Iran International
Iran spent years building influence in Yemen through Hezbollah recruiters and Revolutionary Guards officers, a former Yemeni pro-democracy activist told Iran International, and is now using the Houthis to carry the war to Saudi Arabia and its Western allies.
Baraa Shiban, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London who took part in Yemen’s 2011 uprising and later negotiated with the Houthis, told Iran International’s Eye for Iran podcast that Tehran’s involvement began long before the group became a major regional force.
His account comes as Houthi missile and drone attacks on Saudi airports and energy infrastructure have opened another front in the wider war, threatening aviation and trade routes already disrupted by the confrontation over the Strait of Hormuz.
“I think we’re entering phase three,” Shiban said, describing what he sees as Tehran’s strategy of extending the economic cost of the war to US allies.
Iran, he argued, had kept the Houthis in reserve as a strategic asset until it needed them. Their attacks now serve Tehran’s interests while advancing the group’s own ambitions inside Yemen.
From democracy conferences to an IRGC handler
Young Yemenis who took part in the 2011 Arab Spring were invited to conferences in Lebanon that were presented as discussions of democratic reform, Shiban said. Those who went found that Hezbollah operatives were behind them.
Activists receptive to Iran’s revolutionary ideology were introduced to a Revolutionary Guards officer working in Lebanon under the alias Abu Hadi, he said, and some went on to Tehran.
“We were calling it the Arab Spring. The Iranians called it the Islamic Awakening,” he said. Tehran, he said, wanted to present Yemen’s uprising as an extension of Iran’s 1979 revolution.
Shiban identified the officer as Hassan Irlou, who in 2020 became Iran’s ambassador to the Houthi authorities in Sanaa, a post the United States said was held by a Quds Force official. Irlou died in December 2021.
Hezbollah ran much of the operation at first, Shiban said, before Revolutionary Guards personnel took a more prominent role.
The recruitment reached beyond political activists to women invited to conferences in Iran, some of whom came back converted to the Islamic Republic’s ideology. Shiban said he was shocked by one woman he knew as very liberal, who had protested alongside him and returned from Iran repeating Tehran’s case for crushing the Syrian revolution.
“She has absorbed that propaganda of what the Iranians were saying about the Syrian revolution and why they need to kill all of those protesters until the last one, given this woman herself was protesting with us,” he said.
People drawn into these networks went on to help set up the Houthis’ political bureau in Sanaa, Shiban said. Iran International could not independently verify the full extent of the recruitment he described.
Talks rejected
The account has new weight after Saudi Arabia disclosed on Thursday that the Houthis had rejected an invitation to negotiations in Oman in July.
Riyadh had sought talks to settle outstanding differences before the fighting escalated, Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister Rayed Krimly said.
The Saudi-led coalition said the Houthis had attacked King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh 20 times in October. At least 19 people have been killed in the recent attacks across the kingdom, according to Saudi officials.
Yemen analyst Fatima Alasrar said on X that the Houthis’ refusal reflected Tehran’s timetable rather than an effort to resolve their long-standing demands over airport access, and warned that Iran could keep leverage through the Bab el-Mandeb strait even if it reached a deal with Washington over Hormuz.
The Houthis also have their own aims, among them consolidating control over Yemen and forcing Saudi Arabia to end its support for rival Yemeni forces.
A second strategic chokepoint
The war has put Bab el-Mandeb, the narrow passage between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, at the center of the regional confrontation.
Iran saw the leverage that disrupting Hormuz gave it and wanted the same at a second shipping route, Shiban said. “It saw how valuable and important the Strait of Hormuz was and it wanted to add another choke point.”
The consequences are visible inside Yemen. On Thursday, Houthi missiles struck the presidential palace compound in Aden, killing five people, according to Yemeni authorities. Houthi advances around Taiz have intensified fighting and displacement.
The escalation could prove costly for Tehran, Shiban said, having already antagonized Saudi Arabia and pushed Yemen’s internationally recognized government toward wider war. But Iran’s leaders appear willing to take that risk, he said, on the calculation that Western governments will hesitate to act decisively.
“I think right now they’re counting on the United States is going to be hesitant,” he said.
Even a long confrontation could suit Tehran, he said, if it raises the economic pressure on the Persian Gulf states and strains their ties with Washington.
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Iran has executed a 28-year-old Iraqi man convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia, a charge he denied, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights.
Iran has executed a 28-year-old Iraqi man convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia, a charge he denied, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights.
Ayoub Mohammad Nabil, from Haditha in western Iraq, was hanged on Sunday morning at Lakan Prison in Rasht, the capital of Gilan province on the Caspian coast, the group said. Iranian officials and domestic media had not reported his sentence or his execution by the time it was announced.
Nabil had entered Iran legally on his passport and was working as a caretaker at a private villa when Intelligence Ministry agents arrested him in the nearby town of Fouman on August 26, 2025. He had no prior security record, Iran Human Rights said.
A source told the group he was held for about five months at the Intelligence Ministry’s detention center in Rasht, where he was subjected to severe psychological torture. He denied any link to Saudi Arabia or groups tied to it, and said he had been accused because he was a practicing Sunni Muslim, wore a beard and taught the Quran to local children in his guardhouse.
Despite no evidence of any political activity, the source said, Branch One of Rasht’s Revolutionary Court sentenced him to death for “moharebeh,” or waging war against God, through spying for Saudi-backed proxy groups.
The Kurdish rights group Hengaw, citing its own sources, said Nabil was moved to solitary confinement for execution on October 8, as fighting between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis intensified.
He is at least the 17th person executed in Iran on espionage charges this year, and the third Iraqi, according to Iran Human Rights. Thirteen were accused of spying for Israel or the United States; the other two Iraqis were accused of spying for an unnamed Arab country, and an Afghan man for an unnamed state. Fifteen of the 17 were executed after the war began in February.
More than 70 political prisoners have been executed in Iran since the January protests, and at least 20 more face execution on political charges, Iran International has found.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a report on Thursday that capital cases in Iran, especially security cases, involve systematic violations of fair-trial rights, including forced confessions, closed trials lasting minutes and restricted access to independent lawyers. He called for an immediate halt to executions.
The rights group HRANA said last week that at least 2,003 people were executed in Iran in the year to October 8, up 29 percent on the previous year.
Decades of American sanctions strengthened Iran’s Revolutionary Guards by hollowing out the middle class, former US diplomat Joey Hood told Iran International, and once the fighting ends, Tehran will face a reckoning with its own people.
Hood, who retired earlier this year after 27 years in the Foreign Service, served as acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, deputy chief of mission in Iraq and Kuwait, and US ambassador to Tunisia. He spoke in a studio interview.
He called the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 and the 444-day hostage crisis that followed “the very definition of evil,” adding that the protection of envoys is an ancient principle recognized in Islamic tradition as well.
What followed, he said, was a pattern. In 1983, a suicide bombing at the US Marine barracks in Beirut killed 241 American service members who had been deployed as peacekeepers; US courts have found Iran responsible for the attack, carried out by militants who went on to form Hezbollah. In 1996, the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia was bombed; US investigators blamed Saudi Hezbollah (Hezbollah Al-Hejaz), acting with Iranian support. In 2011, US prosecutors charged an Iranian-American man with plotting, on behalf of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Argentina’s courts have held Iran responsible for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, and plots have been traced to Iran in Europe and Asia.
None of it, Hood said, has won the Islamic Republic a single endorsement.
“You haven’t seen any other country come out and say, ‘What the Iranian regime is doing is great,’” he said. “There’s no sovereign government anywhere in the world that has made such a declaration.”
‘Handing the economy over’
Successive US administrations from Carter to Obama tried various forms of engagement, Hood said, but repeatedly underestimated Tehran’s refusal to accept normal relations. Even when presidents saw the risks, they often stopped short of decisive action. Jimmy Carter understood the danger before admitting the exiled Shah to the United States for cancer treatment in October 1979, weeks before the embassy was seized. After the Beirut bombing, Ronald Reagan withdrew the Marines and limited the American response largely to sanctions, a choice Hood said emboldened Tehran.
Analysts warned as early as the Obama years, Hood said, that sanctions were “squeezing out the normal middle-class businessmen and women and handing the economy over to a shadowy black-market economy” run by the Revolutionary Guards. That has come true, he said: the Guards grew stronger and the middle class weaker, and that middle class has periodically taken to the streets.
The Islamic Republic drew its own lesson from the fall of the Shah, whose government collapsed after months of protest, Hood said. It keeps using lethal force until protests stop, as it did in 2009, 2019 and January 2026.
Congress favors sanctions because they appear to cost no American lives, Hood said, “but Iranian lives certainly are at stake, especially for the middle class and the poor.”
Money is also fungible. Relief that came with the 2015 nuclear deal, he said, went to regional militias rather than public welfare, with particularly deadly results in Syria. Hood declined to use the name Hezbollah, which means “Party of God” in Arabic, calling the group “Iran’s militia in Lebanon.” “God does not have a political party here on Earth, and certainly not a militia,” he said.
Coalitions, not bilateral deals
A more effective approach, Hood said, would press on the nuclear program and the militia network at the same time, with allies rather than through bilateral arrangements.
Under Obama, near-unanimous support in Congress for sanctions helped bring even Russia and China along on the nuclear file. Without that kind of coalition, he said, constraints stay limited. The bilateral agreements the current administration has made with Saudi Arabia, Syria and others help partners defend themselves, but isolating Tehran needs broader coordination.
He tied the Houthis’ recent escalation against Saudi Arabia to Tehran’s difficulty moving fuel and running its shadow fleet under US pressure, and said the Yemeni group would pose no comparable threat without Iranian support. With less leverage in the Strait of Hormuz, he said, Tehran and its allies have turned to other targets, among them Saudi Arabia and potentially the Bab el-Mandeb strait or the Suez Canal.
October, ahead of the US midterm elections, is a period of heightened risk, he said, given the Islamic Republic’s record of trying to influence American votes.
‘Answered for in Iran’
The decisive change since the 12-day war in June 2025, Hood said, is that “anything that Iran or its militias do around the world will be answered for in Iran.” Earlier presidents avoided direct confrontation and preferred to fight Tehran’s proxies.
“That’s the big difference now,” he said. “Iranians themselves are having to pay for Iran’s foreign policy for the first time.”
When active military operations end, Hood said, he expects a reckoning between the Islamic Republic and its own people. Without a lasting coalition to constrain it, he said, the confrontation that began in 1979 will go on in new phases, with more attacks on American interests and partners.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has ruled that part of the government’s anti-terror financing regulations violates Iranian law, saying decisions on who is designated as terrorist must remain with the Supreme National Security Council.
In a letter to President Masoud Pezeshkian, Ghalibaf objected to amended government rules that kept national working groups involved in deciding which individuals, groups and organizations should face terrorism-related financial restrictions.
The rules cover measures including freezing or blocking assets.
Ghalibaf said Iranian law gives the Supreme National Security Council responsibility for identifying terrorist individuals, groups and organizations, and that the government could not give that authority to its own working groups.
What did the government change?
The cabinet adopted regulations setting out how terrorism-related financial restrictions should be applied.
They created a national working group to review cases involving people and organizations that could be placed on terrorism-related lists. The group also had a role in decisions that could lead to assets being frozen.
The government later amended the rules so that the working group would be established with the Supreme National Security Council’s approval and operate under its direction.
But the amended rules still allowed the group to make some listing decisions. Ghalibaf said that remained inconsistent with the law because the council itself, rather than a government working group, has the legal authority to determine who Iran considers terrorist.
What does Ghalibaf’s ruling change?
The letter concerns the government regulation used to implement the law, not Iran’s underlying law against terrorist financing.
It also does not address Iran’s membership in international treaties. The issue is narrower: whether the cabinet gave its working groups powers that Iranian law reserves for the Supreme National Security Council.
Ghalibaf issued the finding through Iran’s established system for reviewing cabinet regulations. His letter says the government must correct the disputed provision within the legal deadline and that the part found unlawful will lose effect if it is not corrected.
Why this matters internationally
The dispute comes as Iran tries to address shortcomings identified by the Financial Action Task Force, or FATF, the international body that sets standards against money laundering and terrorist financing.
Iran has remained on FATF’s high-risk list since 2020. FATF says Tehran has still not completed most of the action plan it accepted in 2016 and continues to call on other countries to apply financial countermeasures.
Those measures are separate from US sanctions, but both make it harder for Iranian banks and businesses to maintain normal relationships with financial institutions abroad.
One of FATF’s outstanding demands is for Iran to have an effective system for identifying and freezing terrorist assets in line with relevant UN Security Council resolutions.
Iran has already changed laws and joined two treaties
Iran has spent years changing its financial laws in response to FATF concerns.
It amended its domestic counter-terror financing law in 2018 and its anti-money-laundering law in 2019.
Last year, Iran also completed accession to two UN treaties that had been politically disputed for years: the Palermo Convention against transnational organized crime and the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism.
Joining those treaties did not mean Iran joined FATF. FATF is a separate organization that judges whether a country’s laws and enforcement meet its standards.
Joining the treaties was not enough for FATF
Iran joined both treaties with reservations, including conditions allowing it to apply them within the framework of its own constitution and domestic laws.
In the case of the Terrorist Financing Convention, Iran also formally said the Supreme National Security Council would determine which individuals, groups and organizations it considers terrorist.
FATF said in June that Iran’s reservations to both treaties were “overly broad” and that its domestic implementation was still not in line with FATF standards. It also said Iran had failed to address the majority of its original action plan.
So Iran can legally be a party to the UN treaties while still falling short of FATF requirements.
The problem at the center of Ghalibaf’s ruling
The latest dispute goes directly to one of those unresolved questions.
Iran needs a system capable of identifying terrorist-linked individuals and organizations and freezing their assets. But under Iran’s own legal framework, Ghalibaf says the decision about who is considered terrorist must be made by the Supreme National Security Council, not delegated to government working groups.
The government must therefore adjust its implementation rules without weakening the financial controls Iran is trying to demonstrate to FATF.
A German court convicted two men of spying on prominent Jewish figures and preparing attacks against them on behalf of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, sentencing both to prison on Thursday.
Ali Hassan Sarwari and Tawab Mohsini gathered information about Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and Volker Beck, president of the German-Israeli Society, and monitored them in Berlin, according to evidence presented at the Hamburg Higher Regional Court.
Sarwari had participated in acts of "state terrorism by the Iranian regime," the presiding judge said.
The judge said Sarwari had traveled to Iran several times and met Revolutionary Guards intelligence and security operatives, including Ali Heydari and Kazem Mohammadi, from whom he received instructions.
The court sentenced Sarwari to eight years and six months in prison and Mohsini to four years and six months. Both verdicts can be appealed.
Direct orders from the Quds Force
Sarwari, a Danish citizen of Afghan origin, received instructions directly from officers of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors said Sarwari sought Mohsini's cooperation in assassinating Beck or recruiting someone else to carry out the killing. The two eventually agreed to find a third person for the operation.
Sarwari was also accused of preparing an arson attack against a Jewish-owned kosher grocery store in Berlin.
German federal prosecutors had requested the prison terms ultimately imposed by the court, while defense lawyers sought acquittals for both defendants.
Surveillance and evidence presented in court
During the second hearing in July, an investigator from Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office described how authorities monitored Sarwari's communications and movements over an extended period.
The investigator said Sarwari had met individuals linked to the Quds Force during trips to Iran, including a man identified as responsible for the force's Israel operations.
Evidence recovered from Sarwari's phone included searches for Jewish-owned kosher grocery stores in Berlin, Schuster's address and saved photographs of Beck.
Investigators also recorded Sarwari photographing one of the stores.
The court was shown photographs of meetings between the defendants at a McDonald's restaurant. Investigators also described their use of Telegram to communicate with individuals identified as Quds Force contacts.
According to the police witness, Sarwari had asked his daughter whether she knew a Palestinian or Somali woman who needed money and would be willing to set fire to a Jewish-owned store for 30,000 Danish kroner, approximately 4,000 euros.
The testimony formed part of the evidence concerning preparations for the arson attack.
Beck, identified in the indictment as a potential assassination target, attended the second hearing.
The verdict followed months of proceedings examining the defendants' links to the Revolutionary Guards and their preparations for attacks against Jewish targets in Germany.
A Social Security hospital in Tehran has locked its main building and moved treatment into a cramped clinic in its courtyard, a member of the insurer’s healthcare oversight committee said, two months after officials listed it among the capital’s unsafe hospitals.
The main building of Shariat Razavi Hospital, run by the Social Security Organization, the state insurer that covers most of Iran’s workers and retirees, is deteriorating behind locked doors with its costly equipment still inside, Hossein Nategh told the labor-affiliated news agency ILNA on Thursday.
The move has turned a fully equipped hospital into what he called an outpatient clinic with the bare minimum of space, cutting the number of patients it can admit and the specialist care it can offer.
“The clinic set up in the yard has neither enough space for patients’ comfort nor the capacity to provide the services expected of a hospital,” he said.
The hospital’s equipment and funds belong to the workers and insured people who pay for them, Nategh said, and patients should not be left waiting in a cramped courtyard while the main building stands unused.
“If the building has a safety problem, why isn’t it being repaired? And if there is no plan to close it, why aren’t these resources being used?” he said. “This situation amounts to squandering the healthcare assets of the working community.”
He called for the main building to be reopened with its full equipment, or for an official explanation of why it was closed and what has happened to the equipment.
Neither ILNA’s report nor any statement from the Social Security Organization has explained why the building was closed or said what will happen to its equipment.
A list of unsafe hospitals
On August 18, Ali Nasiri, head of Tehran’s crisis management organization, named Shariat Razavi among 17 unsafe hospitals in the capital that were being made safe.
Warnings about the safety of Tehran’s buildings, hospitals among them, are not new. In 2024, the head of the city’s fire department said only 52 of the capital’s 189 hospitals had safety certification and that 125 were high-risk. In late 2025, a deputy fire chief, Kamran Abdoli, said 80,000 unsafe buildings had been identified in Tehran, about 27,000 of them high-risk.
Some of the warnings have ended in deaths. In June 2024, a fire at Qaem Hospital in Rasht, in northern Iran, killed at least nine patients with officials saying afterward that the hospital had never installed a fire suppression system despite earlier warnings. In early 2024, a fire broke out at Gandhi Hospital in Tehran, which fire officials said had received five safety notices beforehand and had faulty fire alarm and suppression systems.
Around the same time, Saeed Karimi, then the health ministry’s deputy for treatment, said about 100 hospitals were operating without a license because they had not fixed problems with safety or hygiene standards or with insurance contracts, and that closing them all at once would damage health services.
