Terror specialist and former Director of Security at Iran International TV
In the Persian classic Shahnameh, Ferdowsi tells the story of Zahhak, the usurper king who is kissed on each shoulder by Ahriman, the spirit of evil, and finds two black snakes growing from the wounds.
Cut them off and they grow back. The only way to keep them quiet is to feed them, every day, with the brains of two young men. Zahhak reigns for a thousand years on a diet of sacrificed youth, propped up not by loyalty but by appetite.
The story has always worked as a parable for Iranian tyranny. What I think it misses, applied to the Islamic Republic today, is the arithmetic. Ali Khamenei did not build two snakes. He built three.
The Artesh, Iran’s conventional army, was the first snake, inherited from the Shah and never fully trusted. The IRGC was the second, created in 1979 specifically because the revolution did not trust the first. The Basij was folded into the IRGC as its third head.
It is worth remembering that all three answer, on paper as much as in practice, to a single neck. The Iranian constitution names the Supreme Leader as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces in their entirety, Artesh, IRGC and Basij alike. There is no independent chain of command outside the Supreme Leader’s authority for a general to retreat into. Politicians and Western commentators in both London and Washington keep waiting for one of these heads to turn on the body. They’re waiting for the wrong signal, because they’re analysing 1979, not 2026.
When the Shah’s generals stood aside in February 1979, they did so because the Artesh of that era was a conscript institution led by officers who owed their careers to a monarch, not a movement, and who had no ideological stake in what came next. That Artesh is not today’s Artesh.
Ali Khamenei spent decades solving exactly that problem. Senior appointments in today’s Artesh are subject to security and ideological vetting tied to the Supreme Leader’s military apparatus. The Middle East Forum has documented how senior promotions require approval from the Supreme Leader’s office following scrutiny of an officer’s security and ideological background. The men at the top of the Artesh are appointees of the system, not survivors of it.
This is why this month’s move to complete the integration of the Armed Forces General Staff with the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters matters more than it has been given credit for. Mojtaba Khamenei, who inherited a system his father spent more than four decades constructing, has now moved to formalise a process of centralisation that had earlier been discussed but was not visibly underway in operational terms.
The lesson learned from 2025 and the Twelve-Day War, according to Iran’s own state reporting, was that redundant command structures slow decision-making. The latest restructuring is intended to reduce that redundancy and further narrow the distinction between the operational command of the Artesh and the IRGC. The underlying logic is clear: the system has little interest in preserving institutional space in which one military arm might begin to think or act independently of the others.
I would also gently push back on those looking for salvation in Iran’s reformists. Pezeshkian’s presidency provides a civilian face and international cover for the negotiating track, and that function matters. But it is not independence.
Ghalibaf is a former senior IRGC commander who has spent decades inside the Islamic Republic’s political and security establishment. Araghchi is a capable diplomat entrusted with representing Tehran in negotiations. Both men operate inside the system’s tolerances, not outside them. Reading their willingness to negotiate as evidence of a moderate faction pulling against a hardline one mistakes tactics for structure.
When Iran has had to cede ground, at Bürgenstock or Islamabad, it has ceded it in the way a company reprices a product: reluctantly, and only as far as survival requires. Ghalibaf gets attacked by the influential ultra-hardline Paydari Front for talking to Americans, and he absorbs it, because someone in the system has to run the diplomatic track.
None of this means the system is stable in the way it looks stable. Ali Khamenei is dead. His son, who has still not been seen or heard in public, inherited the office by appointment and is still consolidating the very apparatus his father designed. The strain is real. But strain inside a structure is not the same as a fracture between its parts. The three heads bicker over how much brain they are fed and by whom, not over whether to keep feeding.
So when I hear commentary asking whether this is the moment the Artesh finally breaks from the regime, or whether Ghalibaf represents the pragmatic wing that might yet reform the system from within, I think of Zahhak.
Nobody in that story is saved by one of the snakes deciding it has had enough. The snakes do not turn on the king. The rupture comes from outside the machinery of the court: Kaveh the blacksmith rises first, turning private grievance into public revolt, rallying the people and creating the conditions for Fereydun’s return. Fereydun then defeats Zahhak and binds him at Damavand. Until that structure itself breaks, all three snakes answer to the same shoulders.
The options include imposing a daily cap on supplies to filling stations, tightening vehicle quotas and allowing additional gasoline to be sold at market rates, or transferring fuel allocations from vehicles to individuals and permitting citizens to trade them.
No proposal has been approved, and the government has not announced any immediate change to subsidized gasoline prices.
Esmail Saghab-Esfahani, a vice president and head of Iran's Strategic Energy Policy and Management Organization, outlined the three scenarios on state television and said the public would be informed before any decision was implemented.
Daily supplies could be capped
Under the first proposal, existing prices would remain unchanged, but filling stations nationwide would receive a combined 121 million liters of gasoline per day.
Saghab-Esfahani said pumps would stop operating once that amount had been sold, effectively imposing a nationwide daily supply ceiling without formally increasing prices.
The second proposal would divide the same 121 million liters among registered vehicles through a stricter quota system. Motorists exceeding their allocation would have to purchase additional gasoline at an unsubsidized market rate.
The third option would transfer gasoline quotas from vehicles to individuals. Every citizen would receive about 30 liters per month, whether or not they owned a vehicle, and could use or sell the allocation.
Around 30 million liters per day would separately be reserved for public transportation, conventional taxis and ride-hailing services under that proposal, in an effort to prevent fare increases.
Saghab-Esfahani said the third plan would be accompanied by a three-year program to electrify 400,000 motorcycles, convert 130,000 pickup trucks to natural gas and add 7,300 buses. He did not explain how the program would be financed or provide a detailed implementation schedule.
Conflicting production figures
In his latest remarks, Saghab-Esfahani put daily gasoline production at about 121 million liters and consumption at around 135 million, implying a shortfall of approximately 14 million liters per day.
Tehran-based news website Rouydad24 cited earlier remarks by the official that put production at about 112 million liters. The reason for the nine-million-liter discrepancy was not explained and may reflect different reporting periods or production conditions.
President Masoud Pezeshkian has said Iran spent about $6 billion importing gasoline during the Iranian year that ended March 20, 2026. Officials say falling revenue, limited access to foreign currency and obstacles affecting import routes have made that approach increasingly difficult.
Kerman plan halted before launch
The debate intensified after authorities abruptly announced and then suspended a plan to sell gasoline consumed beyond existing quotas at a sharply higher rate in southern Kerman province.
The plan was halted hours before it was due to begin following talks between Kerman’s governor and national officials. Provincial authorities said the existing system would remain in place while the proposal underwent further review.
Neither the Oil Ministry nor the government disclosed the legal basis for the plan or how the new price had been calculated. Officials also did not clarify whether Kerman had been selected for a local anti-smuggling initiative or as a test for wider changes.
Legacy of the 2019 protests
Gasoline pricing remains among the most politically sensitive issues in Iran.
An overnight nationwide price increase in November 2019 triggered protests in more than 100 cities. Rights groups documented hundreds of deaths in the ensuing crackdown, during which authorities imposed a near-total internet shutdown.
Pezeshkian promised during his 2024 presidential campaign that gasoline prices would not be increased without public consent and that more fuel-efficient vehicles would be made available before any increase.
Government officials have said no immediate price rise is planned, but all three proposals now under consideration would restrict consumption or redistribute subsidies.
The proposals leave the government seeking to address a growing supply deficit without an abrupt policy change that could further strain household finances and renew public anger over gasoline prices.
Mohammad Reza Kan’ani, head of the Environmental Protection Department in the northern province of Mazandaran, said Thursday that the Caspian’s water level was declining by around 10 to 20 centimeters annually, attributing much of the decline to rising temperatures, climate change and increased evaporation.
The Caspian’s water temperature had risen by about 1.5 degrees over the past two decades while evaporation had increased by an estimated 10% to 15%, he added.
Kan’ani warned that continued retreat of the shoreline could have serious consequences for coastal infrastructure, local economies and ecosystems dependent on the Caspian, including wetlands.
About 25% of the Caspian’s water comes from precipitation and 75% from rivers, Kanani said, with the Volga – which flows through Russia into the northern Caspian – accounting for the overwhelming majority of river inflow.
Shina Ansari, head of Iran’s Department of Environment, gave an even broader measure of the retreat this week, saying the Caspian’s level had fallen by around two to 2.5 meters over the past decade.
She described the decline as one of the region’s most serious environmental challenges and said reduced river inflows, alongside climate change, were contributing to the crisis.
Without cooperation among the five Caspian littoral states – Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – the consequences could extend to ports, coastal communities and the wider ecosystem, Ansari warned.
Falling waters meet a renewed legal dispute
The environmental warnings come as the Caspian has returned to the center of political debate in Iran over the government’s effort to ratify the 2018 Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea.
Hossein-Ali Haji-Deligani, deputy chairman of parliament’s Article 90 Committee, criticized what he called the government’s rush to approve the convention, saying this week that it could effectively reduce Iran’s share from 20% to between 3.5% and 5%.
That claim requires important qualification.
The 2018 convention does not assign Iran – or any of the five littoral states – a fixed percentage of the Caspian or its seabed. Instead, it establishes territorial waters and fishing zones while leaving seabed boundaries to be negotiated between neighboring states.
Iran’s southern seabed boundaries with Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan therefore remain unresolved.
The frequently cited figure of 20% was a post-Soviet Iranian negotiating position based on dividing the Caspian equally among its five littoral states, rather than a previously established treaty entitlement.
Nor did the earlier Iran-Soviet treaties formally grant Iran 50% of the Caspian. Agreements concluded in 1921 and 1940 established a bilateral Iran-Soviet legal regime, including equal navigation rights and exclusive arrangements between the two countries, but did not divide the sea or its seabed into equal territorial halves.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, four former Soviet republics emerged as independent Caspian states. Russia subsequently reached agreements with several of them to divide northern seabed resources along modified median lines, while Iran resisted that approach and pushed for an equal 20% division if the seabed was to be partitioned.
Iran ultimately signed the five-state legal-status convention in 2018, but the agreement deliberately left the final division of seabed sectors unresolved. Tehran also stressed at the time that the method for drawing baselines – an important issue because Iran’s concave southern coastline can disadvantage it in maritime delimitation – remained to be negotiated.
The current ratification debate therefore does not amount to a parliamentary vote assigning Iran a specific percentage of the Caspian. The more consequential question is whether Tehran should fully commit to the five-state framework before its own seabed boundaries and the baseline methodology have been settled.
Pollution adds to pressure on a shrinking sea
The falling water level is only one of several environmental threats facing the Caspian.
Iranian environmental officials have also warned of mounting pollution, shrinking fish stocks and destruction of coastal habitats.
Touraj Sadeghi, head of marine ecosystem protection at the Gilan provincial environmental department, told ISNA that untreated municipal and industrial sewage, waste dumping, petroleum leaks, excessive agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, and illegal fishing were among the main sources of environmental degradation.
Many cities along Iran’s Caspian coast still lack adequate municipal wastewater treatment systems, he said, while rivers carry thousands of tons of domestic, industrial and oil-related pollution into the sea each year.
Such pollution reduces water quality, damages natural habitats and contributes to deaths among fish and bird populations, Sadeghi said.
The Caspian supports distinctive wildlife including sturgeon, Caspian seals and migratory birds, but Iranian officials warn that the combination of pollution, habitat degradation and a rapidly retreating shoreline is increasingly threatening the resilience of the ecosystem.
