At least seven members of the Iran-backed Afghan Fatemiyoun militia were killed Monday when gunmen attacked a school being used as a military base in southeastern Iran, the Baluch rights organization Haalvsh reported.
Armed men riding two motorcycles attacked the Bir Sofla school in Bir village, in the Kahir district of Konarak County in Sistan and Baluchestan province, at approximately 4 p.m. local time, Haalvsh said.
The attackers opened fire on Fatemiyoun members stationed inside the building, killing at least seven and wounding several others, including two critically, according to the report.
Haalvsh said a car followed the motorcycles into the village as fighting continued. At least one assailant was killed and his body was removed by security forces, it reported. The wounded were transported by ambulance to hospitals in Chabahar and Iranshahr.
The Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Tasnim news agency offered a different account, reporting that an armed group it identified as Jaish al-Adl had attempted to attack army personnel in Konarak.
Tasnim said security forces killed one attacker and forced others to flee wounded. It did not report any deaths among the personnel targeted.
Fatemiyoun is an Afghan Shiite militia operating under the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force. The conflict-monitoring organization ACLED, citing local sources, has reported its deployment at military and Basij facilities and checkpoints across the province.
Haalvsh previously reported that more than 20 Fatemiyoun members were killed or wounded during prolonged fighting in Taftan County on October 13. That casualty figure could not be independently verified.
A series of deadly attacks
Monday’s confrontation follows repeated attacks on security personnel and installations across the province.
On October 27, Haalvsh reported that armed assailants attacked a police support headquarters and Police Station 12 in Khash, triggering prolonged gunfire.
Earlier, on October 7, gunmen attacked police headquarters in Golshan County using explosives and rocket-propelled grenades. The following day, separate attacks targeted police personnel near Nosratabad and a vehicle carrying army personnel near Nikshahr.
On October 14, a commander of a women’s Basij unit and a police officer were killed in separate shootings in Mehrastan County, according to Tasnim.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, HRANA, documented at least 63 armed incidents across Sistan and Baluchestan and neighboring Kerman between March 31 and October 10, leaving at least 94 people dead and 33 wounded. Its tally covered armed attacks and security operations, with 18 incidents recorded during the final 18 days of that period.
Jaish al-Adl joined other Baluch armed factions in December 2025 to form the People’s Fighters Front, known by its Persian initials JMM. The coalition claimed six of the incidents documented by HRANA, while most remained unattributed or could not reliably be linked to a particular group.
ACLED separately recorded approximately 70 armed confrontations between armed groups and Iranian security forces in Sistan and Baluchestan during 2026 by early October, the highest annual figure in at least a decade.
Poverty and longstanding grievances
The violence has unfolded in a region marked by economic deprivation and grievances among its predominantly Sunni Baluch population.
In an August 2025 report, the International Crisis Group described Sistan and Baluchestan as Iran’s most deprived province by most measures, citing unemployment, poor infrastructure and unequal access to public services.
Drawing on Iranian official data, the organization reported that approximately 30% of provincial households experienced severe deprivation. Unemployment stood at 12.4% in 2023–2024, compared with 8.1% nationally.
Baluch activist and journalist Khalilullah Balochi previously told Iran International that economic deprivation, ethnic and religious discrimination and repression were central drivers of armed mobilization. He argued that militarization had deepened the grievances behind recruitment.
Israel’s UN envoy denied that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pressing Donald Trump to resume strikes on Iran and dismissed claims that a nuclear attack was under consideration, while mediators pursued a deal ahead of Tuesday’s US midterm elections.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu is not pressing President Trump. President Trump knows exactly what he wants to achieve and how he wants to achieve it,” Danny Danon told Al Arabiya English.
“Israel will collaborate with the United States. We will support the decision of the United States, but it is not us pressing anyone,” he added.
Danon’s remarks followed an Axios report Sunday, citing an Israeli and a US source, that Netanyahu was urging Trump to strike Iran immediately after the November 3 elections, while the US president preferred to allow negotiations to continue.
The Israeli source described the leaders’ Saturday phone call as “tough,” while the US source called it “direct.”
Trump confirmed Sunday that he had spoken with Netanyahu about Iran, describing their conversation as “a very good talk,” without providing further details.
Danon also rejected a claim by US commentator Tucker Carlson on X that a nuclear strike against Iran was being considered, calling the idea “delusional.”
“No one is even discussing it in the US, nor in Israel,” he said.
Washington weighs military options and diplomacy
Trump said Saturday that negotiations with Iran were “going fine” and that he was in no hurry to resume military action, although he said Washington still needed to target one or two sites, including the suspected underground nuclear complex at Pickaxe Mountain.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Saturday that Trump had not decided whether to launch further strikes.
“He hasn’t made a decision,” Rubio told reporters in Atlanta, adding that Washington preferred to resolve the conflict peacefully.
Rubio said diplomatic contacts had remained active, often through intermediaries, and declined to set a deadline for negotiations.
Iran says diplomatic contacts remain active
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Monday that consultations through mediators, including Qatar and Pakistan, remained intensive, after several days of talks with Qatari officials ended without a breakthrough.
“Everything depends on the political rationality of Washington,” Araghchi said, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.
Araghchi said a revised proposal developed through mediation could allow the Strait of Hormuz to reopen within two days if Washington accepts Iran’s conditions.
Tehran’s earlier seven-day plan called for Washington to lift its blockade of Iranian ports, release frozen Iranian assets and waive sanctions on Iranian oil sales before negotiations resumed.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian also said Monday that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei had granted the government “certain authorities” regarding peace talks with the United States, according to IRNA.
Pezeshkian said Iran would seek to resolve the conflict through dialogue, without specifying the scope of those powers.
An Iranian source cited by the Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Fars news agency said Monday that indirect communications with Washington had produced no breakthrough and that Tehran still insisted on its seven conditions for progress. Exchanging messages through intermediaries was routine, the source said.
Despite the diplomatic contacts, Danon said in his Monday interview that Israel remained prepared for military action regardless of uncertainty surrounding the formation of a new government following last week’s Israeli elections.
“The military is prepared, we are ready and if we will need to protect our people, we will do it,” he said.
US Vice President JD Vance’s reported bid to meet Iran’s security chief Mohsen Rezaei for peace talks with Tehran raises a troubling question for Washington: Does it understand the man it would face across the table?
For more than four decades, Rezaei has occupied positions of power from which he could make decisions that imposed extraordinary human and economic losses on Iranians, while he and his factional allies in the Islamic Republic remained largely insulated from their consequences.
Understanding this track record and how he calculates the costs of diplomacy is essential to understanding how he might negotiate with Washington, how much he is prepared to tolerate, and what could finally persuade him to compromise.
The wartime calculus
The origins of Rezaei’s cost-benefit calculus go back to 1981, when the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini, appointed the 27-year-old Rezaei as commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The IRGC was at the time a newly established institution in which revolutionary commitment and willingness to sacrifice often carried greater weight than professional military judgment.
Rezaei flourished in that environment and, in turn, helped consolidate a command culture that treated heavy casualties as an acceptable cost of pursuing ideological or factional objectives. The relationship was mutually reinforcing, as the institution rewarded commanders willing to endure enormous losses, while those commanders perpetuated a system in which the political consequences of those losses rarely affected the people responsible for them.
That high threshold for enduring costs paid by others became particularly consequential in 1982, after Iranian forces recaptured the city of Khorramshahr and Iraq subsequently offered negotiations. As IRGC commander, Rezaei was among those who argued for entering Iraqi territory rather than halting at the border. A war begun by Saddam Hussein's invasion now became another six years of bloody battles for goals extending beyond Iran's capacity.
During the catastrophic Operation Ramadan near the port city of Basra in July 1982, Iranian troops, including forces under Rezaei's IRGC command, repeatedly attacked entrenched Iraqi positions. Historians Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner estimate between 20,000 and 30,000 Iranian troops were killed or critically wounded. Some Iranian leaders nevertheless saw progress in exhausting Iraq.
One of my uncles was killed in Operation Ramadan, and another in the offensive campaigns Rezaei had advocated after Khorramshahr. In this calculation, a battlefield disaster became an investment in a hypothetical victory in the long run. That victory never came.
Iranian forces did improve tactically, as a US National Defense University study demonstrates in its account of the successful 1986 assault on Iraq’s Faw Peninsula. Yet those improvements rarely prompted Iranian commanders to reconsider whether their objectives justified the mounting human suffering and material losses, allowing the same strategic mistakes to persist even as battlefield methods evolved.
Later that year, Operation Karbala-4 proceeded despite warnings that Iraqi forces anticipated the assault and that the operation had been exposed. Thousands of mostly Iranian youths were killed, wounded or went missing. Decades afterward, Rezaei called the operation a “diversion” preceding Operation Karbala-5, before acknowledging that it began as a principal attack.
Here was another early expression of a dangerous institutional habit among Iranian decision-makers: a battlefield defeat could be treated as an investment in eventual victory, regardless of whether that victory was becoming more attainable or not.
The following year, Iranian forces continued operations toward Iraq’s Basra. A 2009 US National Defense University study, based on extensive interviews with former Iraqi Republican Guard commander Ra'ad Hamdani, described the fighting as the "Somme of the Iran-Iraq War," recalling frontal assaults with high casualties, enormous artillery concentrations and extraordinary destruction.
The National Defense University researchers concluded that repeated attacks reflected Iran’s persistent unwillingness to learn from previous failures. By 1987, they observed, Iranian political and military leaders were struggling to motivate soldiers who had suffered heavy losses without any meaningful gains.
Rezaei’s demands in the final year of the Iraq war exposed the deeper problem with his leadership style. In 1988, Rezaei set out requirements for rebuilding Iran’s offensive capacity over the following five years, including 350 infantry brigades, 2,500 tanks and 300 combat aircraft, while Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s government warned it could no longer finance the war.
Rezaei merely counted the weapons necessary for victory without offering a comparable accounting of the human cost of continuing the war. Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a ceasefire, and Rezaei remained commander until 1997.
Power and privilege
Peace brought Rezaei new positions and privileges, but the wartime mentality that allowed him to accept enormous costs borne by others followed him into politics. He served as secretary of Iran's Expediency Council from 1997 to 2021 and expanded his influence beyond the military.
He ran unsuccessfully for president in 2009, 2013 and 2021, but those electoral defeats did little to diminish his access to senior positions within the Islamic Republic.
A Tehran Bureau investigation identified him as the owner of Tabnak, a major news website whose corporate structure included relatives and associates. He now had assets and networks worth protecting, even as he continued to regard sacrifice by others as an acceptable price for pursuing political objectives.
Rezaei’s response to his son’s dissent also illustrated the tension between family ties and political loyalty. Ahmad Rezaei had publicly criticized the Islamic Republic and fled the country. Mohsen Rezaei denounced him and declared that he would be treated like any dissident if he returned. Ahmad subsequently returned to Iran in 2005 and was not prosecuted, before leaving the country again.
Ahmad was found dead in Dubai in 2011. Police reported an apparent suicide, although questions persisted. Nevertheless, Rezaei's public response to his son's dissent suggested that even family ties could be subordinated to his position in a political order he had devoted his career to building.
In peacetime economic policy, the same institutional tolerance for high costs borne by Iranian citizens found another arena. Rezaei carried his understanding of costs into economics. Former associates of his presidential campaigns told me he conceived what became slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's "resistance economy" and brought the idea to him.
As vice president for economic affairs under President Ebrahim Raisi from August 2021 to June 2023, he helped direct economic policy amid inflation and declining purchasing power. Once again, ordinary people financed the "resistance," while Rezaei retained his position and influence.
In an interview for this article, former Kayhan editor-in-chief and representative of Ali Khamenei Mehdi Nasiri alleged that Rezaei sought a share of Tehran’s roughly €2 billion electric-vehicle procurement deal with China under hardline Mayor Alireza Zakani in 2024, but declined to elaborate on the basis for his allegation. Separately, investigative journalist Yashar Soltani reported that the deal bypassed standard procurement procedures and involved intermediaries whose selection and financial qualifications were unclear. His report did not name Rezaei.
In August 2026, Rezaei became secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, returning to decisions over war and diplomacy. The body, chaired by President Masoud Pezeshkian, coordinates Iran's security and foreign policy. Rezaei brings decades of relationships within the IRGC into its deliberations, along with the same institutional mentality that shaped his earlier career.
His recent words reveal how much of his wartime calculation survives. In an October 2026 interview, Rezaei acknowledged that a prolonged blockade would hurt Iranian families and investment, then insisted that "economic pain and strategic collapse are not the same thing". Four decades after the Iran-Iraq war, he continues to distinguish between the suffering of ordinary Iranians and the ability of their rulers to continue costly confrontations.
Yet Rezaei also has reasons to protect what he himself has acquired. Political scientist Robert A. Pape's influential research showed that even suicide terrorism can follow strategic calculations. The broader point is that ideological commitment need not exclude strategic calculation. Rezaei’s record suggests a high tolerance for losses borne by Iranians and a potentially much lower threshold when his survival, wealth and the political institutions he serves face danger.
Implications for Washington
Pressure directed mainly at Iranian households may therefore leave his incentives intact, since the leadership has long learned to transfer the consequences of its decisions to the population. His estrangement from his son Ahmad Rezaei also makes family ties an uncertain source of restraint.
The calculation changes when leaders themselves face costs they can no longer transfer, particularly when the institutions and networks sustaining their power are directly threatened. This may help explain why Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, also a former IRGC commander, met JD Vance in Switzerland in June 2026, a few months after US-Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other IRGC commanders.
A “credible threat” can bring Tehran to the negotiating table, although the problem of durability remains. Once the threat recedes, the incentives that sustained decades of confrontation may return, leaving agreements vulnerable to reversal. Any lasting settlement therefore needs verification and enforceable consequences for reneging, even after the immediate threat has passed.
For Washington, the implication is that a credible threat must alter the calculations of those making decisions in Tehran. Pressure that the leadership can transfer to civilians has repeatedly proved insufficient. A lasting agreement requires the regime's decision-makers to understand that renewed confrontation would carry sustained consequences for themselves. Those consequences must remain credible even after the immediate danger has receded.
Iranian state media eagerly repeat the claim that Iranian politicians are exceptionally tough negotiators. Much of that toughness comes from their ability to draw on other people’s wealth and lives, which allows them to prolong confrontation without personally bearing its consequences.
Mohsen Rezaei's career illustrates the extraordinary bargaining advantage of making decisions while others pay the price. Anyone who negotiates with other people’s lives and resources can afford to be a tough negotiator.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pressing US President Donald Trump to strike Iran immediately after Tuesday's midterm elections, but Trump wants to let negotiations play out for now, Axios reported Sunday, citing an Israeli and a US source.
The two leaders had a candid phone call Saturday about the state of US negotiations with Iran and how quickly to return to combat, according to the report.
The Israeli source described the call as "tough," while the US source called it "direct."
Trump is pursuing diplomatic efforts to restart negotiations with Tehran while preparing for a possible resumption of major military operations after the November 3 elections, according to the report.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Saturday that Trump had not decided whether to launch further strikes against Iran and preferred a diplomatic solution.
"He hasn't made a decision. I have no announcement in that regard with you today, and nor do we take any of it lightly," Rubio told reporters in Atlanta.
Trump told reporters Saturday that negotiations with Iran were "going fine" and that he was not "in much of a hurry," but said the United States still needed to "take care" of one or two Iranian nuclear sites.
"We can do that in 10 minutes. We have that planned. You can look at Pickaxe Mountain. We need to take care of that. We can do that very quickly," Trump said, referring to a suspected nuclear facility built into a mountain.
Iran considers US outreach
US Vice President JD Vance sent a letter last week to Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, about the possibility of restarting negotiations.
Rezaei said Saturday that he had received and read the letter but had not responded, according to Iranian state media.
"I read the letter. I haven't yet responded. Their tone has completely changed," Rezaei said in remarks broadcast on Iranian television.
IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency also reported that Tehran continued to insist on its seven conditions being met by Washington, saying any position contradicting that framework was unacceptable.
Qatar-mediated talks continue
Qatari mediators met with Iranian officials Sunday for a third consecutive day in an effort to reach a deal to restart direct negotiations between Washington and Tehran.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran was discussing a proposal that could allow the Strait of Hormuz to reopen within two days if Washington met Iranian conditions.
Araghchi said Sunday that consultations were continuing but had not produced a final agreement, stressing that progress depended on the United States responding to Iran's questions.
"We are making every effort in this regard and hope that the other side will demonstrate enough rationality to choose diplomacy over other paths," he said.
Iranian officials rejected nuclear negotiations, demanded acceptance of their conditions for ending the war and threatened military retaliation, despite continuing diplomatic contacts with Qatari mediators on Sunday.
Iranian officials rejected nuclear negotiations, demanded acceptance of their conditions for ending the war and threatened military retaliation, despite continuing diplomatic contacts with Qatari mediators on Sunday.
“The window for negotiations with our adversaries is now closed because they have nothing new to offer,” Ali Nikzad, deputy speaker of Iran's parliament, said on Sunday.
Nikzad accused what he called adversaries of repeatedly breaking commitments and attacking Iran's nuclear facilities. He said that renewed military action would trigger an “immediate, effective response without geographical limits.”
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, however, said consultations with Qatari mediators were progressing without a final agreement.
“Consultations with the mediators regarding the two-day plan are continuing and moving toward implementation, but we have not yet reached a definitive conclusion,” Araghchi said.
Washington keeps negotiations open
The United States remains open to negotiations but is prepared to pursue other options, Donald Blome, US assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said at the Manama Dialogue security forum in Bahrain, according to the Associated Press.
“The hand of negotiation has been extended, and those channels have continued to be open and active,” Blome said.
Blome warned that Washington could take a different course and would not allow Iran to threaten the region and global economy.
Iranian negotiators were in Doha for a third consecutive day of indirect talks aimed at ending the war with the United States and Israel, Reuters reported, citing an official briefed on the discussions.
Araghchi said the delegation had no plans to meet US officials directly.
Iran sets conditions and threatens retaliation
Iran will not negotiate with Washington until seven conditions announced by the secretary of its Supreme National Security Council are implemented, lawmaker Esmail Kowsari said Sunday.
Nikzad also demanded unconditional acceptance of those conditions, including Iran's proposed arrangements for the Strait of Hormuz.
Ebrahim Azizi, chairman of parliament's National Security Committee, threatened a punitive response to hostile actions in the waterway.
Iranian army spokesman Mohammad Akraminia said that another war could spread beyond the Middle East and said the military was shifting toward an offensive doctrine.
Defense Minister Mehrdad Akhlaghi said Iran was strengthening its military readiness and weapons production to respond to threats without geographical restrictions.
Calls grow to leave nuclear treaty
Lawmaker Nasser Pejmanfar urged Iran to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, arguing that membership had brought no benefits.
Mohsen Araki, a member of the Assembly of Experts and Expediency Discernment Council, separately called for reviewing Iran's membership, according to the Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Tasnim news agency.
The calls to reconsider Iran's nuclear treaty commitments add another obstacle to efforts to resolve the dispute through diplomacy.
Negotiations through Qatari mediators continue in Doha without a final agreement. Washington has kept the door open to talks, but Iranian officials insist that their seven conditions must be accepted before the war can end.
As US-Iran diplomacy gains momentum through Qatari mediation, Tehran is seeking to project a willingness to wage a wider war with the United States and Israel, floating the prospect of retaliation without geographic limits.
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the country's top military commander issued warnings on Saturday of a wider response to any renewed attack, ordering an expansion of the list of potential American and Israeli targets.
The warnings came as Qatari and Pakistani mediators intensified efforts to broker an agreement between Tehran and Washington, while reports suggested President Donald Trump was considering renewed military action after Tuesday's US midterm elections.
In remarks published by Iranian state media following a meeting with senior military commanders, Khamenei called for "maximum deterrence," saying threats of any type or scale must be met with an "immediate and effective response without geographic limitations."
He also instructed commanders to update their list of potential targets to bring a wider range of American and Israeli assets, both physical and nonphysical, within reach of Iran's armed forces.
General Abdolrahim Abdollahi, chief of staff of Iran's armed forces, echoed the warning shortly afterward, saying the military was preparing a new list of targets across a broader geographic area and warning that Tehran's response to any attack would be "unimaginable" to its adversaries.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command, had briefed Trump on military options involving Iran.
The newspaper also reported that Washington had warned regional allies to prepare for the possibility of a short but intense resumption of fighting after the November 3 midterm elections.
Axios previously reported that the Pentagon had instructed Central Command to complete preparations for possible renewed combat operations.
The prospect of another round of war has alarmed regional powers.
Speaking at a security forum in Bahrain on Saturday, Saudi Vice Foreign Minister Waleed ElKhereiji said countries across the region wanted peace restored, although the outcome of mediation efforts remained uncertain.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty warned at the same event that another round of fighting would be "more dangerous, more destructive" and lead nowhere.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Saturday that Tehran was reviewing proposals concerning its nuclear program and that an Iranian delegation had travelled to Qatar for further consultations.
He described an American effort to open dialogue as a "positive step," but said Iran had no immediate plans to meet US officials and that any resumption of negotiations would depend on Tehran's conditions being met.
