Iran International
Regional diplomacy around Iran appears to be gathering pace, with Pakistan, Oman and potentially Qatar seeking to turn an emerging agreement over the Strait of Hormuz into a path back to negotiations between Tehran and Washington.
In Tehran, the diplomatic push is already exposing divisions over what comes next.
Pragmatists see the visits as a possible route back to the Islamabad memorandum and negotiations with Washington, while hardliners portray them as an American attempt to escape the pressure Iran has created around Hormuz.
Farda News, a website close to Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, said visits by Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi and Pakistan’s army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir shared the objective of finding a political solution to the confrontation.
But it stressed that an agreement with Oman would not itself mean reopening Hormuz.
“Tehran insists that a technical agreement with Oman does not mean returning the strait to its pre-war conditions, and that remains tied to the implementation of US commitments under the Islamabad memorandum,” it wrote.
‘American pawn’
Economic daily Donya-ye Eqtesad similarly said the phased agreement could provide a route toward reviving the Islamabad memorandum, easing pressure around the strait and eventually returning Iran and the United States to negotiations.
But hardline Kayhan called the visits a “new phase of the White House deception operation,” arguing that Washington needed Iran back at the negotiating table to escape the energy crisis and deadlock over Hormuz.
It described Munir as an “American pawn” being used to help Washington escape what it called the quagmire of the war and declared the Islamabad memorandum dead.
The competing interpretations follow an unusually concentrated burst of regional diplomacy. Al-Busaidi visited Tehran on Tuesday, a day after Munir, while Qatar’s prime minister is expected in the Iranian capital on Thursday, according to Iranian media.
Diplomatic push
Tehran and Muscat announced after al-Busaidi’s visit that they were working on a phased framework including a temporary maritime corridor through Hormuz and a joint mine-clearance project.
Technical negotiations are continuing over a permanent corridor and the future management of the strait, with the two sides stressing the importance of discussions involving other Persian Gulf states.
After leaving Tehran, al-Busaidi discussed the proposed Hormuz framework with Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.
Qatar, another mediator between Tehran and Washington, said Tuesday that it continued to support efforts to resolve the crisis.
Former diplomat Jalal Sadatian told Fararu that Oman’s renewed activity should be understood in light of its established mediation role. He said Munir also appeared to have carried a message from Washington aimed at reducing tensions and reopening a channel for talks.
International affairs analyst Jafar Ghanadbashi went further, writing in Arman Melli that the Pakistani and Omani visits were “a very clear sign of America’s view of the current situation and its need for negotiations at this time.”
‘No rush for talks’
But Iranian officials have made clear that progress with Oman does not mean Tehran is ready to reopen the strait.
Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said Tuesday that Iran still considered itself to be at war and that the agreement with Oman did not amount to an immediate reopening of Hormuz.
He said reopening depended on an end to the war on all fronts, the lifting of the blockade against Iran and a resolution of the situation in Yemen.
Gharibabadi also challenged US claims about mine clearance in the strait, asking why vessels had not resumed passage if the mines had been removed. He warned that US mine-clearance vessels entering the area would be targeted.
Hossein Mohebi, a spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Wednesday that negotiations with Oman over the past month had produced mutually acceptable results concerning the two countries’ respective waters and revenues from the strait.
But he accused Washington of obstructing a final agreement and reiterated that reopening Hormuz depended on the United States returning to the Islamabad memorandum.
“If the United States does not accept our conditions, the Strait of Hormuz will not open under any circumstances,” Mohebi said.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday he was “not in a hurry” to resume negotiations with Iran and had “no time schedule” for ending the war. He said both economic warfare and military strikes against Iran were effective.
The competing signals leave regional mediators with a difficult sequencing problem: whether an agreement over Hormuz can create enough room to restart diplomacy before either Tehran or Washington decides it has more to gain by waiting.
For nearly half a century the Islamic Republic has reproduced the image of its leaders everywhere: on the walls of schools and government offices, in theatres, cinemas and concert halls, behind officials at podiums, on television screens. Visibility was not vanity. In a system built on the authority of one man, the leader had to be seen for the state to demonstrate that it existed.
Before the war with the United States and Israel, that was the rule. Now the same system publishes messages from its new leader without being able, or perhaps without wanting, to show him.
In the first weeks after his appointment by the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that selects Iran's supreme leader, intelligence services and media inside and outside the country waited for one thing: his Nowruz address. The Persian new year, which falls around March 20, brings the leader's most closely watched speech of the year, and a video would have answered the essential questions at once. He would have been demonstrably alive, apparently well, and visibly in charge.
No video came. The absence stopped looking like a security precaution and started looking like a condition.
The record since has only deepened the ambiguity. There is no photograph, no audio, no film.
Written statements have appeared, attributed to his office rather than demonstrably from his hand. The absence of anything verifiable, no image, no voice, no signature, has weakened the official account of his health and strengthened the theory that he was gravely wounded.
The effect on the state has been visible. Officials who held together in the first days of the war have since split over what comes next, and the fault line runs through the war-or-negotiation question: the state broadcaster has censored the government's own negotiators, while hardline outlets have claimed the leader opposed the process that produced the Islamabad agreement. Both camps invoke him. Neither can produce him.
So the question is whether any of this can work in the system's favor.
Absence as possibility
Consider what visibility would cost. If Mojtaba Khamenei appears and the marks of injury or incapacity are apparent, the Islamic Republic must concede that its leader is diminished. If his death is confirmed, the succession fight begins. If he turns out to be healthy and active, he must accept responsibility for the decisions of the past six months, including a war.
Absence suspends all three. He can be alive, wounded, incapacitated or dead, and the machinery of the state can go on issuing orders in his name.
Uncertainty, which ought to be the government's problem, becomes its instrument.
While the leader's status remains unresolved, no faction can settle the succession, and no official has the standing either to accept defeat or to wind the system up. Commanders and institutions can continue to say they take their orders from the center, a center that may exist but cannot be seen.
That has a second edge, and it cuts the other way. The same fog that prevents anyone from declaring the system finished also prevents anyone from commanding it. An absent leader cannot arbitrate between the men arguing over war and diplomacy, which is very likely why they began arguing in the first place. Ambiguity buys the system time by denying it direction.
Still, on this reading, even the collapse of the state's outer structure would not necessarily be the end. A network of the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, the intelligence services, financial channels and allied forces across the region could carry on in the name of an absent leader. What would survive, in that case, would no longer be a government. It would be an underground organization.
From state to network
The comparison that follows is about mechanics, not equivalence. The question is narrow: how does a network continue after it loses its territory or its leader disappears? On that specific question, two cases are instructive, and neither is offered as a moral parallel to a state that has governed 90 million people for nearly five decades.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the Islamic State's caliphate from a mosque in Mosul in July 2014 and did not appear on camera again for almost five years, though audio messages attributed to him continued to circulate. In that period the group lost nearly all its territory and became a network of clandestine cells. After he was killed in 2019, a US Defense Department inspector general assessment found his death had produced no immediate decisive effect on the group's operations.
Osama bin Laden spent almost a decade in hiding while releasing video and audio messages. His evasion of capture became, for his followers, evidence of invulnerability. Killing him destroyed that impression but did not destroy a network that had already devolved into regional branches.
The Islamic Republic is far better equipped for that kind of afterlife than either. It has governed for close to half a century. It has trained personnel, security intelligence, economic resources, religious institutions and cross-border networks. Driven underground, it would not be starting from nothing.
A familiar pattern of absence
Absence also carries a particular charge in Shia religious culture, and this is where the Islamic Republic has a vocabulary ready to hand.
Twelver Shia Muslims believe the twelfth imam, who vanished in the ninth century, is alive but hidden and will one day return. During the period known as the Lesser Occultation, roughly 874 to 941, his instructions are said to have reached his followers through four successive deputies who spoke on his behalf. The Greater Occultation, in which he remains hidden and has no named deputy, has continued ever since.
This is not a claim about religious rank. Mojtaba Khamenei holds no such standing for Shia believers, and the comparison is not about status. It is about the function of absence: a person who cannot be seen can still be treated as present. Intermediaries speak in his name, and waiting takes the place of proof.
The Islamic Republic itself was built on a theology of absence. Its constitution justifies the rule of a jurist explicitly as an arrangement for the era of the hidden imam, which means the state has spent 47 years governing on behalf of a leader nobody can see. Its propaganda apparatus therefore has both the language and the precedent to convert the absence of Mojtaba Khamenei into a kind of hidden presence.
That possibility is not indefinite. The longer the absence lasts, the harder it becomes to distinguish a genuine order from a manufactured one, the sharper the competition among those claiming to speak for the leader, and the more insistent the question: who is actually giving the orders in Tehran?
Mojtaba Khamenei's absence will probably not save the Islamic Republic from military defeat, economic collapse or social unrest. It may, however, allow it to go on existing after such a collapse.
As long as the fate of the absent leader remains unclear, the system's followers can treat the fall as temporary, the defeat as unfinished and the return as possible. Because sometimes governments continue not because they are still standing, but because their death has not yet been proven.
The reserves, intended to cushion severe shortages and emergencies, have been tapped at a pace in recent weeks that has prompted warnings from experts within the state about the consequences of continuing, the sources said.
Remaining fuel stocks could be depleted within several weeks if withdrawals continue at the current rate, limiting the government's ability to offset disruptions to domestic production or imports and prevent widespread supply stoppages, according to the sources.
The growing reliance on strategic stocks has also opened a dispute between the government and the Revolutionary Guards over how long withdrawals should continue, they said.
Revolutionary Guards officials oppose unrestricted use of the reserves, while government officials want to keep drawing on them to keep filling stations operating and contain public concern over shortages and higher prices, the sources added.
Daily shortfall strains supplies
Iran produces about 120 million liters of gasoline a day but consumes around 135 million liters, leaving a daily deficit of about 15 million liters.
Ali-Akbar Saghab Esfahani, head of Iran's Energy Optimization and Strategic Management Organization, put the daily gasoline shortfall at 14 million to 15 million liters on August 15.
Before the shortage intensified, imports covered about half the gap, much of it through fuel supplies from Russia, the sources said.
A US maritime blockade, Ukrainian strikes on Russian refining infrastructure and the closure of the Caspian Sea supply route have sharply restricted Iran's ability to maintain those imports, according to the sources.
Iranian diplomatic efforts to secure alternative fuel supplies from allies and neighboring countries have yet to produce an agreement.
Britain and Qatar have meanwhile backed a new US economic campaign against the Islamic Republic, as Washington seeks to restrict its financial, shipping and energy trade routes.
Fuel moved to reopen Tehran stations
Gasoline shortages have reached Tehran, forcing some filling stations to close, according to information obtained by Iran International.
Authorities have ordered fuel transferred from neighboring provinces to reopen some stations in the capital, but dozens of others remain at risk of closure, the sources said.
Videos and messages sent by citizens have also documented long lines, station closures and difficulties obtaining gasoline in Tehran, Alborz, South Khorasan and Razavi Khorasan provinces.
The Tehran regional manager of the National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company attributed temporary closures at some stations to a sudden rise in demand and congestion along fuel transportation routes.
Reports from citizens suggest the disruption is also affecting transportation costs. Several people told Iran International that fares charged by ride-hailing services Snapp and Tapsi had risen sharply as fewer drivers accepted trips.
“Gas stations are crowded, GPS doesn't work and you can't work for Snapp. Fares have gone up, but there are no drivers to accept the trip. We're left without money and without gasoline,” a Tehran resident told Iran International.
Another citizen said the cost of a regular Snapp journey had risen from 1,000,000 rials last month to 3,200,000 rials, while a resident of Shiraz described steep increases in ride-hailing fares despite no gasoline shortage there.
A Snapp driver said fuel consumption from running air conditioning for passengers required him to refill about every two days, but his quota had been exhausted and purchases outside the quota were limited to 25 liters.
Other messages sent to Iran International accused authorities of deliberately restricting supplies before a possible price increase.
“When they want to raise the price of cooking oil, they say there isn't any. When they want to raise the price of rice, they say there isn't any. But after the price goes up, everything is available,” a resident of Mashhad said. “Now it's gasoline's turn.”
The Mashhad resident said filling stations were not receiving enough gasoline but predicted supplies would become readily available if authorities raised prices.
Another citizen questioned why a gasoline deficit of 10% to 20% was causing such widespread disruption and accused authorities of deliberately making fuel scarce to make consumers more willing to accept higher prices.
“Many gas stations are either closed or have no gasoline to distribute,” a Tehran resident said, also accusing the government of diverting fuel for foreign currency earnings.
Another message accused authorities of using the shortage as justification for a gasoline price increase and manipulating distribution to create congestion at filling stations and reduce resistance to higher prices.
“Half of Pakdasht's gas stations have no gasoline and the rest are extremely crowded,” a resident said. “They are trying to force people to accept higher gasoline prices.”
Government weighs three options
The government is considering three responses to the shortage: limiting gasoline supply to domestic production levels, reducing subsidized quotas and selling additional consumption at the unrestricted price, or shifting fuel quotas from vehicles to individuals.
Concern that higher gasoline prices could trigger protests has encouraged the government to use strategic reserves to buy time, the sources said.
Fuel price increases have been politically sensitive in Iran. A sudden rise in gasoline prices in November 2019 triggered nationwide protests followed by a deadly state crackdown.
The attempt to delay harder choices by drawing on emergency stocks is now creating another problem, according to Iran International's sources: the buffer intended to protect Iran during severe supply disruptions may itself be only weeks away from exhaustion.
