Clashes between Yemen's Houthis and government forces have killed at least 81 fighters since Thursday, AFP reported, citing military officials and medical sources.
A military official on the Red Sea coast said 24 government fighters were killed, while another in Taiz said 15 were killed there. Medical sources in Houthi-held areas said at least 42 Houthi fighters were also killed.
A fleeting encounter between Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and China’s Xi Jinping in Bishkek has reignited an uncomfortable debate in Tehran: just how strategic is Iran’s much-vaunted partnership with Beijing?
The two presidents exchanged only briefly on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit on Tuesday, with no dedicated bilateral meeting—an absence seized on by Iranian critics as evidence of Beijing’s reluctance to embrace Tehran more closely.
The optics were particularly sensitive in Tehran, where closer ties with China and Russia have for years been promoted as the cornerstone of a “Look East” strategy intended to reduce Iran’s dependence on the West.
Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, a former member of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said Xi’s treatment of Pezeshkian sent a message from China to the United States amid the war.
“Xi's cold reception of Pezeshkian was this Eastern vendor's message to America amid the war,” he wrote on X. “What some in Iran called a strategic partnership was, for China, nothing more than a superficial relationship.”
Prominent moderate politician Davoud Heshmati also pointed to the absence of a bilateral meeting, arguing that it was “rejected by the Chinese side.”
A serious warning
Conservative commentator Mostafa Najafi described the encounter as “a serious warning and negative signal in Iran-China relations,” particularly if Tehran had requested a meeting and Beijing had declined.
He warned that continued ambiguity in the relationship could have significant consequences for Iranian foreign policy at a time when Tehran’s international options are already limited.
The unease over Pezeshkian’s encounter has been amplified by a separate, disputed claim that Beijing has attached conditions to deeper cooperation with Tehran.
Hossein Marashi, secretary-general of the centrist Executives of Construction Party, said in an interview with EcoIran that China had set specific conditions for implementing parts of a 25-year cooperation agreement and for a planned visit to Beijing by parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf.
Ghalibaf was appointed Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s special envoy for China affairs in May but has yet to travel to China or meet Chinese officials in that capacity.
“The Chinese have told us very clearly: You open the Strait of Hormuz, you do not charge [transit] fees, you resolve your issues with Saudi Arabia and the United States, before Ghalibaf comes to China,” Marashi claimed.
Hardliners hit back
Ghalibaf’s office rejected the attribution of such conditions to China and urged media outlets to refrain from publishing claims that could “affect Iran’s national interests and its foreign relations.”
There is no independent evidence that Beijing imposed the conditions described by Marashi.
Marashi’s comments prompted a fierce response from conservative and hardline media, where questioning the relationship with Beijing was portrayed by some as serving Washington’s interests.
The hardline Kayhan newspaper called Marashi “a facilitator of White House policies” and accused him of seeking to “poison Iran’s strategic relations with its Eastern partners from within.”
A commentary published by the Fars news agency went further, accusing reformists of trying to portray relations with China as unstable and dependent on Washington and calling for Marashi’s prosecution.
The dispute also spilled onto Persian-language social media, where hardline users accused Pezeshkian of placing greater importance on reaching an agreement with the United States than on relations with China.
Others argued that the absence of a bilateral meeting reflected Beijing’s choices rather than the Iranian president’s diplomacy.
The argument exposes a deeper uncertainty over Iran’s “Look East” strategy. Its advocates have presented China as a strategic partner capable of helping Tehran withstand Western pressure, while critics increasingly question whether Beijing sees the relationship in comparable terms.
The brief encounter in Bishkek cannot by itself answer that question. At a moment when Iran’s options are narrowing, it remains unclear how far its most important partner is actually prepared to go.
The United States is investigating whether its forces were responsible for a deadly strike on a wedding in southern Iran, Vice President JD Vance said Thursday, as evidence emerged suggesting the building may have been directly hit by a US munition.
“We’re investigating it because obviously we care. We want to know,” Vance told reporters in Washington.
“If we do make mistakes, again, this is a big difference between us and Iran, when our military makes mistakes, they learn from them to try to get better from them,” he added.
The explosion ripped through a residential building hosting a wedding in the small town of Kuhestak in Sirik County on Tuesday, during a new wave of US strikes along Iran’s Strait of Hormuz coast.
Iranian authorities said at least 68 people were wounded. A four-year-old child was among those reported dead. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei described the wedding strike as a “war crime.”
CENTCOM said Wednesday it was already looking into reports of the incident but rejected allegations that American forces deliberately target civilians.
“We’re aware of the reports, which originated from Iranian state media, and we are looking into them,” US Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, a CENTCOM spokesperson, told Iran International. “The U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC.”
CENTCOM said its forces carried out multiple strikes across southern Iran on Sept. 1, targeting Revolutionary Guard air-defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets and facilities, mine-laying capabilities and communications sites.
On Thursday, Reuters published an analysis by four weapons experts who said the damage was more consistent with a direct hit than a ricochet from another target.
Three assessed that the munition was likely American rather than an errant Iranian air-defense missile. One said a US weapon may simply have missed its intended target.
Those assessments are not definitive, and the US investigation remains ongoing.
Shahin Milani, executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, told Iran International that any strike on civilians required proper investigation, while cautioning that restrictions on independent access inside Iran made the full civilian toll difficult to verify.
“Striking civilian targets contravenes international law, and all such incidents must be properly investigated,” Milani told Iran International. “The Iranian government, however, has consistently denied UN mechanisms access to the country. Moreover, given the Iranian government’s long history of disseminating falsehoods, it is very difficult to ascertain the real extent of harms to civilians based on the reports produced by state-run media in Iran.”
Reuters cited a US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, as saying investigators were considering several possible causes, including a US strike, a US munition ricocheting from another target, or an Iranian air-defense missile or interceptor going astray.
The incident has renewed scrutiny of the civilian toll of the US-Iran war, six months after a missile struck a primary school in Minab, killing scores of children and teachers, according to Iranian authorities.
Washington did not publicly accept responsibility for the Minab strike.
Reuters reported in March, however, that an initial internal US military investigation found American forces were likely responsible.
The Pentagon has not publicly released the findings of that investigation.
Donald Trump’s renewed call for Iranians to rise up against the Islamic Republic has revived a question among some of those he is urging into the streets: after months of shifting US policy, can they trust Washington to stand by them if they do?
The question came as the United States renewed strikes on Iranian military targets and Trump rejected Tehran’s call for a return to the Islamabad Memorandum, saying an agreement with the Islamic Republic was not “worth the paper it’s written on.”
But responses sent by a number of Iran International viewers raised a different question: if Iranians return to the streets, can they be certain that Washington will continue supporting them?
Some pointed to the experience of the past eight months, during which Trump has moved between encouraging Iranians to challenge the Islamic Republic, launching a war against it, reaching an agreement with Tehran and again escalating military pressure.
That history began with the nationwide anti-government protests in December and January.
Trump repeatedly encouraged Iranians to stay in the streets. On January 13, as the crackdown intensified, he told protesters to “take over your institutions” and declared that “help is on its way.”
The repression that followed was on an extraordinary scale. More than 36,500 people were killed by security forces during the January 8-9 crackdown, according to classified government documents and other evidence, including field reports and accounts from medical staff, witnesses and victims’ families, reviewed by Iran International.
Trump also warned Tehran against executing detained protesters, saying the United States would take “very strong action” if executions went ahead.
Days later, he said he had been informed that more than 800 planned executions had been canceled and suggested that his intervention had helped stop them. Iran’s prosecutor general later denied that such a mass execution plan existed.
Then, on February 28, the United States and Israel launched their war against the Islamic Republic.
Trump again addressed the Iranian public directly. He urged people to stay sheltered while the bombing continued but said that once military operations were over, Iranians should “take over your government.”
For opponents of the Islamic Republic who interpreted his remarks as a commitment to support political change, the months that followed produced a more complicated picture.
The war eventually gave way to negotiations and the Islamabad Memorandum. The agreement dealt primarily with security and geopolitical issues, including the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s nuclear activities and sanctions. The political rights of Iranians and the government’s repression of protesters were not central elements of the framework.
That did not make Washington an ally of Tehran. The United States has continued imposing severe economic and military pressure on the Islamic Republic, and the agreement itself later unraveled.
But it demonstrated an important limitation to Trump’s earlier rhetoric: Washington’s immediate priorities could shift from political change inside Iran to reaching an arrangement with the government Iranians had been encouraged to confront.
Executions also continued.
Trump has not been completely silent about them. In July, he reacted to the execution of one protester by writing “Savages!!!” and shared material about another case. But those interventions were far more limited than his earlier warnings that executions could trigger strong US action.
This is the context in which Trump is now once again asking Iranians to rise up.
He himself acknowledged on Wednesday why doing so is difficult. Asked about the absence of another uprising, Trump said protesters “get shot,” while arguing that the Islamic Republic was growing weaker and would eventually become less capable of suppressing them.
The scale of the January crackdown makes that explanation difficult to dispute. Taking to the streets against the Islamic Republic can carry an immediate risk of imprisonment, execution or death at the hands of security forces.
But the responses received by Iran International suggest another calculation is also at work for at least some Iranians: what happens if they act on Trump's encouragement and US priorities subsequently change?
There is precedent for Washington placing limits on how far it is prepared to go. During the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June 2025, Trump prevented Ali Khamenei from being assassinated, he later confirmed in a post on Truth Social.
"I SAVED HIM FROM A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH," Trump posted on June 27, 2025.
That episode does not establish that Trump prevented the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, as some of his critics have argued. But it reinforces the distinction between Trump's rhetoric about regime change and the limits Washington may impose when making military and diplomatic decisions.
Trump’s messages to Iranians over the past eight months have therefore contained two different signals.
He has repeatedly encouraged them to challenge the Islamic Republic and, at moments, suggested that American power would help create an opportunity for them to change their government. At other moments, Washington has prioritized a ceasefire, negotiations and specific US security interests.
For people being asked to risk their lives in another confrontation with the Islamic Republic, that distinction is not theoretical.
Trump is asking when Iranians will rise up and fight. The experience of the past several months helps explain why some of them are responding with a question of their own: if they do, how long can they count on his support?
An economic forecast produced by Iran’s own government planners more than five years ago projected where continued sanctions would leave inflation and the national currency by 2026—and the numbers have proved strikingly accurate.
The model projected inflation of 66% and the dollar at 178,000 tomans in the current Iranian year under a scenario in which sanctions remained in place.
The forecast has resurfaced after Iranian economic journalist Marzieh Mahmoudi highlighted it in a widely shared YouTube video, arguing that successive governments disregarded warnings their own planners had put on paper.
The model was produced by economist Mohammad Hossein Rahmati, then head of the Macroeconomics Office at Iran’s Planning and Budget Organization (PBO).
It projected government revenues and spending, economic growth, inflation, exchange rates and other fiscal indicators through the Iranian year 1406, ending in March 2028.
Best case, worst case
Crucially, it offered policymakers two possible futures: one in which sanctions were lifted and another in which they continued.
Under the continued-sanctions scenario, the model projected the dollar reaching 284,000 tomans in 2027. It now stands at 220,000, having exceeded Rahmati’s 178,000.
Under the alternative scenario, in which sanctions were lifted, Rahmati projected a dramatically stronger rial, with the dollar at around 50,000 to 60,000 tomans by the end of the period.
Several of the projections now bear a striking resemblance to Iran’s economic trajectory, although comparisons are complicated by the multiple exchange rates operating in Iran and the extraordinary volatility of the rial during the war.
In a recent episode of the YouTube-based daily news program Hasht-e Shab (8 PM), Mahmoudi displayed the table and argued that what now looks prescient was politically inconvenient when it first appeared.
The numbers were alarming even in 2021. But rather than treating the projections as a constraint around which policy needed to be built, Mahmoudi said, officials largely sought to distance themselves from them.
‘The dollar sage’
The controversy extended to the Planning and Budget Organization itself. After the table was published and debated in the Iranian press in 2021, the PBO issued a formal denial disputing the forecast attributed to it, despite the model having emerged from its own economic planning apparatus.
The table remains available in the archives of the Iranian Parliament’s Research Center and was also published at the time by Iranian news outlets including Tabnak and Khabar Online.
Rahmati subsequently left his position following disagreements over budget formulation. He became known in Iranian media as “the man of the dollar forecast,” while Mahmoudi argues that his warnings about the fiscal and inflationary consequences of continued sanctions were marginalized rather than acted upon.
The significance of the model goes beyond whether Rahmati correctly guessed the future price of the dollar.
Its two scenarios attempted to show how sanctions would shape Iran’s broader fiscal trajectory. Continued sanctions meant weaker revenues and growth alongside mounting inflationary and exchange-rate pressure, while their removal produced a substantially less damaging outlook.
Five years later, Iran has moved much closer to the former scenario.
Everybody knew
The period covered by Rahmati’s projections has spanned three presidencies—those of Hassan Rouhani, Ebrahim Raisi and Masoud Pezeshkian—and the rial has weakened substantially under each.
The market rate stood at roughly 30,000 tomans to the dollar when Rouhani left office in 2021. It weakened to around 60,000 during Raisi’s presidency before depreciating much more sharply under Pezeshkian amid war, sanctions and mounting fiscal pressure.
The official exchange rate, meanwhile, remained politically managed and increasingly detached from the price at which ordinary Iranians and businesses could obtain dollars.
The result is a trajectory remarkably similar in direction to the one Rahmati’s model warned about more than five years ago, even if individual figures cannot be compared precisely with today’s volatile exchange rates.
Mahmoudi’s central argument is therefore less that one economist successfully predicted the price of the dollar than that Iran’s own economic planners had already modeled the consequences of allowing existing pressures to continue.
Signs of renewed street-level hijab enforcement have emerged in Tehran and other parts of Iran, including footage of women warning passersby over their clothing, though it remains unclear whether it represents an organized return of hijab patrols.
A video circulating on social media appears to show two women confronting people over hijab in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. The exact date of the footage has not been established, although the Iranian outlet Khabar Online said it was believed to have been recorded recently.
The women’s faces are not clearly visible. One is wearing a medical mask, while another can be seen carrying a radio communication device that is generally unavailable to ordinary citizens in Iran.
Khabar Online said it was not possible to determine from the footage whether she was wearing police insignia, although parts of her clothing resembled police uniform.
Iran’s police have not publicly commented on the incident.
Tehran City Council chairman Mehdi Chamran said any organized activity of this kind in the capital would normally need to be coordinated with municipal authorities, while adding that he had no information about the specific incident at the Bazaar.
Khabar Online also reported that women involved in enforcing Islamic dress rules had appeared in recent days on the sidelines of a nighttime gathering in at least one neighborhood in northeastern Tehran.
The reports come amid broader signs of renewed campaigning over compulsory hijab.
Khabar Online said online activity on the issue has increased in recent weeks, particularly on the Iranian messaging platform Eitaa and on X. Gatherings have also been held in Qom and in the Miankaleh area of Mazandaran demanding action against women who do not observe compulsory hijab.
During a recent visit by Culture Minister Abbas Salehi to Yazd, some participants also chanted in favor of implementing the Islamic Republic’s stalled Hijab and Chastity Law.
At Tehran’s Iran University of Science and Technology, the Student Basij recently protested the presence of unveiled female students at a meeting attended by the head of Iran’s Student Affairs Organization and an adviser to the science minister.
Taken individually, the incidents do not establish that the Islamic Republic has decided to restore the type of morality-police enforcement that became synonymous with compulsory hijab before the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
Together, however, they point to renewed pressure over an issue the authorities have struggled to manage since the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody in September 2022.
Women appearing in public without headscarves have since become commonplace in major Iranian cities, making defiance of compulsory hijab one of the most visible social changes to emerge from the protests.
While compulsory hijab remains legally in force, authorities have stopped short of fully restoring the extensive street patrols that existed before 2022.
Frustrated hardliners
That restraint has increasingly frustrated parts of the Islamic Republic’s ideological base, for whom enforcing Islamic dress is not simply a social policy but one of the defining obligations of a state that presents itself as Islamic.
Pressure has also returned to parliament.
After Mohsen Rezaei was appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in August, hardline lawmaker Mohammad-Taghi Naghd-Ali publicly questioned whether the council would continue blocking implementation of the Hijab and Chastity Law.
The tougher legislation had been due to take effect in December 2024 before its rollout was halted amid concerns that enforcement could provoke renewed unrest.
UN human rights experts said at the time that the law represented “an intensification of state control over women’s bodies in Iran” and a further assault on women’s rights and freedoms.
The dispute leaves the Islamic Republic facing competing political risks.
A return to aggressive street enforcement could create another source of public anger at a time of severe economic pressure and continued political repression. But allowing widespread non-compliance to continue carries its own cost with the loyalist constituency on which the system relies during elections, official rallies and periods of political crisis.
For the Islamic Republic’s most committed supporters, the disappearance of compulsory hijab from much of everyday public life can be interpreted less as tactical restraint than as ideological retreat.
That helps explain why the state has neither fully restored the pre-2022 enforcement system nor abandoned compulsory hijab.
Instead, enforcement has remained fragmented. Authorities have continued to use pressure on businesses, universities and individuals while avoiding, at least so far, an unambiguous nationwide return of the old morality-police model.
The latest incidents therefore leave a question that Iranian authorities have yet to answer: whether they represent scattered pressure from hardline activists and individual institutions, or the first signs of a broader return to street-level hijab enforcement.