83 flights by US-sanctioned Iranian airlines landed in Turkey after deadline — report

Rahman Salehi, 35, and Salam Ahmadyan, 36, were arrested on September 20, on the eve of Yom Kippur, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter and charged with preparing or assisting an act of terrorism.

Police allege the two men were in contact with a third party overseas who may have been in Iran, though authorities have not publicly established that the Iranian state directed the alleged plot.

Vicki Evans, the senior national coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, said: “This week also brought into sharp focus some of the wider threats being projected into the UK from Iran.”

The case follows a separate suspected plot near RAF Fairford, a British airbase used by US bombers in operations against Iran.

Five British men were arrested near the base on September 27 on suspicion of terrorism and explosives offences, while a dual UK-Iranian national was detained days later.

In March, police arrested four men suspected of spying for Iran and conducting surveillance of Jewish targets in London, while MI5 previously said it had disrupted 20 Iran-linked plots in Britain over a 12-month period.

In July, Britain formally designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a threat to national security, making public support for the organization or assistance to it punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

The IRGC is one of the Islamic Republic’s most powerful military and political institutions. Its overseas Quds Force oversees Tehran’s relationships with allied armed groups and has been accused by British authorities of directing operations against dissidents, journalists and Jewish or Israeli-linked targets in Europe.

British authorities said Quds Force members were behind the Islamic Movement of Companions of the Right which claimed responsibility for seven attacks this year against Persian-language media and locations linked to Jewish and Israeli communities in Britain.

Those incidents included an antisemitic arson attack that damaged four ambulances belonging to the Jewish emergency service Hatzola in Golders Green, north London, on March 23.

Education Ministry spokesman Ali Farhadi said Friday that reports of teacher resignations were “not true” and accused unspecified actors of trying to undermine in-person education.

“The resignation of teachers is a rumor,” Farhadi told the Tasnim news agency, saying teachers and students had welcomed the return to classrooms across the country, including in southern provinces such as Hormozgan.

But the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations has offered a sharply different account, saying numerous videos and reports of resignations have emerged from different parts of the country in recent weeks.

The council said teachers were leaving because of a combination of wages below the poverty line, worsening living conditions, administrative pressures and what it described as the securitization of the profession, including dismissals, suspensions, arrests and legal cases against teachers and union activists.

It warned that experienced teachers were being driven out of classrooms by policies that had pushed the education system toward decline.

Videos circulating on social media in recent days have shown teachers announcing their resignations and citing financial hardship, workload and a lack of recognition for their work.

The dispute comes as Iran’s education system is already grappling with teacher shortages and longstanding discontent over pay and working conditions.

Teachers have repeatedly protested over salaries and benefits, including at a demonstration outside the Planning and Budget Organization in Tehran in September.

Labor activists have also warned that financial pressures are forcing some teachers to work multiple jobs, while shortages of teaching staff are affecting the quality of education.

The resignations have emerged against a wider backdrop of pressure on teachers and union activists, who in recent years have faced arrests, prison sentences, dismissal and suspension from work.

The Coordinating Council rejected the government’s portrayal of the unrest in schools as the product of outside agitation, arguing that the discontent stems instead from conditions within the education system itself.

Whether the resignations amount to the “wave” described by the teachers’ council is difficult to establish. The pressures it says are driving teachers out are considerably easier to document.

Before trading closed on Wednesday, the final working day of the week in Iran, the Tehran Stock Exchange reached a record 7,766,000 points.

The market has risen 109 percent since the start of the Iranian year, while small investors poured roughly 4.7 trillion tomans, or about $19 million, into shares in a single day.

Iran’s prominent economic daily Donya-ye Eghtesad argues that the surge is not necessarily a sign of confidence. People are buying shares as political and economic risks rise, it says, while savers are also moving into gold, coins and dollars, all of which hit record highs on the same day.

The open-market dollar has passed 250,000 tomans, while measured in dollars, the stock market remains well below previous peaks.

At least part of the rally therefore appears to reflect a search for protection against the falling rial rather than confidence in the underlying economy.

Similar pressures are visible in consumer markets, where prices for cheaper mobile phones rose 33 to 42 percent in a month, outpacing the currency’s decline as import quotas, registration rules and fees hit lower-priced devices particularly hard.

Earlier this week, the government announced that the central bank would sell up to $2 billion in cash. The first $1 billion tranche is being sold through banks, with adults holding a national ID card allowed to buy up to $10,000.

The government’s own newspaper, Iran, warned that selling cash may slow the dollar’s rise but cannot reverse the underlying trend while inflation, budget pressures and political uncertainty remain unresolved.

Tehran’s prosecutor also ordered action against “market disruptors,” including online channels publishing exchange rates. Eyewitnesses on Ferdowsi Avenue, the capital’s main currency-trading hub, reported shorter queues and more sellers than buyers on September 30.

The respite was brief. On October 1, the open-market dollar rose 1.49 percent to 2,593,000 rials, its highest level in a year.

The central bank has been steadily raising the official exchange rate, from about 137,000 to more than 174,000 tomans this year, to encourage exporters to repatriate their foreign-currency earnings. Even so, the open-market rate remains much higher.

Because official imports are priced at the exchange-center rate, increases can feed through into the cost of imported goods. They also reduce the real value of the government’s electronic food-voucher scheme unless the state spends more rials to maintain it.

Hardline outlets including Kayhan and the IRGC-linked Javan portray the rial’s fall as part of Washington’s economic war. But their criticism is also directed at Iranian policymakers.

Kayhan calls currency sales a repeatedly failed policy and a waste of resources in wartime. It wants the government to reverse its economic liberalization and use judicial and security pressure to force exporters to repatriate their foreign-currency earnings.

The criticism exposes an argument within the establishment over how Tehran should respond: spend scarce foreign currency trying to contain demand, or preserve it while tightening controls over exporters and the domestic market.

That argument is becoming more urgent as the US blockade curtails Iranian oil exports, depriving Tehran of a major source of foreign currency.

Diplomacy could provide some relief, with Iran seeking access to frozen assets and an easing of sanctions and the blockade as part of negotiations with Washington.

For now, however, the clearest signal comes from the markets themselves. Stocks, gold and the dollar are all setting records. The simultaneous rush into them suggests that for many Iranians, almost anything that might preserve its value increasingly looks preferable to holding rials.

The ruling also upheld a two-year ban on political, online and artistic activity imposed by Branch 23 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, which convicted her of “propaganda against the system.”

Her lawyer, Houshang Pourbabayi, said the post expressed grief and sympathy for those killed and contained no call for collective action or reference to state institutions.

Shakerdoost, 42, is one of Iran’s best-known film actresses and has worked in Iranian cinema for more than two decades. In 2019, she won the performance prize at the International Political Film Festival of Carcassonne in France for When the Moon Was Full, which also won the festival’s Grand Prize.

In August, human rights activists reported that nearly 100 prominent Iranians, including artists and filmmakers, had been summoned by security agencies or judicial authorities after speaking out against the new wave of executions, particularly the public hanging of protesters in Isfahan.

More than 20 of those summoned were well-known film and television actors, a civil rights activist said.

The report said those targeted had been among public figures posting against the executions under the hashtag “No to executions.”

Shortly after the brutal crackdown on January protests, acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi warned that the Islamic Republic was intimidating artists to erase evidence of the massacre, citing the killing of a fellow director as the reality the authorities were trying to suppress.

Panahi said on Instagram that the killing of filmmaker Javad Ganji has been followed by an escalating campaign of intimidation against artists aimed at erasing the truth about protest deaths.

Panahi said directors Majid Barzegar and Behtash Sanaeiha were separately summoned and harshly interrogated for hours over a joint statement condemning state violence, warning that more cinema professionals are expected to face summons and that heavy judicial cases are already open.

Haalvsh, which covers developments in Sistan-Baluchestan, said five members of the IRGC-Quds’s Fatemiyoun militia were killed in the Rudmahi area near Zahedan after an explosive device detonated beside their vehicle and gunmen opened fire.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards gave a different account, confirming a roadside bombing in the province but saying one fighter was killed. The IRGC Ground Force said what it described as "terrorists" had planted a bomb along a road in Sistan-Baluchestan and carried out an indiscriminate attack.

The Guards did not identify the person killed, mention Fatemiyoun or give a precise location for the incident.

Conflicting accounts of Zahedan attack

Haalvsh said the attack took place at about 6:30 a.m. as the men were patrolling the Kaleh-Pedeh route in the Rudmahi area in a Land Cruiser equipped with a DShK heavy machine gun.

Citing eyewitnesses, the outlet said an explosive device was detonated as the vehicle passed and that gunmen opened fire after the blast destroyed the vehicle.

The identities of those reported killed have not been released.

Haalvsh said local sources continued to put the death toll at five and identified all of those killed as Fatemiyoun members, but said it had not been able to independently verify the precise number of deaths.

Fatemiyoun is a militia linked to the IRGC's Quds Force and made up largely of Afghan Shiites. It was formed with Iranian support and fought alongside forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad during Syria's civil war. The United States sanctioned the group in 2019.

Haalvsh said Friday's incident was the second deadly attack on forces it identified as Fatemiyoun in Rudmahi in less than a month. It reported in September that four members deployed in the area by the IRGC were killed when gunmen attacked them during a patrol.

The outlet has also reported the deployment of hundreds of Fatemiyoun members to several parts of Sistan-Baluchestan, including areas around Zahedan, Mirjaveh, Rask, Saravan, Zabol, Chabahar, Konarak and Iranshahr.

Hours of fighting in Rask

The violence on Friday was not limited to Zahedan.

Haalvsh said Iranian military and security forces moved in Rask county at about 5:30 a.m., triggering fighting with armed men that lasted more than six hours.

Heavy gunfire and explosions were heard during the confrontation, according to the outlet, which said reinforcements and additional military equipment were sent to the area.

Armored vehicles, pickup trucks and civilian cars with private license plates were seen at the scene, while a vehicle carrying a heavy weapon was also deployed, Haalvsh reported.

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  Heavy fighting spreads in southeastern Iran, with security force casualties reported

Local sources cited by the outlet said reconnaissance quadcopters and explosive drones were used during the operation.

Haalvsh said the identity and affiliation of the gunmen remained unknown and that no reliable information had emerged about casualties or damage.

IRGC-linked Fars news agency, citing an unnamed source, said security forces had begun an operation against armed groups in Rask on Friday morning and that "a number" of gunmen had been killed. Fars said the operation was continuing.

Intelligence facility targeted

An intelligence ministry facility in Nokabad, the administrative center of Taftan county, was also attacked by gunmen early Friday, according to the Baloch Human Rights Documentation Network.

The group said the attackers fired at the building. Local sources also reported an explosion and said a grenade may have been used.

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  IRGC says six gunmen killed in clash in Iran's restive southeast

No casualties or damage were immediately reported, and no individual or group had taken responsibility for the attack.

Fighting follows deadly clash a day earlier

Friday's incidents came a day after another hours-long confrontation near Zahedan.

On Thursday, the IRGC said six gunmen were killed during fighting with security forces in the Manzelab area. The Guards' Quds regional headquarters said its forces had identified and "destroyed" what it described as an armed "terrorist-Takfiri" cell that had been preparing an attack.

Haalvsh said that clash began at about 6 a.m. and continued for several hours, with heavy gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade fire heard in the area.

The IRGC said explosive devices were recovered but did not identify the armed group or name those killed.

A police officer, Alireza Sanchouli, was also killed in a separate armed attack on a checkpoint at the entrance to Rask, according to Iranian reports.

At least one person was killed earlier in the week during another confrontation with security forces in Iranshahr.

Last month, a roughly nine-hour battle in the Bakhshan area of Saravan killed three IRGC members and four gunmen. Reports at the time linked the armed side to the People's Fighters Front, an alliance formed in late 2025 that includes several Baluch armed groups, among them Jaish al-Adl.

Iranian authorities regularly describe armed groups operating in Sistan-Baluchestan as terrorist organizations. The southeastern province has seen repeated armed attacks, insurgent activity and clashes between security forces and gunmen in recent weeks.