Trump says Iran unlikely to make deal he considers necessary

On August 5, a state bank froze the accounts of the National Iranian Oil Company, NIOC, over about $1 billion owed to the sovereign wealth fund, two years past due. A separate case was already running: a $1.5 billion tax assessment the company says it simply cannot pay. Enforcement on that one stopped only when the presidency intervened.

The episode matters because the law shielding the company is also where its condition is recorded. NIOC publishes no audited accounts, and Iran's budget shows state companies only in aggregate, leaving its debt to be reconstructed from budget provisions and disclosures by other state institutions.

This year's budget sets the amount of NIOC debt to the central bank and commercial banks being deferred at 55 billion euros, about $63.5 billion, covering principal and interest on financing for upstream oil and gas development. It appears as a single sentence at the bottom of a table in which every other figure is in rials or percentages, renewed every year since 2019.

Iran's sovereign wealth fund, the National Development Fund, has separately said NIOC is its largest debtor, with $17 billion in unpaid loans.

Those two categories alone amount to more than $80 billion. No single official document presents them as one consolidated NIOC debt figure.

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Iran's entire general budget this year converts to roughly $37 billion at the open-market rate. For scale, the deferred bank debt alone is about 1.7 times what the government plans to spend in a year.

That burden grows without anyone borrowing another dollar. The debt is in foreign currency, and the rial has fallen from about 900,000 to the dollar in early 2025 to nearly 2 million today, a slide President Trump celebrated in August as his administration "destroying Iran's currency." Each step down makes the same $63 billion heavier against NIOC's rial costs and the state's domestic revenues.

That burden grows in rial terms without anyone borrowing another dollar. The debt is in foreign currency, and the rial has fallen from about 900,000 to the dollar in early 2025 to nearly 2 million today, a slide President Trump celebrated in August as his administration "destroying Iran's currency.” Each step down increases the rial value of the same $63 billion obligation and makes it larger relative to the state's domestic revenues.

Maximum pressure is usually scored from the outside: barrels tracked leaving the Persian Gulf, the rial's slide, the lengthening sanctions lists. By that scorecard the campaign is working.

A clearer measure is the condition of the company at the center of the sanctioned trade, and by that measure the campaign has worked more completely than the scorecard shows. The pressure did not stop Iran's oil. It changed the terms of the business, and the new terms have broken the company that produces it, in every sense but the accounting one.

The business model was set at the top. After the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions, Ali Khamenei told officials not to leave the economy waiting on "decisions to be made by others." The objective instead was to plan with the sanctions in place and, in his formulation, to neutralize them.

The oil ministry's version of neutralization was to keep production alive with domestic contractors, the Revolutionary Guard's companies among them. On its own terms, that part worked. Output that had fallen below 2 million barrels a day in 2020, the lowest in almost four decades by American government estimates, was rebuilt to about 3.6 million by mid-2024, a recovery the oil minister boasted of publicly.

Selling those barrels was another matter.

"We have unofficial or unconventional sales, all of which are secret," then-oil minister Bijan Zanganeh said in 2019, "because if they are made known America would immediately stop them." His deputy called it the grey market.

In practice, that meant selling at sanctions-driven discounts that have varied widely over time, reaching $10 to $15 a barrel below Brent through 2024 and 2025, particularly to China's independent refiners; using a shadow fleet, ship-to-ship transfers and obscured vessel identities; relabeling Iranian crude as originating elsewhere; and paying intermediaries to keep the chain moving. China has at times taken roughly 90 percent of Iran's exported crude.

Payment itself became another layer of the sanctions trade. Iranian oil proceeds have been trapped or restricted in foreign banking systems, while other sales have been settled through barter or in currencies that are difficult to repatriate freely.

India created a rupee payment mechanism for Iranian crude in 2019, and the channel stalled the same year when Indian purchases stopped. Roughly $6 billion in Iranian oil proceeds frozen in South Korea were eventually transferred to restricted accounts in Qatar as part of the 2023 prisoner exchange.

Every additional discount, commission and restriction reduces what reaches Iran. NIOC's statutory share of crude and condensate export proceeds is set at 14.5 percent, so lower realized export revenue narrows the company's own take as well.

The difference between what the model earned and what production cost was covered on credit, in foreign currency, from the central bank, state banks and the sovereign wealth fund, with parliament's authorization.

By January 2019 the state knew in writing that the arrangement was not paying for itself. The parliament's research arm reported that NIOC, then about $50 billion in debt on its own count of the previous year, could not repay what it owed. The party line continued anyway: the same parliament approved fresh lending in the same budget, and two months later wrote the first deferral into law.

The dollar figures were tracked for two more years, to about $60 billion in March 2020 and about $70 billion in March 2021. Then that series went quiet.

The liabilities themselves did not vanish from the record. Two years later the Economy Ministry put NIOC's debts for 2021 at 1,683 trillion tomans, the largest of any state company in Iran, ahead of Bank Sepah and Bank Melli. At the exchange rate of the day, that is the same $60 to $65 billion the dollar series had been reporting.

What disappeared was the ability to follow it: a comparable figure, year by year, in the currency the money was owed in. The largest corporate debt in Iran's history was reduced to one renewable sentence that for six years carried no number at all. When a number finally surfaced this February, it settled what the silence had left open. The bank debt did not go away. It was rolled forward.

The meter still runs, though not at one rate. The sovereign fund's published terms for foreign-currency oil and gas facilities are 3.5 percent for the fund plus 2.5 for the agent bank, 6 percent all-in. On the $17 billion it is owed, that alone is close to $1 billion a year, almost exactly the size of the claim that froze the company's accounts in August.

The central bank has never published its contract rate, so the future cost can only be estimated. If even a 4 percent rate were applied to the $63 billion outstanding balance, it would add more than $2.5 billion in interest over a year; at the sovereign fund's 6 percent rate, the figure would approach $3.8 billion.

What the budget does establish is that the deferred bank debt already consists of principal and interest. The cost of carrying the old debt has become part of the debt.

For comparison, $1.5 billion in foreign currency is allocated for medicine this year, in a spring when pharmacy prices jumped several hundred percent, cancer and dialysis drugs ran short, and officials blamed scarce foreign currency. Depending on the rates applied to NIOC’s different debts, the annual interest burden could exceed that amount by several billion dollars.

An Iranian who misses a single loan installment pays the contract rate plus a 6-point penalty. The oil company's interest simply accrues, uncollected, year after year. A deferral, in the end, is a bet that a better year is coming, one with a surplus large enough to settle old bills. The Islamic Republic has been promising that better year that is yet to come for forty-seven years.

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Because the loans are neither collected nor written off, the central bank and the state banks carry them as sound assets, the same accounting that keeps Iran's insolvent banks upright. When those banks come up short, they overdraw at the central bank, and that is where base money is created.

The transmission is not mechanical, but it is the route by which a single failed lender, Bank Ayandeh, accounted for about a quarter of the growth in Iran's monetary base in 2022-23. The bill reaches Iranians as inflation: the tax no one votes on, taking its largest share from the poorest.

Fifteen years of records say NIOC could not pay when conditions were merely bad. With its fields bombed and its exports blockaded, repayment is beyond reach in any scenario.

And the pressure is still tightening. On August 13, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who runs the Economic Fury campaign against the Islamic Republic, promised measures "like have never been seen in the history of the economic isolation of a country," on top of a blockade meant to keep anything from moving in or out of Iranian ports. Whatever they turn out to be, they are aimed at the only revenue that could ever service this debt.

Nor does the optimistic case rescue the company. Even a full lifting of sanctions would not change the arithmetic quickly, because a company with damaged fields and war-hit infrastructure would have to borrow more before it could export more.

Maximum pressure set the terms of this downfall, but the decisive choices were Tehran's: to keep pumping at any margin, to stop publishing a comparable foreign-currency debt figure after 2021, and to push the bill forward one year at a time.

The company that once symbolized Iran's oil wealth was not felled by a rival or a market. It was sacrificed, quietly, by its own state, to the nuclear program and the regional ambitions that brought the sanctions, and to the business model built to outlast them, and the receipt is one sentence long, perpetually renewed every year.

Reyhaneh Ghasemizadeh accused government opponents of displaying “fake concern for Iran” before making the controversial remark in footage widely circulated on social media Monday.

Iran’s state broadcaster said her comments had been taken out of context and released a longer version. In it, Ghasemizadeh accused critics who had called for Donald Trump’s help of now claiming concern for southern Iran, saying: “They post claims of patriotism... saying, ‘Our hearts ache for the south.’ Southern Iran, sacrificed for southern Lebanon.” She then accused the same critics of celebrating reports that 168 students in Minab had been killed on February 28.

Islamic Republic supporters argued online that the disputed phrase was not Ghasemizadeh’s own view, but a quotation or paraphrase of what she was attributing to government opponents. Most visible comments under widely shared versions of the clip, however, rejected that interpretation, saying her delivery did not make clear she was quoting dissidents.

The remarks touched a longstanding political fault line in Iran over the Islamic Republic’s support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and other members of what Tehran calls the “Axis of Resistance.”

“Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran” has long been among the slogans chanted in antigovernment protests in Iran.

It first gained prominence during the 2009 Green Movement and has repeatedly resurfaced during subsequent waves of anti-government demonstrations.

It was most recently heard during nationwide protests beginning in December 2025, including in Tehran and other cities. The slogan has become shorthand among protesters for opposition to Tehran directing financial and military resources toward regional allies while Iran faces economic hardship at home.

Ghasemizadeh’s comments also come weeks after southern Iran bore the brunt of a sustained US bombing campaign following renewed fighting around the Strait of Hormuz.

US forces carried out 13 consecutive nights of strikes in July, hitting military and other infrastructure across Hormozgan, Khuzestan and Sistan & Baluchestan provinces, including around Bandar Abbas, Jask, Chabahar and Qeshm. Washington said the campaign was intended to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping.

Iranian authorities reported deaths, damaged bridges and transport links, as well as power and water disruptions in parts of the south, fueling public concern over the civilian cost of the renewed conflict.

Iran’s repression follows survivors through three places: into the hospital, where their wounds may identify them; into their bodies, where pellets and pain remain; and into exile, where scars, flashbacks and fear continue years later.

Every injured protester I advised feared the healthcare system; not the physicians trying to help them, but what might happen if their wounds identified them.

Healthcare should be a red line. Patients must be able to seek treatment without being punished for their wounds, and clinicians must be free to treat them without intimidation. Yet UN experts reported that Iranian security forces entered medical facilities, attempted to arrest wounded protesters and detained people in and around them.

From Los Angeles, I joined physicians working through MAHSA Medical to provide free, confidential telehealth guidance to injured civilians. I also worked through a network of doctors in the United States connected to colleagues and relatives practicing inside Iran.

Through WhatsApp and Telegram, I spoke directly with injured civilians and examined them on live video whenever security and connectivity allowed. We reviewed photographs, medical imaging and prerecorded audio and video from homes where protesters were hiding.

Patients told us they feared that even seeking antibiotics or pain medication from a pharmacy could flag them as protest casualties. They suffered silently at home while we tried to provide what limited care we could from thousands of miles away.

During one live video call, I saw a young man with a deep wound across his right hand and significant active bleeding. He said security forces had attacked him with a machete-like blade, cutting to the tendons. The injury required formal evaluation and likely surgical repair, but he feared its pattern would identify him as a protester.

Instead of a hand-surgery suite, we discussed temporary stabilization using household materials. Even while bleeding and in severe pain, he remained remarkably composed. After years of treating catastrophic trauma, I had never witnessed that combination of physical pain, acute fear and resolve. This was not equivalent care. It was harm reduction when seeking ordinary care felt dangerous.

The pellet injuries were even more pervasive. Patients ranged from teenagers to women in their 70s. Some had clusters of 20 or more fragments in one region; others carried more than 100. I reviewed pellets involving the face and eyes, neck, chest, hands, hips, upper thighs and urogenital region—near structures whose injury can cause blindness, catastrophic bleeding, nerve damage, sexual or reproductive harm, disability or death.

In the cases I reviewed, I estimated that more than 95% of the retained pellets could never safely be removed. Fragments were embedded between the small joints of hands and knuckles, within or beside larger joints and near delicate neurovascular structures. Searching surgically for each tiny fragment could damage a nerve, blood vessel, tendon or joint and cause more harm than leaving it in place.

That does not make the pellets harmless. They can chronically irritate nerves and joints, causing pain, stiffness, reduced mobility and recurrent inflammation. Unlike a single projectile with one wound track, a shotgun discharge can scatter dozens of permanent foreign bodies across tissues too delicate to explore safely.

The eyes reveal the scale of this harm. During the January 2026 crackdown, more than 400 gunshot-related eye injuries were documented at a single Tehran hospital, according to physicians cited by the Guardian.

Doctors described permanent blindness and eyes damaged beyond repair. This continued a pattern seen during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, when ophthalmologists reported at least 580 significant eye injuries. The nationwide toll remains unknown.

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Years after the streets fall silent, a pellet lodged beside a nerve or within a joint can turn an ordinary movement into both pain and memory. Each bend of a finger can evoke the gunfire, fear and moment the survivor was wounded.

But the wounds can also become evidence against the wounded. Reuters reported that Revolutionary Guards and police sought hospital records to find protesters who had already been discharged. The Associated Press reported that some physicians removed pellets or altered records to help patients avoid detection.

A retained pellet does not prove a person’s beliefs or conduct, but in this environment it can become a physical marker of suspected protest participation. Identification can expose a survivor to arrest, detention and prosecution, including proceedings carrying the death penalty.

Medical records, scans and forensic examinations should be preserved securely, not transformed into instruments of surveillance. When the injured avoid hospitals, they lose not only treatment but contemporaneous documentation of what happened.

I encounter the other end of this process as a volunteer physician evaluator with the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network. In a forensic medical evaluation, I assess whether an asylum seeker’s scars, chronic injuries and psychological symptoms are medically consistent with the history of persecution the person reports.

Medicine cannot decide whether someone legally qualifies for asylum, identify an assailant from a scar alone or prove every detail of an event. It can document findings, consider alternative explanations and explain how closely the clinical evidence corresponds to the account provided.

One man, now in his early 40s, reported that his persecution began in his mid-20s and recurred over nearly two decades. His family operated a wedding hall where music and men and women celebrating together drew repeated Basij or IRGC intervention. He described repeated detention, including solitary confinement without meaningful legal process. In one assault, he suffered penetrating knife wounds to his thigh and posterior chest, requiring emergency vascular surgery and about a month in hospital.

Years later, I documented extensive scarring, diminished pulses, muscle loss and chronic vascular and neurological complications medically consistent with severe penetrating trauma near the femoral artery. Such an injury can cause massive hemorrhage, shock, loss of the limb and death. A wound cannot prove an assailant’s subjective intent, but it can establish that the violence was life-threatening.

Nearly two decades after the persecution began, he still reported pain, nightmares, insomnia, flashbacks and hypervigilance. News from Iran and disrupted communication with his family impaired his concentration and work. He had escaped the immediate danger, but the danger continued to organize his life.

I have seen the same continuum in other survivors: scars medically consistent with accounts of beatings and lashings, alongside panic, dissociation, depression and hypervigilance that can persist long after someone has escaped. Not every enduring injury is visible, and no single symptom can prove what happened. But trauma-informed forensic evaluation can document what violence leaves behind.

Executions and deportation remain part of the stakes, but they are not the center of this medical story. Amnesty International has documented protesters subjected to incommunicado detention, denial of medical care and torture-tainted proceedings, including cases carrying the death penalty. For survivors seeking protection abroad, return can mean renewed exposure to the institutions they identify as their persecutors.

The response must begin with protecting the independence of medicine. Iranian clinicians must be able to treat patients without intimidation or punishment. International investigators should document attacks on patients, health workers and facilities. Governments reviewing asylum claims should protect confidentiality and provide access to qualified forensic evaluation.

No one should have to choose between leaving a disabling injury untreated and revealing themselves to those they fear.

As an Iranian American, this work is personal. But my medical conclusions must rest on examinations, imaging, clinical evidence and candor about what those findings can and cannot establish. A wound is not merely a mark of what happened to one body. Properly treated and independently documented, it can become part of the record of what happened to a society.

Iran’s authorities may try to frighten the wounded away from hospitals, intimidate those who treat them and suppress the evidence left behind. Medicine cannot stop that machinery alone. But it can care for the injured, protect the integrity of their stories and preserve what repression is designed to make disappear.

The bill would also give the Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards’ Intelligence Organization a central role in establishing prohibited foreign links, potentially handing prosecutors a broad new set of offenses in a judicial system repeatedly criticized by rights groups over due process.

Parliament approved the general framework of the bill on Sunday, though its current text has not been made public.

The latest publicly available draft contains 19 articles imposing prison terms, professional bans and other penalties across journalism, academia, civil society, culture and communications with foreign individuals and organizations.

Approval of the general framework does not mean lawmakers have approved each provision, and the final legislation could differ substantially.

But if its central provisions survive, the legislation would create an extensive new framework for prosecuting alleged foreign influence as authorities intensify prosecutions over perceived links to foreign governments and media.

What could land someone in prison?

Among the most far-reaching provisions is Article 7, which would prohibit sending messages, photographs, videos, audio or other data to non-Iranian media or people engaged in media activity abroad.

The offense would carry a prison sentence, with potentially harsher punishment if the communication occurred under a work arrangement, was deemed intended to undermine national security or took place during “crisis,” “unrest” or “rioting.”

Article 6 would prohibit interviews or other communication with media deemed hostile, including American or Israeli-funded outlets. Speaking to other foreign media would require notification through an Intelligence Ministry system, with failure to notify also punishable by imprisonment.

Under Article 5, the Intelligence Ministry would annually publish a list of foreign governments, universities and institutions approved for scholarships, academic agreements, conferences and scientific cooperation.

Collaboration with institutions outside that list could bring imprisonment, as could sending medical, research or archaeological samples to them.

Private individuals and organizations communicating with foreign embassies or institutions would meanwhile need to notify authorities and obtain written authorization, with limited exceptions for personal and civil-status matters.

NGOs, associations and political parties would be barred from accepting financial benefits from foreign governments, institutions or embassies without approval from a committee including the Intelligence Ministry and IRGC Intelligence.

Violations could bring imprisonment, lengthy bans on social and cultural activity and dissolution of the organization.

Film, documentary, theater, music and book projects involving “prohibited foreign direction or support” could result in permanent professional bans if authorities determine that they question religious rules, portray Iran negatively or promote what the bill calls anti-Islamic culture.

Organizing certain foreign-linked courses or workshops, including online programs, could also bring prison terms, as could knowingly participating in them.

Broad crimes, powerful investigators

The breadth of the prohibited conduct is compounded by the powers given to Iran’s security agencies.

The draft names the Intelligence Ministry and IRGC Intelligence as the principal investigative authorities responsible for presenting evidence of prohibited foreign direction or involvement to judicial authorities.

The criteria they would be tasked with establishing are broad.

Article 1 covers people acting under the supervision, direction, training or guidance of a wide range of foreign governments, international organizations and other non-Iranian entities.

Potential harms include damaging national security or territorial integrity, but also undermining public trust in the political system or reducing electoral participation. Severe prison sentences are envisaged in some circumstances.

Another provision indicates that ignorance of a prohibited foreign connection would not necessarily eliminate criminal liability if authorities conclude negligence or carelessness resulted in harm.

Cases would be heard by Revolutionary Courts, which could also order confiscation of assets and professional bans.

New charges in a system under scrutiny

By criminalizing a much wider range of foreign contacts and communications, the bill could give investigators and prosecutors additional charges in cases involving alleged foreign links.

That prospect is particularly consequential given the record of Iran’s Revolutionary Courts and security agencies.

Human Rights Watch has documented restrictions on access to independent lawyers in national security cases and said Revolutionary Courts regularly fall short of fair-trial standards.

The group reported in February that state-affiliated media had broadcast hundreds of purported confessions, including statements describing collaboration with foreign intelligence agencies and sharing protest footage with Persian-language media abroad.

Amnesty International has similarly documented what it describes as systemic denial of access to lawyers and forced confessions during the January crackdown, including detainees being made to confess to sending protest images to media outside Iran.

The overlap with conduct contemplated by the proposed legislation is striking.

The bill would therefore arrive in a system already accustomed to prosecuting alleged foreign connections, but with a substantially expanded range of conduct explicitly available for prosecution.

It would also criminalize certain foreign-directed economic activity and allow enhanced punishment for other crimes committed under alleged foreign supervision or guidance.

If passed into law in its available or a similar form, the legislation would move the concept of foreign “infiltration” far beyond conventional espionage.

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.