Pezeshkian nominates missile-industry veteran as defense minister

The latest warning came from Mohammad Amin Aghamiri, secretary of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace and head of the National Cyberspace Center, who raised the possibility of treating satellite internet infrastructure as a military target.

“If satellite internet infrastructure is used as a tool of war, naturally this infrastructure can become a legitimate military target,” Aghamiri said Monday at a conference on online businesses organized by Iran’s cyber police.

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  Iran official warns Starlink could end state control of internet

Aghamiri described satellite internet and Starlink as potential threats and said the Islamic Republic was technically prepared to counter them.

Referring to the January protests as a “coup,” Aghamiri said authorities had succeeded in disabling Starlink terminals during the unrest.

Officials and state media have repeatedly described anti-government protests as riots or attempted coups and attributed them to foreign actors, including the United States and Israel.

Internet shutdowns and protests

Internet restrictions have long been used by Iranian authorities during periods of widespread unrest.

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  Starlink next door could loosen Iran’s grip on internet

The Islamic Republic imposed a sweeping internet shutdown during the November 2019 protests and has since restricted or cut connectivity at different points, including during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, the 12-day war and the January 2026 protests.

After the 40-day war began in late February, authorities again cut internet access. The restrictions lasted 88 days, becoming the longest digital blackout in the world.

Concerns surrounding Starlink have grown alongside an increased US military presence in the region, worsening economic conditions and domestic discontent.

Internet and cybersecurity expert Davoud Sajjadi told Iran International on October 1 that Starlink allows users to bypass filtering and other government mechanisms designed to control internet access.

The ability to connect outside those systems has made the technology a growing concern for officials, Sajjadi said.

Diplomatic pressure and Starlink seizures

Iran has also pursued diplomatic and law-enforcement measures against the satellite service.

The Foreign Ministry summoned Norway’s ambassador on Sunday to protest continued Starlink operations in Iran.

Norway is the country through which the Starlink network is registered with the International Telecommunication Union, and Iranian authorities say Oslo is therefore responsible for preventing what they describe as unauthorized operations inside Iran.

Foreign Ministry delivered a formal protest to the Norwegian ambassador and called on Norway to take action to halt Starlink operations in Iran.

Authorities have simultaneously intensified efforts to stop the import and distribution of Starlink equipment.

Hossein Rahimi, head of Iran’s Economic Security Police, previously said police seized 997 Starlink devices and related equipment during the first four months of the current Iranian year, which started in mid-March, and arrested 163 people in connection with their import and distribution.

Efforts to stop the entry and distribution of Starlink equipment increased after the 12-day war, Rahimi added.

Official warns Starlink could force power cuts

The extent of official concern was underscored by a Communications Ministry official who warned that widespread Starlink access could undermine the government’s existing mechanisms for controlling cyberspace.

“The spread of Starlink drives the final nail into the coffin of cyberspace governance,” Mohammad Hafez Hakami, deputy minister for technology, innovation and international affairs at the Communications Ministry, said on September 30.

“Those concerned about Starlink have been warning about it for two years, but not even a single line of policy has been developed on the issue,” Hakami said. “If this trend continues, we will be forced to cut electricity in the next crisis.”

Hakami also warned that the expansion of Starlink and direct-to-cell technology could render mechanisms such as device registration and user identification ineffective.

“Starlink, as a new tool that evades governance, is fundamentally no longer based on our network,” Hakami said.

Direct-to-cell technology allows mobile phones to connect directly to satellites without relying on conventional telecommunications towers.

The prospect of satellite connections operating independently of domestic networks poses a particular challenge to authorities because shutting down conventional internet infrastructure would no longer necessarily disconnect users.

Starlink enters broader debate over information access

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also highlighted Starlink during his September 24 address to the United Nations General Assembly, holding up one of the devices while discussing access to information in Iran.

“The Iranian regime is especially afraid when their people have this. This is a communications device, Starlink, that allows people to access truth, to exercise choice and to exercise freedom of thought and freedom of speech.”

Netanyahu said Starlink could give Iranians access to what he called “truth,” as well as choice, freedom of thought and freedom of speech.

The growing focus on Starlink now extends across several arms of the Iranian state, from diplomatic pressure and equipment seizures to technical countermeasures and warnings of military action.

The images drew widespread reactions after they were posted on X on Friday by Ali Gholhaki, a conservative commentator with ties to Iran's security establishment. Some Iranian outlets describe him as close to parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf.

The pictures show smartwatches on the wrists of three men: Gholamreza Jalali, who heads the Passive Defense Organization, the body that protects Iran's critical infrastructure; Reza Farahi, a Defense Ministry official; and Ali Shamkhani, the former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.

Shamkhani was killed in US-Israeli airstrikes on February 28, on the first day of the current war. He had survived an Israeli strike in June 2025.

Asked about his watch by a Fars News reporter, Jalali asked whether people had smart televisions at home and said his device was effectively the same thing.

Gholhaki rejected the comparison. The man in charge of protecting the country's critical infrastructure, he argued, faces a different order of risk from an ordinary citizen, and such devices are hard to justify for senior security officials when Israel has repeatedly exploited electronic lapses to track Iranian personnel.

Smartwatches can transmit location and activity data through GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or a paired phone, and some carry microphones and other sensors.

The US military has long restricted location-tracking devices, smartwatches included, in operational areas because they can expose movements and routines; in 2018, a fitness app's public heat map revealed the outlines of American bases from soldiers' running routes.

'Careless use'

The row touches a much larger argument inside the Islamic Republic about repeated intelligence failures.

During the 12-day war in June 2025, Iran's Cyber Security Command banned officials and their security teams from using any device connected to public communication or telecommunications networks, Fars reported, as concern grew that mobile tracking was being used for targeted assassinations.

The directive named smartphones, laptops and smartwatches, and warned that switching a device off might not prevent it from being located.

It came too late. The New York Times later reported, citing Iranian and Israeli officials, that Israel tracked and targeted senior Iranian leaders and nuclear scientists in that war by hacking the phones of their bodyguards and drivers.

On June 16, 2025, the Supreme National Security Council met in a bunker deep beneath a mountain in western Tehran; none of the officials carried phones, but the Israelis found the meeting through the phones of the bodyguards who had driven them there. The bodyguards had long been exempt from the strict phone bans imposed on the commanders themselves, even after earlier assassinations.

Gholhaki tied the smartwatches directly to those failures, arguing that complacency had helped Israel and the United States kill senior military, security and political figures in successive wars. He called for fundamental changes in security practice and renewed his demand for a broad postwar inquiry into how the failures happened.

Gholhaki himself was among a group of Telegram channel operators arrested by the Revolutionary Guards' counterintelligence arm in 2022, accused of disturbing public opinion and publishing classified documents.

A blogger on death row

The judiciary has shown no such tolerance for ordinary Iranians accused of far smaller breaches.

Marziyeh "Sevda" Ebrahimi Shamsabadi, a 33-year-old blogger from Bandar Abbas who has been held since March, was sentenced to death in August by a Revolutionary Court on charges including insulting the supreme leader, intelligence activity on behalf of hostile governments, and taking and sending photographs to Persian-language media abroad.

One allegation concerned a photograph she was said to have taken, from a distance, of a site hit by a missile. She was held in solitary confinement for 20 days and faced severe pressure during interrogation.

"I just don't see a pathway to rehabilitation," said Kamran Bokhari, a strategic forecaster and senior resident fellow at the Middle East Policy Council.

“This regime cannot go back to what it was.”

The pressure is coming from every direction. The rial fell past 2.5 million to the dollar this week, a record low; at that rate the minimum monthly wage of 166 million rials is worth about $66.

On Wednesday, Washington extended sanctions to Iran's auto and rail industries, on top of a naval blockade of Iranian ports and a campaign against sanctions evasion that have already cut deep into oil revenue and access to foreign currency.

At home, two people detained after January's nationwide protests were executed this week, and four others arrested during the unrest have recently been sentenced to death.

An appeals court upheld sentences of 74 lashes against the singer Parastoo Ahmadi and seven musicians and organizers over a concert she performed without a headscarf, filmed and posted online.

Human Rights Watch and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center documented 29 executions between March and the end of August of people arrested in connection with the protests. Five were carried out in public.

'They want to show they're in charge'

Alberto Fernandez, a former US diplomat and vice president of the Middle East Media Research Institute, said the repression should be read alongside the economic pressure.

"They want to show they're in charge," he said. Extreme violence, he said, is one way of demonstrating to Iranians and to the world that the state can still impose its will. The more it relies on that, the more it shows both the power it has left and the pressure it is trying to hold down.

"The challenge of the regime is not the war," Bokhari said. "The challenge is governance and economic statecraft."

Three senior Iranian sources told Reuters last month that the US campaign against oil exports and sanctions evasion was becoming increasingly hard to withstand. The average monthly wage now covers less than a third of a household's basic costs, Reuters reported.

Even if Tehran wins some sanctions relief, Bokhari said, he sees little prospect of it recovering what it had.

"Regimes take a long time to undergo a meltdown," he said. "That meltdown was happening even before this war."

The price of eggs

David Patrikarakos, a special correspondent for the Daily Mail and an author, said he watches one basic indicator.

"I have become a keen watcher of the price of Iranian eggs," he said.

When he spoke with people inside Iran during the war, he said, the conversation kept returning to the cost of necessities.

"When the basics become too expensive, no government can deal with that," he said. "You can only terrorize people back into their homes for so many things. If they're starving, they can't afford food, there's nothing you can do."

The authorities appear to know it. More than 6,000 people have been arrested since the war began, Reuters reported this week, as officials worry about renewed protests.

But repression has limits. Bokhari called it a "precision instrument" that can backfire when used too broadly.

"You can oppress people, but if you start to do it at scale, then it can backfire," he said. "At some point, your own security forces will say, 'Where is this going?'"

'The butter part is going out'

If the Islamic Republic survives, Fernandez said, one model is what he called the "North Koreanization" or "Houthization" of Iran: a poorer, more predatory state that can still repress at home and project force abroad while its economy and institutions are hollowed out.

That was never the plan. The Islamic Republic wanted revolutionary and military power abroad and a functioning society and middle class at home, Fernandez said, the old combination of guns and butter.

"Well, the butter part is going out," he said.

Without a reversal, he said, Iran could become "a more ramshackle predatory state." "It still can bite, but it becomes much more fragile, much more fractious."

That trajectory would run against Iran's own sense of itself and the aspirations of its educated population, Patrikarakos said. "The Iranian self-image is wanting to take part in the world."

Even the Islamic Republic, for all its decades of confrontation with the West, never sought North Korea's isolation, he said.

"They don't want to go down the North Korea path," Bokhari said. "The question is, can they avoid it?"

As the options narrow, he said, survival is overriding everything else. "Regime survival is now more than ever before the primary imperative."

What to watch

Bokhari said he is watching for infighting that can no longer be contained. "I'm also watching for signs of infighting, where different elements of the regime start to disagree to a point where the disagreement isn't behind closed doors," he said.

Fernandez said the visible divisions are no longer mainly between moderates and conservatives, the old frame for Iranian politics, but among hardline factions themselves.

He is also watching the currency, and how long Tehran can hold out without real relief. Iran's leaders may be looking to the US midterm elections and the next Congress in the hope that politics in Washington will ease the pressure, he said. If that hope fails, they face a long period of no war and no peace while the squeeze continues.

The Islamic Republic has survived periods when it looked weaker, more isolated and less popular than before. Survival and recovery are not the same thing. The price of food, the value of the rial, unrest in the streets, fractures at the top and the loyalty of the security forces will show how far the meltdown has gone.

"This situation is untenable," Bokhari said.

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On Thursday, the end of Iran’s market week, the rial fell to another record low. Year-on-year inflation has reached almost 90 percent, with food prices rising even faster.

The deterioration comes as US sanctions and a naval blockade squeeze Iran’s sources of revenue. The blockade has severely constrained oil exports, while Washington on Thursday expanded sanctions into the automotive and rail sectors, targeting some of the country’s largest industrial companies.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has seized on the rial’s collapse as evidence that Washington’s pressure campaign is working, saying this week that it had driven the currency to its lowest level in history.

Iranian Economy Minister Ali Madanizadeh rejected Bessent’s assessment, telling the official IRNA news agency Thursday that predictions of an imminent economic collapse had repeatedly proved wrong.

“They want to create unrest and stress among the people so they rush to the currency market and the exchange rate increases; otherwise, these statements serve no purpose, and we will not allow this to happen,” he said.

The Central Bank has offered a similar diagnosis. It said Friday that the exchange rate was not “fully consistent with the economy’s fundamental variables,” attributing much of the gap to heightened uncertainty, psychological pressure and market expectations.

The bank announced Wednesday that it planned to inject $2 billion in banknotes into the market. So far, however, the intervention has failed to halt the rial’s slide.

‘The Central Bank shoots it into its own goal’

Hardliners have challenged the government’s explanation, arguing that sanctions and the war cannot by themselves account for the surge in the exchange rate and prices.

Nadergholi Ebrahimi, a hardline lawmaker, claimed in an online interview Thursday that the war had contributed no more than 25% to the recent rise in prices and accused government economic officials of deliberately fueling inflation.

Threatening to seek the impeachment of economic ministers, he accused them of waging an “economic sedition” that was reducing the public’s ability to withstand economic pressure and increasing dissatisfaction.

Hossein Samsami, an economist and hardline lawmaker, has also attacked the Central Bank’s handling of the exchange rate.

“Today, the currency is the enemy’s tool in an all-out economic war, and the measure of its success is the devaluation of our national currency,” Samsami wrote on X.

But he accused the Central Bank itself of helping drive that process by following an exchange rate he said was artificially determined by Iran’s enemies.

“The enemy passes the ball, and the Central Bank shoots it into its own goal!” he wrote.

Inflation approaches 90 percent

Whatever the relative weight of sanctions, war, expectations and domestic policy, their combined effect is increasingly visible in household finances.

According to the Statistical Center of Iran, annual inflation has reached 73.6%, while year-on-year inflation rose to a record 89.8%.

Food and beverage prices have risen substantially faster than overall inflation, hitting lower-income households particularly hard because they devote a larger share of their income to food and other essentials.

Accelerating prices have also eroded the value of government food vouchers introduced after subsidized foreign-exchange rates for a range of goods were removed amid a sharp depreciation of the rial and economic protests in December and January.

Although the government pledged to increase the value of the vouchers in line with rising prices, it has yet to do so.

Wages fall behind as prices surge

The pressure is also increasingly visible among salaried workers.

Videos circulating on social media in recent weeks have shown teachers and nurses saying low wages have left them with no choice but to resign after years in their professions.

Ali Farhadi, spokesman for Iran’s Education Ministry, dismissed reports of widespread teacher resignations as a “rumor” on Friday.

The dispute has become another front in the broader argument over the economic crisis, with government supporters alleging that expressions of discontent are being amplified to encourage unrest and critics accusing authorities of dismissing genuine economic grievances.

Samsami, however, has placed greater responsibility for the hardship on domestic economic policy than on Washington.

“The pressure imposed on people’s livelihoods by misguided economic policies is far greater than that caused by sanctions and the naval blockade,” he wrote, adding: “We are not at an impasse. By reforming our policies, we can control inflation even under these sanctions.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday condemned Netanyahu’s visit, warning of what it called the “very dangerous consequences” of an Israeli presence in the region.

The ministry said any move that provides “a platform for destabilizing actors to enter the region” would ultimately harm regional countries by fueling division and instability. It called on governments to prevent their territories from becoming “a platform for destabilizing actions” against neighboring states.

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued a more direct warning to the UAE on Wednesday.

“Just as hosting US military bases has not brought you security, hosting the butcher of Gaza will not have positive consequences either,” he wrote on X. “Learn from the recent war, stop starting wars and refrain from making baseless claims about the Iranian islands.”

The hardline Javan newspaper, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), described Rezaei’s remarks as “a clear warning to Abu Dhabi,” saying Iran’s neighbors could pay a price for policies they believed would bring them greater security.

The rhetoric comes as the UAE’s security relationship with Israel faces fresh scrutiny following an attempted attack aboard a Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

Israeli and Emirati authorities are investigating the incident, while US President Donald Trump said Thursday that investigators were examining a possible Iranian connection, although no evidence of Tehran’s involvement has been made public.

Iranian media intensify criticism

The criticism in Iranian media has increasingly gone beyond Netanyahu’s visit, with conservative outlets portraying the UAE as an active participant in efforts to contain Iran and questioning whether its cooperation with Israel extends beyond diplomacy.

Nour News, which is close to the Supreme National Security Council, accused the UAE of pursuing a two-track policy — publicly advocating de-escalation and dialogue with Iran while maintaining close security ties with the United States and Israel and pressing its claims to the disputed islands.

The website also portrayed Netanyahu’s visit as part of broader Israeli-Emirati efforts to reshape the regional security order and increase pressure on Saudi Arabia, though it offered no evidence of a coordinated plan.

Sobh-e No, considered close to parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, warned that cooperation with a country involved in a war against Iran, whether military or intelligence-related, could affect Tehran’s security calculations.

The newspaper questioned whether the UAE’s role had been limited to hosting political meetings or whether its security cooperation with Israel had extended to the military confrontation with Iran.

Economic ties under strain

The increasingly hostile rhetoric comes against a history of extensive economic ties between Iran and the UAE, although Abu Dhabi suspended trade with Iran in August amid the war.

In 2024, around $21 billion of Iranian imports came from the UAE, accounting for roughly 30% of the total, according to World Trade Organization data. The UAE was also one of Iran’s largest destinations for non-oil exports.

The country has also long served as a hub for Iranian companies and intermediaries involved in moving goods and money around US sanctions.

Some Iranian conservatives are now arguing that those economic ties gave the UAE excessive influence over Tehran’s policy.

Conservative political activist Ali Gholhaki accused the UAE of profiting from sanctions on Iran while increasingly using its influence in Israel’s favor. He also alleged the existence of a “UAE lobby” inside Iran that had prevented Tehran from taking punitive measures against Abu Dhabi.

Calls for retaliation

The rhetoric has gone further among some figures close to Iran’s political establishment, with calls for direct retaliation against the UAE.

Mehdi Mohammadi, a strategic adviser to parliament speaker Ghalibaf, accused the UAE of cooperating with Netanyahu in launching a war against the Islamic Republic in a commentary published by the conservative Alef website.

“There is not much difference between them and the Israelis,” Mohammadi wrote.

“This time, the Emiratis should taste in Dubai, Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah what they have brought about in Africa, Yemen, Somalia and the Arabian Peninsula. It is time for flames of light to be seen in the middle of Dubai.”

The rhetoric marks a sharp deterioration in Iranian discourse toward a neighbor with which Tehran had until recently sought de-escalation and maintained extensive commercial ties, with Netanyahu’s visit intensifying an already widening rupture over Israel, regional security and the disputed islands.