuals and companies it said had supported weapons procurement for the Revolutionary Guards and Iran’s defense ministry.
Oil sanctions work differently, Bitsoff said. Rather than necessarily preventing a barrel of Iranian crude from reaching a customer, the restrictions can make every stage of that journey more expensive.
An Iranian shipment may have to pass through several intermediaries, rely on aging tankers carrying higher insurance costs, undergo ship-to-ship transfers and be sold at a discount to a limited pool of buyers willing to accept the risk of dealing in sanctioned oil. Ship managers, operators and others involved in the trade may also demand premiums because they risk becoming sanctions targets themselves.
“By the end of it,” Bitsoff said, Iran can be forced to absorb a “huge discount,” meaning export volumes alone do not provide a complete measure of whether sanctions are working.
The US Treasury has described many of the same methods in its recent actions against Iran’s oil trade, citing front companies, intermediary brokers, ship-to-ship transfers, falsified documents and manipulation of vessel identities. In April, Treasury said China was buying about 90% of Iran’s oil exports and that independent Chinese refineries, commonly known as teapots, accounted for most of those purchases.
Bitsoff said enforcement can therefore be thought of as a dial that Washington can turn up or down even when the underlying sanctions remain on the books.
She pointed to the period after the United States left the nuclear agreement in 2018, when tougher enforcement drove major buyers with exposure to the US financial system away from Iranian oil.
She contrasted that with the early years of the Biden administration, when she argued Washington eased enforcement as it sought to revive negotiations with Tehran, allowing Iran’s oil trade with China to adapt around smaller buyers with less exposure to the US financial system.
“The whole idea is to change behavior,” she said. “You don't wanna just sanction something and then walk away.”
Without continued enforcement, she said, companies treat a designation as a one-time event and find ways to adjust their operations around it. “If you don't keep up with that, if you don't make that enforcement visible, people are just going to keep doing what they want to do.”
Iran's sanctions evasion machine
Keeping up has become more difficult because Iran has spent years developing mechanisms to circumvent the restrictions imposed on it, Bitsoff said, describing a system largely developed by the Revolutionary Guards and the broader state during the intense sanctions pressure of the early 2010s.
“They have a sanctions evasion machine that works pretty well,” she said.
The core of that system has remained relatively consistent, relying on shadow banking, buyers willing to trade with Iran and efforts to avoid transactions vulnerable to the US financial system. But Bitsoff said Tehran has repeatedly adapted the mechanics when new opportunities appear, from deceptive tanker practices and cash smuggling to newer methods involving cryptocurrency.
“The pattern I can discern is that they'll just use anything at their disposal to evade sanctions,” she said.
China now occupies an especially important place in that system, both as the dominant destination for Iranian oil and as a source of components used by Iran’s military industries. The Treasury Department has increasingly targeted Chinese refiners, ports, shipping companies and procurement networks as part of the maximum-pressure campaign, including a June action against China- and Hong Kong-based actors accused of facilitating weapons purchases for the IRGC and defense ministry.
“Most evasion of sanctions, especially related to Iran, happens through China,” Bitsoff said. “Those are the front companies that move money. They're the buyers of oil. They're the suppliers of weapons components.”
That makes pauses in enforcement against China particularly significant, she argued, because companies and intermediaries watch US actions when deciding how much sanctions risk they are prepared to accept.
Bitsoff said this helps explain why sanctions cannot be regarded as an on-off mechanism capable either of completely stopping Iran’s activities or, at the other extreme, being dismissed as ineffective because those activities continue. Their purpose, in her view, is degradation: reducing revenues, increasing costs and making military and nuclear programs harder to sustain.
That pressure also has a domestic dimension, she said, because Iran’s leadership must contend with economic mismanagement while the public sees resources being directed toward military programs and allied armed groups rather than economic opportunity at home.
“The population knows that it's funneling money not to them, not to economic growth, not to opportunities, but back to its proxies, back to its nuclear program, back to its weapons program,” Bitsoff said.
But she stopped short of arguing that economic pressure can determine the Islamic Republic’s political future. Instead, she said sanctions can help establish the conditions in which other forces operate, with political change ultimately depending on Iranians themselves.
“The Iranian people are the ones that have to use that pressure,” Bitsoff said, adding that alongside sanctions, the United States should be “thinking of any possible way we can support that.”
