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A grainy archival video, has surfaced opening an unusually clear window into the internal thinking of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps during the 2000s. It is not a battlefield clip or a propaganda reel. It is something more revealing: a classroom lecture. Standing at the front is Hossein Salami—then a senior officer, later the commander-in-chief of the IRGC—methodically explaining to a room of trainees how to fight the United States.

The lesson is striking not for its theatrics, but for its clarity. Confrontation with America, Salami tells his audience, is not to be understood as a short, decisive war. It is a prolonged war of attrition—a conflict to be stretched across years, even decades, in which the objective is not outright victory but the steady accumulation of pressure. Costs must be raised. Time must be extended. The opponent must be worn down.

Decades later, that framing reads less like theory and more like a description of the strategic environment the United States has faced across the Middle East.

The Man Behind the Doctrine

Understanding the weight of this footage requires understanding the man delivering the lecture. Hossein Salami was not an academic observer of war. He was a central figure in the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus for decades, eventually rising in 2019 to become the commander-in-chief of the IRGC—the regime’s most powerful military and ideological institution.

The IRGC itself is not a conventional army. Created after the 1979 revolution, it functions as a parallel state within a state, tasked with safeguarding the regime, exporting its revolutionary ideology, and waging asymmetric warfare beyond Iran’s borders. It oversees missile development, directs or supports proxy forces across the region through its Quds Force, and maintains deep involvement in Iran’s domestic economy and political structure.

Salami’s career unfolded inside this system. Before assuming the top post, he served as deputy commander and played a long-standing role in shaping strategic doctrine. The lecture captured on tape is therefore not a speculative exercise. It is an early articulation of ideas that would later be operationalized.

Salami was killed in April 2024 at the age of 64, during an Israeli airstrike on an IRGC facility in Syria. His death marked the culmination of decades of strategic leadership, from doctrine to direct conflict.

Attrition, Not Victory

In the video, Salami strips war down to its most pragmatic terms. The United States, he suggests, should not be confronted symmetrically. Instead, it should be drawn into a long-duration conflict where its advantages—technological superiority, conventional military power—are blunted by time, cost, and political friction.

Victory, in this framework, is redefined. It does not require battlefield dominance. It requires endurance.

The method is equally direct:

• Increase the economic cost of engagement

• Apply political pressure that complicates decision-making

• Ensure that conflicts become prolonged and diffuse, rather than short and decisive

The aim is not to win quickly. It is to make continuation of the conflict increasingly unattractive.

The Convergence with American “Endless Wars”

This doctrine intersects in a revealing way with a defining feature of American political discourse over the past two decades: the growing rejection of what are commonly called “endless wars.”

From Iraq to Afghanistan and across a network of smaller, less visible engagements, the United States has found itself involved in conflicts that stretch on without clear resolution. Over time, public frustration has hardened into skepticism. The costs—financial, human, and political—have appeared to outweigh tangible outcomes.

Commentators across the political spectrum, including figures like Tucker Carlson, have channeled this sentiment into a broader critique of U.S. foreign policy. The argument, in its simplest form, is that Washington has entangled itself in conflicts it cannot win and should not continue.

That critique resonates with a war-weary public. But the Salami footage complicates its underlying assumption. Because if one side has explicitly designed its strategy around prolonging conflict and raising costs, then the persistence of these wars cannot be understood solely as a product of American decision-making. It becomes, at least in part, the intended effect of an adversary’s doctrine.

Fatigue as an Objective

What emerges from the 2000s lecture is a concept that rarely appears explicitly in Western debates: war fatigue as a target.

In democratic systems, prolonged conflict carries political consequences. Public support erodes. Electoral pressures mount. Strategic patience has limits. These are not incidental weaknesses; they are structural features.

Salami’s framework suggests that these features were not merely observed but studied—and incorporated into planning.

If the goal is to extend conflict long enough, and to raise its costs steadily, then fatigue is not a side effect. It is a mechanism of victory.

Policy, Response, and Strategic Friction

This dynamic helps explain the sharp divisions within U.S. policy debates, particularly during the presidency of Donald Trump. Efforts such as the “maximum pressure” campaign—combining sanctions, targeted strikes, and attempts to deter escalation without large-scale deployments—were framed by supporters as an alternative to open-ended military commitments.

Critics warned of escalation risks and questioned the long-term effectiveness of economic pressure. Supporters argued that such measures directly targeted the networks responsible for asymmetric warfare, rather than allowing conflicts to expand indefinitely.

The Salami footage does not resolve that debate. But it reframes it. It shows that the logic of cost imposition and long-duration pressure did not originate in Washington’s response—it was already embedded in the doctrine of the IRGC decades earlier.

A Clash of Time Horizons

At its core, the interaction between the United States and the Islamic Republic reflects a deeper structural mismatch.

The United States operates within cycles of public opinion and electoral accountability. Strategic priorities shift with administrations. Patience is finite.

The IRGC, by contrast, operates within a system that allows for long-term continuity. Its planning horizon extends beyond election cycles, beyond immediate public pressure. Attrition, by definition, favors the actor willing—and able—to wait.

The lecture from the 2000s suggests that this asymmetry was not only recognized but deliberately leveraged.

Reframing the Debate

The phrase “endless wars” has become a shorthand for policy failure in American discourse. It carries an implicit assumption: that duration itself is evidence of strategic miscalculation.

The archival footage of Hossein Salami suggests a more complicated reality.

If one side defines success not by swift victory but by prolonged engagement—if it actively seeks to extend conflict, increase costs, and erode political will—then duration alone cannot be taken as proof of failure. It may also be evidence that the strategy encountered is working as designed.

This article is copyright © Iran So Far Away. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this content without explicit written permission is strictly prohibited and subject to legal action under applicable copyright laws.

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In the Khomeinist regime, the central question is no longer what is true, but who is actually exercising authority.

The latest message attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei—issued for International Workers’ and Teachers’ Day—has been presented as the voice of Iran’s supposed new leader. Yet a closer reading reveals something far more unsettling: not just economic collapse, but a regime so fractured that even its messaging may be detached from any identifiable authority.

A Succession Without Process

For nearly two months, the system has circulated claims that the Assembly of Experts selected a successor following the death of Ali Khamenei. But evidence for such a process is, at best, contradictory.

Reports differ sharply. Some officials insist a decision was made; others suggest procedural irregularities, rushed votes, or even the absence of a formal session altogether. The result is not clarity—but confusion.

This ambiguity is not accidental. It reflects a deeper structural reality: power has not been formally transferred—it has been improvised.

In practice, authority appears to have shifted toward security institutions, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with Mojtaba Khamenei functioning more as a symbolic figure than a governing one.

And that raises a critical question:

If Mojtaba Khamenei is not visibly present, not publicly speaking, and possibly not even fully operational, then who is writing these messages?

Who’s in charge?

This is not speculation without basis.

Since the alleged succession, multiple anomalies have emerged. Statements attributed to Mojtaba have often been delivered indirectly read aloud by others, issued in written form, or broadcast without his physical presence. In some cases, even images associated with him have been questioned as manipulated or outdated.

Reports have also circulated—denied, contradicted, and revived—that he may be injured, incapacitated, or otherwise unable to function as a leader.

In such an environment, attribution itself becomes suspect.

The “leader” becomes a placeholder—a name under which various factions can issue directives.

He is, in effect, the regime’s cardboard ayatollah.

The Message Itself: A Document of Breakdown

The text itself is revealing, not only for what it says, but for how it says it. It is verbose, repetitive, and structurally inconsistent—less like a coherent policy statement and more like a stitched-together document attempting to simulate authority.

It echoes the tone of the now-deceased Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in its long-windedness, yet lacks the internal tact that typically characterized his centralized messaging.

And then there is the substance.

An Implicit Admission of Economic Crisis

The message attempts, at least superficially, to praise workers and teachers. But in doing so, it repeatedly acknowledges conditions that amount to a direct admission of crisis:

• declining purchasing power

• shuttered workshops

• layoffs across industries

• a broader collapse of economic activity

These are not marginal issues. They point to a system in which both production and consumption—the two pillars of any functioning economy—are simultaneously deteriorating.

The “Solution”: Shift the Burden to the People

More revealing still is the framework of “solutions” offered in the text.

Rather than outlining state-led intervention, the message shifts responsibility onto the public. It suggests that just as people have appeared in the streets to “support the Khomeinist military forces,” they should now extend practical support to workers and teachers.

The implication is staggering: a population already struggling to secure necessities is now expected to stabilize the labor market itself.

This is not simply unrealistic—it is an admission of state failure.

A Circular Economic Logic

The contradiction runs deeper.

The message insists that appreciation for labor must move beyond “verbal praise” and take on a practical form. Yet when it comes to defining that practicality, the burden is transferred entirely to ordinary citizens.

People are urged to prioritize the purchase of domestic goods as a means of supporting workers.

But this recommendation collapses under the weight of reality.

First, much of Iran’s production capacity has already been disrupted. Workshops and factories are closing due to energy shortages, lack of liquidity, and the cascading effects of war, sanctions, and government-imposed disruptions such as internet shutdowns.

In many cases, there is no meaningful level of production to support.

Second, even where goods are produced, the question remains whether consumers have the financial capacity to purchase them. A population that struggles to afford basic food staples cannot be expected to drive economic recovery through consumption.

The message thus exposes a circular logic: support domestic production by purchasing goods that are increasingly unavailable, using financial resources that the public no longer possesses.

Layoffs

The same pattern emerges in the section addressing employers.

Business owners are urged to avoid layoffs “to the extent possible.” This phrasing is critical. It acknowledges that layoffs are not hypothetical—they are already occurring on a wide scale.

If only a handful of businesses were affected, such guidance would be unnecessary. The appeal itself is evidence that a significant portion of the productive sector is shedding labor in order to survive.

Moreover, the message implicitly recognizes that employers cannot realistically be expected to maintain their workforce under current conditions.

The qualifier “as much as possible” is an admission that, in many cases, it is not possible at all.

Businesses are not reducing staff out of preference; they are doing so because the economic environment—marked by declining demand, disrupted operations, and rising costs—leaves them with no alternative.

A System Detached from Itself

The government’s role, as described in the message, is equally revealing.

It is said that the state will assist “within its capacity.”

This vague formulation underscores a fundamental limitation: the government lacks both the resources and the mechanisms to provide meaningful support. In functional economies, crises of this scale prompt decisive intervention—subsidies, tax relief, emergency financing, and direct income support. Here, the state offers only conditional, undefined assistance, effectively acknowledging its own inability to act.

The issue is not only that the Islamic Republic is facing economic collapse. It is that the regime itself appears increasingly disconnected from its own command structure.

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By Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour

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Historically, the relationship between the Iranian-American community and the Democratic Party have not been good. As a group who arrived in the States as refugees from a sadistic tyranny that came to power in no small measure due to the policies and actions of former President Jimmy Carter, Iranian-American voters typically rejected the Democrats, with their message of negotiations and appeasement of the Islamic Regime, and preferred Republicans, who at least offered words about confronting Tehran and supporting freedom for the beleaguered Iranian people.

Yet, beginning around 2000, a new situation began to appear. A number of liberal Democrat Iranian-Americans began to achieve public notice, and run for and win elected office. These politicians used their Iranian heritage as a calling card, to both signify their representation of a new, more diverse, America, and to justify the Democratic Party’s policy of accommodation with Tehran. Whenever a hawkish figure would call for pressure against the Islamic Regime or its agents, an Iranian-American Democrat would inevitably respond with calls of racism and warmongering.

This situation did not arise due to changes within a community. It was brought about in a synthetic manner by lobby organizations for the Islamic Regime closely tied to the highest levels of the Democratic funding base, and all of these political figures brought forward as representatives of the Iranian-American community are rejected and lambasted by a majority of this community.

The Role of NIAC

The National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) and its connections with Tehran have already been discussed at length by Iran So Far Away. Here we will note the activities of its political action committee (PAC) NIAC Action in selecting, training, and assisting electoral candidates. Each election cycle, NIAC Action produced a list of endorsed candidates, without exception Democrats of the most-liberal wing of the party such as Senator Bernie Sanders and the Squad in the House of Representatives, along with a selection of Iranian-Americans. The candidate questionnaire used by NIAC to determine whom they endorse specifically asks for views that oppose Trump’s travel ban (also called the Muslim Ban) military pressure and sanctions on Iran, and support for the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA).

In 2020, Iranian-American winners endorsed by NIAC included:

1. Anna Eskamani of the Florida House of Delegates

2. Shireen Ghorbani of the Salt Lake City, Utah, City Council

3. Yassamin Ansari of the Phoenix, Arizona, City Council

4. Sepi Shyne, West Hollywood, California, City Council

5. David Emami, Valley, Oregon, City Council

6. Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, Santa Cruz, California, City Council

In 2022, Iranian-American winners from NIAC were:

1. Darya Farivar, Washington State Legislature

2. Farrah Chaichi, Oregon State Representative

3. Shebreh Kalantari-Jonhnson (reelected)

In 2024, with mounting scrutiny on the organization, NIAC Action did not publicize a list of endorsements, but that year did see the accession of Yassamin Ansari to the Congress.

The Money Behind Them

As NIAC proudly states, its major donors are the Ploughshares Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Open Society Foundation (of George Soros), the Arca Foundation, and the Nasiri Foundation. In other words, its funding does not come from within the community it claims to advocating for but rather from broader liberal organizations who fund a plethora of other organizations all working to advance the same viewpoints. This is the definition of a synthetic movement – instead of figures naturally rising to prominence from with a group, faces are cherrypicked by outside figures because they share the views of such outsiders. Thus, we see a development where Iranian-Americans are promoted by non-Iranians to act as if they were the leaders of the entire community.

Why Do Some Iranian-Americans Become Democrats

Various surveys have shown that immigrants from repressive societies tend, in the first generation, to be very grateful to live in America and they thus tend to be “conservative” and vote Republican. The younger generations, born in the USA, educated here and culturally assimilated, tend be become more liberal. For Iranian-Americans, highly-educated, middle to upper income and urban as a whole, this phenomenon can be more pronounced as peer pressure coming living in ‘Blue” cities where almost everyone of one’s colleagues and friends may be Democrats, ensures a strong to pressure to likewise identify as such. The biased teaching in colleges and universities, where faculties are dominated by the left, also serve to make younger Iranian-Americans question the received wisdom inherited from their parents, and to begin to be moved towards thinking in a leftist framework. These individuals, however, tend to live and interact mostly with non-Iranian Americans and to be cut off from the core of the community, as is readily seen by reading social media, especially posts written in Persian by Iranian-American activists.

False Statistics

It is hard to know just where exactly Iranian-Americans as a whole stand on American politics. Anecdotally, most members of the community assume that Iranian-Americans are mostly Republican. Social media would certainly give that impression as well. Yet, there are polls suggesting otherwise. A 2020 survey from the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA) proclaims that only 22% of Iranian-Americans are Republican and 44% Democrat. The same survey states that Iranian-Americans preferred Joe Biden to Donald Trump 56% to 21%. A 2025 survey by the same organ has the ratio of Democrats to Republicans decline to 35% vs 24%. However, PAAIA’s numbers cannot be trusted because, aside from the fact that the organization is connected to NIAC and itself also accused being a lobby for Tehran, their polls are conducted by the Zogby corporation which has been described as using flawed methodologies by many analysts. More importantly, NIAC, which publishes its own surveys of Iranian-Americans, has been accused of falsifying its statistics.

The Iranian-American Republicans You Never Hear About

Though Iranian-American Republicans do have their own committees, the fact that a Republican would tend to run of his/her record or qualifications rather than on his/her background means that they do not make much of their origin during their campaigns. NIAC, of course, never mentions them, and the liberal leaning media would rather not mention achievements in diversity not made by them. Thus, Stephanie Bice received little notice when she became the first Iranian-American in Congress in 2020, and was even attacked by liberals for not being “Iranian enough”. Likewise, there was not much coverage when President George W. Bush appointed Manda Zand-Ervin to serve as US representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

It is to be regretted that, until now, the Iranian-American community has not created an organization to combat NIAC and express the community’s genuine opinions in Washington D.C. Instead, activism tends to play out mostly on social media, within intracommunal channels and is thus not read by a wide body of non-Iranian Americans.

Being Aware of Realities

As America today is divided on questions of immigration, multiculturalism, and diversity, with some Democratic voters tending to support candidates based on “identity politics” and the desire to see those from “marginalized communities” ascend to positions of influence and power, a candidate with Iranian heritage can be an asset to these voters. The Democratic machine thus has good reason to cooperate with NIAC in promoting these candidates. For Republican voters, on the other hand, who often believe in a uniform American loyalty, heritage is not an issue and their candidates will not make noise regarding solely where they came from. It is important for Americans to know that Iranian-American liberal Democratic politicians are precisely that, representatives of their liberal base, and not the product nor the advocates of the Iranian-American community at-large.

The journalist with Hassan Rouhani

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Saeed Kamali Dehghan, a bylined Iran correspondent at The Guardian since October 2006, has resurfaced inside Iran, setting off alarm bells among activists who once trusted him. What makes his reappearance different from that of an ordinary journalist is not simply that he is back in Iran. It is that his career, viewed in sequence, is a chain of reversals, controversies, and relationships that were repeatedly flagged yet never fully confronted by the institution that gave him credibility.

His state-issued reporter’s ID card—issued before his move to London—shows he worked as a journalist for the IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency.

According to a report published by IranWire, Kamali Dehghan’s presence in Iran has triggered serious anxiety among civil and political activists. Many of them point to the same fact: for years, he operated at the intersection of Western media credibility and Iranian political access. According to that report, people who once spoke to him as a journalist now fear that—under the Islamic Republic’s well-documented pattern of pressure on returning individuals—those networks and conversations could carry risks. Per the report, Kamali Dehghan worked with them between 2013 and 2014 and that attempts to contact him for comment on his current activities were unsuccessful.

The record does not begin today. It stretches back to 2009, when Kamali Dehghan was associated with the HBO documentary For Neda, produced by British-South African filmmaker, Antony Thomas, which chronicled the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan during the 2009 Green Movement protests. Her death became one of the most widely documented and symbolically powerful moments of that uprising. At the time, the documentary—and those involved in it—were seen as part of an effort to document state violence. Years later, in 2020 however, Kamali Dehghan reversed course. In an interview with the state-affiliated Tehran Times, he expressed regret over his role and claimed he had been influenced by “Western scenarios.” It was not a minor adjustment or a reinterpretation of nuance; it was a direct repudiation of a globally recognized event and the narrative that had accompanied it.

Peabody Awards in 2011 for the 2010 HBO Documentary FOR NEDA : The photo features documentarian Antony Thomas holding the award, journalist Saeed Kamali Dehghan, and producer Carleen Hsu.

That reversal was followed by another, more immediate controversy that would force The Guardian to act. In 2018, Kamali Dehghan wrote about alleged Saudi connections to Iran International. After the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, he escalated the story by claiming that Khashoggi had been his source and that the killing was linked to information shared with him. Reportedly however, those claims were made without evidence and were deleted within hours. The episode drew formal complaints and ultimately led to Kamali Dehghan being removed from covering Iran. The damage, however, extended beyond a reassignment. At the same time, Iranian state-linked outlets amplified his statements, and Mehr News Agency reported that Iran’s ambassador to London, Hamid Baeidinejad, publicly praised him and indicated that the embassy was in contact with him. What might have been dismissed as a journalistic misstep instead exposed a deeper overlap between his reporting, his claims, and the way those claims were received and utilized by the Iranian state apparatus.

It is in that overlap that the pattern begins to take shape. Individuals close to Kamali Dehghan have noted that he maintained regular contact with figures inside the Iranian political establishment. Among those named are Hesamodin Ashna and Javad Zarif, alongside ongoing interaction with Ambassador Baeidinejad. He was also described as frequently visiting the Iranian embassy in London and socializing with members of Hassan Rouhani’s family. One aspect that highlights the regime’s pragmatism is that, despite the fact that Kamali Dehghan was openly gay—a characteristic the regime would typically harshly condemn—he nonetheless maintained social connections with Iranian officials and their families. A former friend has said that although Kamali Dehghan was gay, he came from a religious family and maintained religious beliefs, which became even more apparent during his mental health struggles.

Trita Parsi and the pro-regime lobby further suggests that Kamali Dehghan was operating as an apologist rather than an objective journalist.

Activists see this as a glaring example of how utility to the regime can override ideological rigidity. At the time, those around him reportedly justified such access as a normal feature of journalistic work. That explanation, which might once have seemed coercively plausible, now sits uneasily against the cumulative record.

Even personal episodes appear in a different light when placed within that sequence. In March 2020, Kamali Dehghan wrote on his Telegram channel that he had been admitted to the Nightingale mental health facility in the United Kingdom. During that same period, he is said to have remained in contact with Iranian diplomatic figures. On its own, that fact might not carry meaning, but within the broader context, it reinforces the continuity of those relationships across time and circumstance.

The pattern did not end there. In 2025, following another visit to Iran, Kamali Dehghan reportedly stated that his August 6^th, 2010, interview with Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani—a case that had drawn intense international attention—had been fabricated. If accurate, that claim does not merely revise a detail; it undermines the integrity of reporting that had been published under the banner of – in this case, The Guardian, a major Western newspaper. It raises a question that extends beyond a single journalist: what happens when the credibility of the platform itself is used to validate information that is later disavowed?

Now, in 2026, the consequences of that long arc are no longer theoretical. Activists point to a specific risk: that individuals who once spoke to Kamali Dehghan did so under the assumption that he was an independent journalist operating within the norms of Western media. Those conversations may have included sensitive political views, personal information, or details about networks of opposition. The fear is not only that he has returned to Iran, but that the state has a documented history of applying pressure on returnees to extract cooperation.

What emerges from this sequence is not a single controversy but a layered accumulation: a journalist who reverses his position on a defining moment of protest history; who makes a high-profile claim linking a murdered journalist to his own reporting without evidence; who is removed from a major beat following that claim; who maintains ongoing contact with senior figures tied to the Islamic state; who later disavows prior reporting as fabricated; and who now reappears inside Iran presenting a narrative that aligns with official messaging while former sources express concern about their exposure.

The question that follows is not limited to Saeed Kamali Dehghan. It extends directly to The Guardian. How many of these incidents were known internally as they unfolded? How many concerns were raised, formally or informally, by those who interacted with him? How often were these issues treated as isolated episodes rather than components of a pattern? And at what point does a series of warnings stop being dismissed as coincidence and start being recognized as a structural failure of editorial judgment?

Because in the end, the power of this story lies not in any single allegation, but in the record itself. Each element, taken alone, might have been explained away. Taken together, they form a sequence that no longer explains itself—and no longer can be ignored. The real question for major international media outlets is why a known Fars News reporter was given a platform for over a decade. As former MOIS head Ali Fallahian openly acknowledged many years ago (above video), the regime has long used journalism as a cover for its operatives.

Nota bene: IranWire reports that Saeed Kamali-Dehghan has been posting updates and stories to Instagram in English. Iran So Far Away, however, was unable to find or verify any Instagram account under his name or offering such reportage.

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In 2001, the world began to collectively focus on the hectic tracking game: the global hunt for Osama bin Laden, a man who became a puzzle, complete with audio production capabilities. Governments spent billions, analysts issued breathless updates, and yet the central fact remained stubbornly intact—no one could quite say where he was.

He was in a cave. No, a compound. No, crossing a border. And the guessing went on.

A 3D parody of the famous "Where's Waldo" picture books asks readers to find a cartoon Bin Laden, his posse, and other objects hidden in action-packed scenes. Published in 2007.

It became the Where’s Waldo? of counterterrorism, punctuated by the occasional audio directive—proof of life, and a to-do list for his followers.

Fast forward, and the sequel has arrived—and it’s no less absurd. Enter Mojtaba Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s new supreme leader-cum-resident phantom. Once a gray eminence behind his father, he has, in the hundred-plus days since his father’s demise, become phantasmagoric.

Ali Khamenei passes on the flag of the Khomeinist regime to his son and successor, Mojtaba, as the Invisible Imam (The Mahdi/12th Imam) looks on in approval.

Depending on which rumor you catch, he is either orchestrating everything or nothing at all. He is consolidating power, hiding in his underground bunker on Qeshm island, in a Moscow hospital recovering, or somewhere looking forward to receiving his new prosthetic leg. The map is decorative at this point.

Because the real story is not geography. It’s design.

With bin Laden, that meant an organization that behaved like smoke—dispersed, deniable, and always just beyond reach. With Mojtaba, it’s more bureaucratically refined: a regime of overlapping power centers—clerical offices, security services, and informal networks—where responsibility is diffused and accountability nearly impossible to pin down.

The effect is identical: the world reduced to speculation, repetition, and an almost theatrical confusion. When no one can locate you, they cannot predict you. When no one can define you, they cannot confront you. When your presence is ambiguous, you gain something more durable than authority: you gain myth.

This is how you end up with entire governments, media ecosystems, and intelligence agencies orbiting the same uncertainty, polishing it, debating it, and—whether they mean to or not—sustaining it.

So, the sequel writes itself. Different names, different landscapes, same script from the same terrorists. The world peers into the shadows, trying to pin down a figure who benefits precisely from not being pinned down.

And so, the search goes on—another sighting, another theory, another confident briefing that doesn’t survive the week. Everyone is looking. No one is finding. Almost as if that’s the point. In the end, it may be the Khomeinists’ final gesture: a supreme leader who governs not by presence, but by absence—an echo, however imperfect, of their own Invisible Imam Mahdi.

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Abbas Araghchi’s The Power of Negotiation, published in January 2025, is now being ‘discovered’—and rather dubiously promoted—in April 2026. It is cast as ‘gaining attention’ for offering fresh ‘insight into diplomacy,’ as though it was just hot off the presses, rather than having sat quietly for over a year. This is less a rediscovery than a reactivation—less about the book itself than the narrative into which it is now being inserted.

The book is Araghchi’s attempt to distill decades of what he tries to justify as diplomatic experience into a guide on negotiation. It frames negotiation as both an art and a structured process, drawing heavily on analogies from the Iranian bazaar—persistent bargaining, patience, repetition, and strategic restraint. It emphasizes power—national, political, and psychological—as the true foundation of any successful negotiation, and places heavy importance on discipline, emotional control, and timing. Obviously it mentions nothing about the famous Mullah flim flam culture of usurping and grabbing.

The irony does not stop at branding, however.

Move over, Western business gurus—Tehran’s latest masterclass in negotiation is here. In a move as original as a knockoff designer handbag, somebody has decided to position The Power of Negotiation as the Khomeinist answer to The Art of the Deal. The twist, of course, is that they are sprinting to out-West the West while simultaneously insisting they will defeat it. If this keeps up, we might soon see a reality show called Khomeinist Apprentice, where everyone gets fired by an IRGC commander or a mullah in a turban. The message is clear: if you can’t beat ’em, copy ’em—while insisting you’re beating ’em.

And then there is the publishing.

The book’s English-language edition was released by an obscure outfit, Success Publications SAR, based in Alberta, Canada. It presents itself as a publishing house, but the reality is an obscure, out-of-the-way operation with no visible footprint in serious literary or academic circles, and certainly nothing approaching the standards or reach of a major publisher like Penguin Random House. It’s the kind of publisher where books land after other doors have closed—or when no one expects them to open in the first place. The company’s office phone just rings and doesn’t even go to voicemail. And yet, here it is, being repackaged as a serious contribution to global diplomatic thought.

Which brings us back to where we started: a book quietly sitting on a shelf for over a year, suddenly lifted into relevance—not by organic interest, but by a digital ecosystem that blends tech aesthetics, geopolitical storytelling, and carefully staged amplification.

So who’s promoting it? It is not being revived by major publishers, academic institutions, or even serious policy circles. Instead, It surfaces, tellingly, not in a publisher’s catalogue or an academic forum, but on Instagram—specifically through two accounts, My Electric Sparks and ReadRight Institute, both of which trace back to Pakistan. That detail matters, because it immediately situates the “promotion” outside the usual ecosystems of books, scholarship, or policy discourse. Instead, it appears in a social media environment where provenance is looser, narratives are more easily shaped, and credibility is often implied rather than demonstrated.

What sharpens the concern is this: both accounts promote the claim that Abbas Araghchi’s book is a New York Times Bestseller—a claim for which there is no credible evidence and which does not align with any publicly verifiable bestseller listings. This is not a matter of interpretation or spin; it is a concrete, checkable assertion that appears to be false. And yet, it is presented without hesitation, as fact.

The first of these, My Electric Sparks, presents an especially curious dual identity. Its website—styled as “The MES Times”—reads like a conventional technology and innovation outlet. It cycles through the expected themes: artificial intelligence, hydrogen energy, consumer tech, market trends. Its “About” language is fluent in the clichés of global tech media, invoking analytics, disruption, and forward-looking insight. At the same time, it gestures toward a geographically hybrid identity: it claims global reach, emphasizes Pakistan as a point of origin, yet lists contact details in Austin, Texas. None of this is inherently implausible, but it creates a deliberately broad—and somewhat ambiguous—sense of legitimacy.

That ambiguity becomes more pronounced when set against its Instagram presence, which feels like an entirely different organism. Instead of tech reporting, the feed leans into AI-generated imagery and sweeping geopolitical assertions. World leaders appear arranged in symbolic tableaux, and captions assign outsized strategic roles—particularly to Pakistan—in global affairs. It is within this environment that the false bestseller claim is inserted—absorbed seamlessly into a stream where visual authority and confident language substitute for verification. The contrast with the website is stark: one projects the neutrality of a tech publication; the other traffics in narrative construction and visual persuasion.

The second account, Read Right Institute, adds another layer. It identifies itself as “a distinguished educational hub dedicated to providing comprehensive assistance for the preparation of Competitive Examinations of Pakistan.” It is founded by Syed Taimoor Bukhari, and its stated mission is rooted in academic preparation. On its face, this is conventional and even respectable. But here too, the same false claim about bestseller status appears—again presented without sourcing, without qualification, and without correction. That convergence is difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

At that point, the question becomes unavoidable: when multiple accounts, outside the normal publishing ecosystem, circulate a verifiably false credential to elevate a political figure’s book—what exactly is that, if not a form of information shaping? Whether one calls it propaganda, narrative engineering, or simply digital amplification of misinformation, the underlying mechanism is the same: repetition of an unverified claim until it acquires the appearance of legitimacy.

In short, it reads less like a serious work on negotiation and more like a piece of state messaging—shaped by the worldview of a career mouthpiece managing international optics for a deeply ideological system that has shown no hesitation in killing its own citizens in full view of the world.

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Giant banners with Trita Parsi’s face, across bridge overpass on busy Tehran street, quotes him saying: “Trump’s failed war has eliminated the power of America’s military threats.” April 2026.

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For more than two decades, Trita Parsi has operated in Washington as an “analyst,” a “policy expert,” and a self-appointed voice on Iran. He has advised, influenced, and shaped discussions at the highest levels of U.S. policymaking. He has had access to senior officials, appeared across major media platforms, and helped frame how Iran is understood in the American political arena. Yet throughout all of this, one question has never been properly confronted, much less answered: why has a man with such extensive, documented alignment with the interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran never been required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)?

FARA is not an obscure statute. It is a straightforward transparency law designed to expose exactly this type of situation. If an individual operates in the United States in a political capacity on behalf of, or in coordination with, a foreign government, the law requires disclosure. Not discretion. Not interpretation. Disclosure. The standard is not whether someone openly declares themselves a “lobbyist.” It is whether their conduct—communications, advocacy, coordination—places them in the role of advancing a foreign principal’s interests. When that threshold is met, registration is mandatory. Failure to comply is a criminal violation.

What makes the case of Trita Parsi so striking is not that accusations have been made against him. Washington is full of accusations. What makes it striking is that the underlying facts supporting those accusations have never been meaningfully disputed—and yet no legal action has followed.

Parsi’s own early work makes clear that his later role was not accidental. In 1999, he co-authored a paper explicitly calling for the creation of an Iranian-American lobbying structure capable of shaping U.S. policy. The strategy was not naive. It acknowledged, openly, that any organization perceived as directly representing Tehran would be politically discredited. The solution was to build something that appeared domestic, legitimate, and community-based, while gradually acquiring influence over policy. That blueprint was not theoretical. Within three years, NIAC was established, and it proceeded along precisely those lines—building credibility through non-controversial issues while positioning itself as a key voice on U.S.–Iran relations.

In late 2003, I began sounding alarms about Trita Parsi, who had interned in Congressman Bob Ney’s (R-OH) office back in 1997. Parsi had continued to maintain very close ties with Ney well after his internship had ended. Ney himself had lived in Iran, spoke Farsi, and shared Parsi’s push for engagement with the regime. Ney—later imprisoned for corruption tied to the Abramoff scandal—became an enabler of Parsi’s ambitions. When I publicly challenged Parsi’s dubious stance toward the Khomeinist regime, I was met with the threat of a lawsuit. That threat was conveyed through NIAC’s Executive Director, Marjan Ehsasi, a distant family relation who, through those same family channels, relayed Parsi’s intention to sue me. At the same time, I was contacted by Capitol Hill Police, who informed me that Bob Ney or one of his staff, had reached out to them claiming that I had made physical threats against him and his staff.

At the time, even the Iranian-American community found it hard to believe that anyone in or somehow close to the community could conceive of such activities—let alone journalists or officials in Washington, DC. Yet Eli Lake—who had heard my concerns for years— became the first journalist to break the wider story, bringing Parsi’s activities into the public spotlight.

The significance of that origin becomes unavoidable when viewed alongside what later emerged through litigation. Then by the mid 2000s, activist Hassan Daioleslam began writing about Trita Parsi. His critical articles were already circulating by around 2006, and this ultimately led to the defamation lawsuit Parsi filed against him in 2008.

When Parsi sued Daioleslam for defamation, he forced the disclosure of his own communications, including emails with Mohammad Javad Zarif, then Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. Those emails were not fabricated. They were not conjecture. They were entered into evidence. They demonstrated sustained, direct contact with a senior representative of the Iranian regime while Parsi was actively shaping policy discussions in Washington.

At that point, the issue ceased to be speculative. The question was no longer whether Parsi had connections to Iranian officials—it was what those connections meant in legal terms. Under FARA, the existence of ongoing, policy-relevant communication with a foreign government official, combined with domestic advocacy aligned with that government’s interests, is not a trivial matter. It is precisely the kind of pattern that warrants registration, or at the very least, investigation.

Parsi did not prevail in that lawsuit. He lost at the district level and again on appeal. But the most important outcome was not simply the loss—it was what the courts were willing to state on the record. The judges determined that calling Parsi a potential agent of the Iranian government was not defamatory. That is not a casual finding. It means that, based on the available evidence, the claim was considered plausible and grounded in fact. In any other context, such a determination would trigger immediate scrutiny from the Department of Justice. In this case, it did not.

Even more damaging were the court’s findings regarding Parsi’s conduct during the case. Judges cited repeated failures to produce relevant documents, delays in disclosure, and misrepresentations about the existence of key evidence. This was not a minor procedural issue. In a case centered on allegations of undisclosed relationships, the withholding of information goes directly to the heart of the matter. It suggests not transparency, but concealment. And concealment, in the context of FARA, is not a side issue—it is the violation.

Despite this, Parsi’s influence in Washington expanded rather than contracted. During the Obama administration, he was brought into policy discussions. He visited the White House 33 times and regularly met with senior officials such as Valerie Jarret and Ben Rhodes and became part of the broader effort to shape the narrative surrounding engagement with Iran. His access was not incidental. It was sustained and meaningful. He was not a marginal figure. He was inside the conversation, helping to frame it.

Likewise, Parsi’s increasing media apparencies was part of the “echo chamber,” as described by its creator, former Deputy National Security Advisor Benjamin Rhodes, by which liberal-aligned media outlets were fed a false picture of the 2015 Nuclear Deal (the JCPOA) and became willing participants in “selling” the deal to the American people using these falsehoods.

Parsi seen with the Islamic regime’s delegation, in Geneva during the JCPOA talks.

This is where the failure to act becomes impossible to ignore. Because if an individual with documented communications with a foreign government, a clear pattern of advocacy aligned with that government’s interests, and judicial findings that accusations of foreign agency are plausible is allowed to operate at the highest levels of policymaking without even a formal inquiry, then the law itself becomes irrelevant. FARA cannot function as a safeguard if it is not enforced in cases where its application is most obviously implicated.

By 2020, under the Biden administration, the situation had escalated to the point where U.S. senators formally requested that the Department of Justice examine whether NIAC should be investigated for potential FARA violations. Their request was not speculative. It cited internal communications indicating that significant portions of NIAC’s work involved lobbying activity—activity that, under the statute, would require registration if conducted on behalf of a foreign principal. This was the moment when the issue could have been resolved through normal legal channels.

Nothing happened.

No investigation was announced. No findings were issued. No explanation was provided. The request simply disappeared into the institutional void.

At that point, the question ceased to be solely about Trita Parsi. It became a question about the integrity of enforcement itself. Because a law that is selectively applied is indistinguishable from a law that does not exist. If individuals can engage in sustained policy advocacy aligned with a foreign government, maintain direct contact with its officials, and still avoid even the most basic disclosure requirements, then FARA is not being enforced—it is being ignored.

There is a convenient explanation often offered for this silence. It is suggested that figures like Parsi serve as informal channels of communication in the absence of formal diplomatic relations. That they are useful. That they provide access, insight, or leverage. Even if that were true, it would not exempt them from the law. FARA does not contain a clause for “useful intermediaries.” It requires disclosure regardless of convenience. In fact, the more strategically valuable such a role is, the more critical transparency becomes.

The facts, taken together, are not ambiguous. They form a consistent pattern: a deliberate strategy to build political influence under the guise of community advocacy, sustained and documented contact with senior Iranian officials, judicial findings that accusations of foreign agency are plausible, and repeated efforts to avoid full disclosure of relevant information. This is not a single incident or a misunderstanding. It is a long-term body of conduct.

At some point, the refusal to act on that body of conduct becomes its own form of complicity.

The Department of Justice does not need speculation to proceed. It needs a reasonable basis to investigate whether FARA has been violated. That threshold has been met many times over. The only remaining question is why it has not acted.

In recent weeks, a Change.org petition has begun circulating, calling for the deportation of Trita Parsi. But deportation alone is insufficient in this case. A decisive legal approach must be taken—one that enforces the laws Parsi has long avoided, ensuring that any violations are met with prosecution, not symbolic measures.

Trita Parsi has spent years shaping how Americans understand Iran. It is time for the United States government to determine, formally and definitively, whether he has been doing so as an independent voice—or as an unregistered agent of a foreign and now openly violent totalitarian regime. If the evidence already in the public domain is taken seriously, there is more than enough to move beyond questions and toward charges.

Anything less is not caution. It is neglect.

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All religions have their icons—their saints, their prophets, their carefully preserved images meant to inspire reverence and continuity. The Khomeinist regime, however, has taken this to an entirely different level: cardboard stand-ins, muralized martyrs, and now, in keeping with the times, algorithmically generated scions.

From the earliest days of the revolution, the face of Ruhollah Khomeini was less a presence than a product. It appeared everywhere—on posters, banners, walls, and even on the surface of the moon—reproduced in those almost tenderly earnest cardboard cutouts that followed the revolutionaries wherever they went. The man himself could be distant, silent, or strategically absent; his image, however, was filled in for him and tirelessly went everywhere. It smiled when needed, glowered when appropriate, and above all, remained perfectly consistent.

Over time, this aesthetic matured into something more ambitious. Streets became galleries, cities transformed into exhibitions, and public space turned into a kind of ideological wallpaper. Authority was no longer embodied; it was printed, scaled, and distributed. The result was a landscape in which one could scarcely move without being observed by a face that, paradoxically, was not there at all.

Soleimani's face was seen brandished on buildings, flags and billboards across Tehran as the mourners gathered. (AP)

When Qasem Soleimani was killed, he did not simply pass into memory. He was elevated—quite literally—onto the sides of buildings, stretched across highways, and fixed into the skyline with a permanence that life itself had never afforded him.

And now, in what must be considered a natural evolution, the regime has embraced its most sophisticated substitute yet.

The regime-adjacent outlet Hamshahri, has released an AI-generated video (above) of Mojtaba Khamenei—a figure so elusive that his introduction to public life has been entrusted not to his own presence, but to artificial intelligence. The latest offering, circulated with a straight face that would be admirable under other circumstances, presents him riding in a taxi, incognito, among ordinary citizens, pen in hand, listening attentively as if he were a graduate student conducting field research rather than a man rumored to stand at the center of power.

An accompanying narrated text claiming that at some unspecified moment in time, the “third leader” would sit among ordinary passengers and listen to their conversations. In recent weeks, similar AI productions have placed him in war rooms, behind podiums, delivering speeches he has never publicly given. And yet, nearly forty days after his supposed introduction as a national leader, he has not appeared in public—not once. No verified video. No direct audio. Only voiceovers and carefully rendered approximations.

Translation of Mojtaba Khamenei’s video narration:

“One of my successes has been the opportunity to hear the words of the dear people from all social classes. For a period of time, in an anonymous capacity, I accompanied you in taxis—which had been arranged at my own request—traveling through the streets of Tehran and listening to your conversations. I considered this type of sampling superior to many opinion polls. In many cases, my understanding was aligned with your words, which were usually expressed in the form of criticisms related to various economic and managerial issues. In this regard, I learned many things from you and I continue to seek new lessons. During these days, before and after the 19th of the blessed month of Ramadan, I again learned certain matters from different individuals among you who were present in public spaces. I hope I will not be deprived of this blessing.”

It is an extraordinary situation: a leader whose existence is increasingly mediated through software. Speculation, inevitably, rushes in to fill the void. Persian-language discussions have been saturated with rumors about his physical condition, many suggesting he was severely injured—particularly to the face and legs—during an early airstrike in a joint U.S.-Israeli operation. Some claims go further, citing officials who have said he is alive but gravely wounded, even “disfigured.” Others, in a rather touching display of narrative discipline, insist he has not spent a single night in a hospital and that his face remains entirely intact.

The regime’s own eulogists have gone so far as to defend the aesthetic integrity of a man no one has actually seen.

At this point, one might briefly summon French sociologist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, who in his book Simulacra and Simulation described a world in which representations cease to reflect reality and instead replace it entirely. The Islamic Republic, appears to have taken this as a governing manual. The image no longer points to the leader; the image is the leader. The simulation does not depict authority—it performs it.

A billboard depicting Mojtaba’s father, the deceased former Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, center, handing the Islamic regime’s flag to his son and successor Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, right, as the late founder, Ruhollah Khomeini stands at left, in a square in downtown Tehran, March 2026.

The taxi story, repeated with such earnestness, is meant to signal closeness: the leader among the people, absorbing their concerns firsthand. But there is something unintentionally revealing in the choice. In systems where public sentiment can be openly expressed, leaders do not need disguises. They have elections, independent media, and the noisy friction of genuine discourse. Where those are absent, one must resort to fables. And what better fable than the attentive ruler, notebook in hand, quietly discovering—like a tourist in his own country—that his people have opinions?

A banner in Tehran, featuring the Islamic regime’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, leading the conflict with U.S.-Israeli. March 2026. Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

When the leader is invisible, he is generated. Each step moves further away from the unpredictability of reality and deeper into the comfort of construction. It is governance not through presence, but through projection.

The current fascination with artificial intelligence is less a departure than a continuation. It is simply a more advanced method of doing what has always been done: creating a version of reality that behaves better than the original. And so, the image of Mojtaba Khamenei in a taxi joins a long lineage of carefully crafted appearances. It sits comfortably alongside the cardboard cutouts and the towering murals. The materials have evolved, but the principle endures.

A billboard bearing portraits of slain Iranian IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani (C), Lebanon's Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah (2nd R), Palestinian Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar (R), and Ismail Haniyeh (L), and head of Hezbollah's executive council Hashem Safieddine (2nd L), with the slogan in Farsi reading 'God wrote our duty, to help the oppressed' at Tehran's Enghelab square. ABEDIN TAHERKENAREH/EPA/EFE/Shutterstock

Perhaps the greatest irony lies in the very message these images attempt to convey. They are meant to signal closeness, accessibility, and engagement. They are designed to reassure the public that those in power are listening, observing, and understanding. Yet in their very construction, they reveal the opposite. A leader who must be imagined among the people is, by definition, not among them. A system that relies on simulations to demonstrate connection is, almost by necessity, disconnected.

The system has long been comfortable with figures who are more invoked than seen. The most obvious example is the enduring devotion to the Mahdi—the hidden, absent savior whose authority shapes belief without requiring presence. For decades, the state has drawn on this tradition of reverence for the unseen, cultivating a political culture in which invisibility does not weaken legitimacy but reinforces it.

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By Banafsheh Zand and Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour

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Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari (D-Arizona) has been carefully presented to the public as a modern political success story: a young Iranian-American woman, progressive, articulate, rising quickly through the ranks of American power. This narrative is designed to resonate—polished, aspirational, and emotionally compelling. However, like many such narratives, it begins to fracture the moment it is examined not through image, but through pattern. Beneath the branding, beneath the rhetoric, and beneath the carefully constructed public persona lies something far more revealing: a political posture built not on consistency, but on contradiction. Though Congresswoman Ansari has presented herself as an advocate for the Iranian people, the facts reveal that she is instead the product of the Islamic Regime’s lobby.

The NIAC Connection

A breakdown of NIAC “successes” & how NIAC Action & their members elect the President & Congressional candidates

Those who are knowledgeable on US-Iran relations are aware that there is an ecosystem in Washington that has spent years reshaping how the Islamic Regime in Iran, is discussed, negotiated with, and ultimately accommodated within Western political frameworks. Organizations such as the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), founded by Trita Parsi, are central to that ecosystem. They act to preserve the Regime by advocating against policies which could topple it – whether diplomatic or military – while covering themselves in the language of peace, humanitarianism, and anti-imperialism. In order to maintain a façade of independence from Tehran, organizations like NIAC will sometimes pair rhetorical criticism of the Regime, usually on blatant human rights violations that can’t be explained away, with a continued resistance to the kinds of pressure that might cause such violations to cease.

Ansari Cisac Honors Thesis (1)

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Ansari’s academic work on Iran’s nuclear program raises additional questions about the consistency of her approach. In her honors thesis, she appears to adopt a framework common in certain policy circles—one that places significant emphasis on strategic context, regional dynamics, and Western policy responses, often at the expense of directly confronting the Islamic Republic’s own record of deception, coercion, and long-standing nuclear opacity. While presented in the language of analysis and nuance, this approach mirrors a broader tendency to reframe the regime’s behavior as reactive rather than deliberate, shifting focus away from its ideological and strategic objectives. The result is not an outright defense, but a form of intellectual softening—where the regime’s actions are contextualized to the point that their underlying intent risks being obscured.

Congresswoman Ansari operates in exactly the same manner, because she is a product of NIAC. NIAC’s political arm, NIAC Action prominently supported her run for Phoenix City Council in 2020. In 2021, she returned the help by speaking at NIAC’s annual fundraising gala.

A study of Ansari’s 2024 congressional campaign donor list reveals much regarding who exactly is behind her rise. Her largest donors are corporations owned by her parents, wealthy real estate investors Bijan Ansari and Fariba Malek Salehi. (Though Congresswoman Ansari has left-wing views and posits herself a representative of the working class, she owes her status in large part to the privilege she was born into as the child of an affluent and well-connected family). Bijan Ansari is a longtime major donor to the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA), a group that sometimes works with NIAC, has a number of members on its board who have been alleged to have ties with Tehran, and PAAIA itself has been accused of a pro-Tehran bias.

Bita Daryabari

Another major donor – through her immigration charity, the Pars Equality Center, is Bita Daryabari. Ms. Daryabari is Congresswoman Ansari’s aunt – her ex-husband, Dr. Reza Malek, is Ansari’s mother’s brother – and she also is a largescale supporter of NIAC. A billionaire who was also formerly married to technology executive Omid Kordestani, Daryabari has a long record of donations which some have alleged foster the Regime Lobby’s activities.

A third large donor – through his company Stewart & Stevenson – was the late Hushang Ansary, a former Iranian politician and convicted fraudster. Despite having been a minister in the Shah’s government, Hushang Ansary later supported increased trade and détente with the Islamic Regime.

Other donors include Arizona-based investor Francis Najafi—a 10% owner of the Phoenix Suns and longtime supporter of Trita Parsi—and New York banker Hamid Biglari, who has lived a life of luxury while promoting the Khomeinist regime.

Her Record

A congresswoman from Phoenix, Arizona, could easily have chosen to make the needs of voters her sole priority. Instead, Ansari has used her Iranian descent to place herself as almost a representative of the Iranian-American community. Yet, by choosing to be a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Yassamin Ansari has chosen to stand beside the staunchest opponents of Iranian freedom in the US House, members such as Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

To provide political cover, she has attempted to align herself, rhetorically with the suffering of the Iranian people. She supported the Mahsa Amini Human Rights and Security Accountability Act, a measure tied to one of the most globally visible atrocities committed by Tehran’s leaders. Supporting a sanctions bill tied to a universally condemned act carries no real risk; it is the easiest way to establish credibility while avoiding commitment. However, when the conversation moves from symbolic condemnation to real-world pressure—Ansari pivots. She does not escalate against the regime; she moves to restrain the United States. She warns against escalation. She supports limiting American power in confronting Iran. She redirects urgency away from Tehran and back toward Washington. Her rhetoric intensifies, but its target changes. It is the White House that receives her most aggressive language, not the regime she claims to oppose.

Iranian-Americans organize solidarity demonstrations for the Iranian people day in, day out, for years. But Ansari does not join them. She chooses, rather, to protest Donald Trump.

Though she has built her public profile on advocating for refugee rights, opposing so-called “Muslim ban” policies, and even introducing the Artemis Act to protect asylum seekers—particularly those fleeing persecution in Iran—she has simultaneously continued to attack immigration enforcement efforts, criticizing ICE even in cases involving criminal deportations.

When Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran “Maryland dad” accused of human trafficking, was deported back to El Salvador, Ansari traveled internationally alongside Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), to advocate directly on Garcia’s behalf. She elevated the issue into a national cause. She framed it as a constitutional crisis.

In February 2026, she declined to attend President Trump’s State of the Union address and instead chose to make a political gesture on behalf of undocumented immigrants detained by the ICE. Only after the government begins to arrest and deport members of the families of regime leaders living in America does Ansari propose a bill expanding immigration access for Iranians.

When Iranians came into the streets en masse in January 2026 to call for the Regime’s overthrow, and the response was the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iranians, Ansari responded with words of condemnation but when President Trump launched an attack that took the life of Ali Khamenei, the Iranian people’s oppressor, Congresswoman Ansari called the war illegal. She supports a War Power Resolution aiming to deprive Trump of the ability to continue the military operation. She calls on the Cabinet to remove Trump from office using the 25^th Amendment, and she files impeachment articles against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Without bothering anymore about appearing nuanced, Ansari the 160 girls killed when an American missile allegedly struck a school – and ignores reportage claiming the incident was distorted by the regime. When Sharif University, a key research site for Tehran’s nuclear program is bombed, Ansari asserts that civilians are being targeted.

Meanwhile, Iranians both inside and outside the country demonstrate and send messages of gratitude to the US for helping eliminate their tormenters – and Ansari responds by resharing an article that describes the Iranian diaspora as puritanical and autocratic.

How she is seen in Tehran

Khomeiniists have called America The Great Satan since 1979, and American politicians, even ones that appease Tehran such as Barack Obama or John Kerry, are always reviled in regime media outlets. Iranian diaspora members who win election to foreign political office are almost always referred to a traitors. The way Yassamin Ansari is covered in Iranian state-controlled media, however, is different.

Eghtesad News proudly describes Ansari as the “first Iranian woman in the American Congress” and asks “why isn’t she more famous.” Asr Iran runs a long, photo-filled article about her, depicting her in glowing terms, and describes her as “the voice of the Iranian-American community.” Tabnak covers her every speech and bill proposal. Why does Khomeinist regime (or regime adjacent) media approve of Ansari so publicly, and ignore other Iranian-Americans?

The real first Iranian-American in Congress

Despite the repeated assertions, Yassamin Ansari is not the first Iranian-American in Congress. That honor instead belongs to Congresswoman Stephanie Bice (R-Oklahoma) who was first elected in 2020. Congresswoman Bice, however, has not made her ethnicity her calling card and has focused her career on serving her constituents in Oklahoma. In its November 6, 2025 issue, Iranian media outlet Eghtesad News openly admits—while also attacking her—that because she is not a Democrat, media outlets that typically extol diversity choose to ignore Congresswoman Bice, and because she is not a member of NIAC, the regime lobby effectively treats her as nonexistent.

How Iranian-Americans really see Yassamin Ansari

The broader Iranian-American community—long aware of what NIAC is—has not been fooled by Ansari’s platitudes. Social media is filled with posts attacking her credibility and accusing her of being part of the regime lobby. AI-generated images of the Congresswoman wearing an ayatollah’s robe and turban circulate. Ansari herself is repeatedly questioned by Iranian-Americans, both online and in person, and asked to explain the logic behind her positions and actions. A Change.org petition has been filed to have Ansari expelled from Congress. Iranian-Canadian activist, Ghazal Modirian, has investigated malfeasance by Iranian organizations receiving funding from the US government, has produced a dossier of links between Yassamin Ansari and Tehran.

Caught Promoting Flagrant Propaganda

On April 11, 2026, Ansari posted on X what she claimed was a letter sent to her from a woman in Tehran, describing alleged horrors that average Iranians have endured under the US and Israeli attacks. Readers immediately began to question how someone could have sent a message to Ansari from a nation that had been under intense Internet blackout for weeks, since the beginning of the war in February. Speculation immediately began that the letter was propaganda produced by the Regime’s intelligence services. Ansari quickly deleted the letter, seemingly confirming that it was a fake, but then asserted that she did so because the sender fears reprisals from the regime security forces. However, one can easily ask how the security forces could identify someone from an image of text with no personally identifiable information? Ansari’s explanation only raises more questions.

🔺 https://x.com/restitutor_iran/status/2043156834316394703?s=12

Yassamin Ansari has constructed a political identity that allows her to speak fluently about Iran while remaining structurally distant from the consequences of confronting it. She condemns loudly but acts cautiously. She signals alignment while avoiding its cost. She mobilizes forcefully when it is politically safe—and retreats into restraint when it is not. Like all those associated with NIAC, she appoints herself the voice of a nation but uses that voice to drown out the actual calls of the people she claims to care about.

For those still living under the regime she describes, it does not read as representation. Saying the right thing requires nothing; standing by it when it matters is where the record is made. And when a political record consistently stops at condemnation—while resisting the pressure required to turn words into action—it ceases to be a matter of nuance. It becomes a choice. For those inside Iran, that choice is not abstract; for those inside Iran, that choice is not debated—it is endured.

Players being driven away on a bus, as supporters and defenders crowd the street. Picture: Backgrid/news.com.au

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In March 2026, a group of Iranian women footballers briefly stepped outside the boundaries imposed on them by the Islamic regime. It was not a loud rebellion. There were no speeches, no slogans shouted to cameras. But in the quiet refusal to sing the national anthem during the AFC Women’s Asian Cup in Australia, something unmistakable had occurred. For a fleeting moment, they asserted a form of autonomy that the system governing them does not tolerate.

What followed has since been presented by the regime as a simple story: a misunderstanding, quickly corrected. A handful of athletes momentarily misled by foreign influence, only to rediscover their loyalty and return home. But when the sequence of events is reconstructed through Persian-language reporting, international coverage, and the silences that followed, a far more troubling picture emerges—one that is still unfolding.

In the days after Iran’s elimination from the tournament, five players, including captain Zahra Ghanbari, Fatemeh Pasandideh, Atefeh Ramezanizadeh, Zahra Sarbali, and Mona Hamoudi, were quietly separated from the team environment and granted humanitarian protection in Australia. For a brief period, they existed outside the immediate reach of Tehran. It was a moment of possibility, and also a moment of extreme vulnerability. Within hours, the Islamic state-aligned media began to frame them as defectors, traitors, or victims of foreign manipulation. The language was familiar, the implications unmistakable.

Then, almost as quickly as the break had occurred, it began to collapse.

Reports from both international outlets and Persian-language sources point to the same mechanism: pressure exerted not directly on the players themselves, but on their families inside Iran. The method is as old as the system—shift the cost of defiance onto those who cannot leave. One by one, the players withdrew their asylum requests. What had appeared to be a collective act became a series of isolated decisions, each made under conditions that can hardly be described as free.

Atefeh Ramezanizadeh (left), Fatemeh Pasandideh (right)

Only two players—Fatemeh Pasandideh and Atefeh Ramezanizadeh—refused to return. Their path since then has been visible. They have been seen training publicly with Brisbane Roar FC, adapting, continuing their careers in the open. Their presence has been documented, their movements traceable, their choices—whatever uncertainties they carry—made in a space that is at least partially free of coercion.

https://www.facebook.com/brisbaneroarfc/posts/1546356984157134?ref=embed_post

The others returned to Iran.

Upon arrival, the narrative tightened. Zahra Ghanbari, the team captain and the most prominent figure among them, was quickly placed before state television cameras. In the interview that followed, she stated that Australian authorities had offered her residency, but that she chose to return out of loyalty to her country and her mother. The statement was delivered cleanly, without hesitation, and in a tone that conveyed finality. It was also entirely consistent with a pattern long established in the Islamic regime: public reaffirmations of loyalty following moments of perceived deviation.

Iranian women's national soccer team captain Zahra Ghanbari left Australia after being offered asylum. Photo: Dave Hunt/AP

What happened next is where the story ceases to be controlled.

In recent weeks, a list circulated through judiciary-linked channels in Iran identifying more than 400 individuals accused of supporting “the enemy,” whose assets were subject to confiscation or seizure. Among the names that appeared was Zahra Ghanbari. The inclusion was striking not only because of her recent return, but because it directly contradicted the assurances—implicit and explicit—that those who came back would face no consequences.

The response from officials was immediate and defensive. Figures connected to the football federation moved to deny that the name referred to the national team captain, insisting instead that it was a case of mistaken identity, a coincidence of names. On its surface, the explanation is plausible. But the sequence of events raises more questions than it answers. A player seeks asylum abroad, returns after reported pressure, is publicly rehabilitated through state media—and then appears, however briefly, on a list associated with punitive state action. Even if the denial is accepted, the contradiction itself is revealing.

It suggests that return does not necessarily restore trust.

Perhaps more telling than any official statement is the absence of independent information about the players who went back. Beyond carefully managed appearances and regime-aligned reporting, there is little verifiable detail about their current circumstances. No sustained interviews, no independent profiles, no clear sense of whether they have resumed normal lives or remain under scrutiny. The information space around them has narrowed, not expanded.

This stands in stark contrast to the two players who remained in Australia. Their visibility—training sessions, club integration, continued reporting—serves as an unintended point of comparison. One group is seen. The other has largely disappeared into a controlled narrative.

Iranian soccer fans during the AFC Women's Asian Cup Australia 2026 match between Islamic Republic of Iran and Philippines at Gold Coast Stadium on March 08, 2026 in Gold Coast, Australia. Picture: Albert Perez/Getty Images.

The Khomeinist regime has presented this episode as a closed chapter, a resolved incident that reaffirmed loyalty and exposed foreign interference. But the available evidence does not support closure. Instead, it points to a process: dissent contained, choices constrained, narratives imposed, and consequences that remain deliberately obscured.

The story of Iran’s women footballers in Australia was never just about a tournament or a temporary asylum request. It was a rare moment in which the internal pressures of the system became visible on an international stage. What has followed since—the reversals, the messaging, the contradictions, and the silence—has only reinforced what that moment revealed.

Sources:

1. Iranian Female Football Captain’s Assets Seized After Returning Home

2. تهدید جانی زنان ورزشکار؛ درباره فوتبالیست‌های پناهنده در استرالیا چه می‌دانیم؟

3. Iranian women soccer players granted asylum in Australia are pictured training in Brisbane

4. Iranian women soccer players’ hotel escape aided by Australian police

5. Captain of Iranian women’s football team leaves Australia after initially accepting offer of asylum

6. https://farsnews.ir/Wire_Plus/1775896602059557770

7. https://www.tasnimnews.ir/fa/news/1405/01/22/3563196

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Former Foreign Minister and Vice President Mohammad Javad Zarif’s latest démarche does not derive from a feeling of strength. Though he claims the Islamic Republic is “clearly winning,” his message suggests the opposite: a faction that sees danger and is searching for an exit.

In his recent article in Foreign Affairs—the Council on Foreign Relations publication, which has long shown sympathy toward Zarif and his “reformist” camp—he dispensed with much of the usual diplomatic varnish and issued what amounts to a thinly veiled plea, urging Washington to seize the moment for a broader agreement with the United States—one encompassing nuclear constraints, sanctions relief, and regional de-escalation—that might halt the Islamic Republic’s steadily deteriorating position. Framed diplomatically, the proposal nonetheless carries an unmistakable subtext: the war, as it stands, is not trending in favor of the Khomeinist regime.

Iran International’s Morad Veissi framed it bluntly:

Mohammad Javad Zarif has written an article in the American publication Foreign Affairs which, in my view, is an indirect message from the Rouhani–Zarif faction to Trump to kill Qalibaf and senior IRGC commanders, with the aim of breaking the deadlock in negotiations between the Islamic Republic and the United States.

With this controversial article, Zarif is in fact indirectly sending a message—from the Rouhani camp and himself—to Trump that the ones preventing the Islamic Republic–U.S. talks from reaching a conclusion are Qalibaf and a group of senior IRGC commanders aligned with him.

And if Qalibaf is removed, Rouhani and I are ready to reach an agreement with the United States—that is the essence of Zarif’s article.

Ruhollah Rahimpour, an Iranian political commentator who appears frequently on the Persian-language channel Iran International, stated bluntly that Zarif’s proposal reflects American superiority on the battlefield and that calling for a ceasefire under current conditions amounts to accepting the regime’s defeat. That assessment—coming not from a regime insider but from a media analyst articulating what is increasingly being said aloud—was immediately followed by something far more revealing.

A regime-affiliated eulogist, Saeed Haddadian (above video), responded to Zarif’s ploy with anger and public intimidation. Speaking before a gathering of IRGC and Basij members, Haddadian labeled Zarif a “spy,” demanded that he publicly recant within three days, and warned that otherwise he would go to his home “with a caravan.” He went further, taunting security forces: “Are you waiting for Zarif to write on his forehead that he is America’s sellout?” The remarks were met with applause—until, notably, interruptions from within the crowd forced him to pause, snapping back, “Don’t interfere. I know what to say and when to say it.” Even within that setting, consensus appeared fragile.

Regime supporter holds a placard that reads: Death to Rouhani “The Baha'i”, Death to Zarif “The American”. It also claims that Rouhani, whose real name is Manouchehr Fereydoun has been a Mossad and Savak spy since 1974. The “signatories” according to the person holding the placard is the United People of Iran who request the Islamic Judiciary indict and execute the two traitors.

The reaction from within the regime’s more polished elements was no less telling. Hesameddin Ashena, a former intelligence official and close associate of ex-president Hassan Rouhani, Zarif’s former boss, issued a carefully worded response: “Let us not go too far. Let us not get overwhelmed and emotional. Let us not take the street hostage. Let us not speak without information.” It was not a defense of Zarif so much as a warning—to others within the system. Do not escalate. Do not mobilize. Do not turn internal disagreement into public confrontation.

That language is revealing. It strongly suggests that Zarif’s proposal was not a freelance initiative, but something that at least parts of the system were aware of—if not quietly permitting. The real dispute, then, is not whether to signal weakness, but who controls that signal—and who controls the street.

None of this, however, should be mistaken for the emergence of a credible “moderate” alternative within the system. Zarif was never a dissident; he was the regime’s most effective diplomatic mouthpiece abroad and, during the Obama years, its most polished and trusted interlocutor in Washington. He developed a notably close working relationship with John Kerry and became the de facto face—and in many respects the operational lead—of the Khomeinist regime’s side during the negotiations that produced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Far from representing a break with the system, Zarif functioned as its most sophisticated channel to Western policymakers, repackaging the regime’s objectives in language designed to reassure and persuade. In 2019, the U.S. Treasury described him as the Islamic Republic’s primary international spokesperson. Even his own leaked remarks in 2021 did not reveal a reformist worldview so much as the internal hierarchy of power—admitting that diplomacy was routinely subordinated to the preferences of Qassem Soleimani and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Rouhani’s record is no less instructive. During the November 2019 protests—at the time the bloodiest crackdown since 1979—security forces were ordered to do “whatever it takes” to suppress unrest. Hundreds were killed, at least. At the same time, the regime imposed one of the most extensive internet shutdowns in modern history, effectively isolating the population while the crackdown unfolded. Rouhani did not oppose this machinery; he presided over it.

Disputes within the Khomeiniist Regime have never concerned the Regime’s underpinnings, nor its totalitarian structure. Rather, disagreements have been about which geopolitical path to pursue the shared goal of regional and ultimately global hegemony – whether to align with the “East” (Russia and China) or the elites of the “West” (exemplified by Globalist organizations like CFR and WEF).

The current spectacle, then, is not reform versus hardline. It is a struggle within a system whose factions differ in tone and tactics—but not in their ultimate commitment to preserving the regime.

Nor is this infighting new. It is, in fact, foundational to the Islamic regime. Khomeini knew well that a foundation of absolute power is a divided governing class.

From its inception, the regime has been marked by internal purges, rivalries, and ideological betrayals. In the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, clerical forces rapidly sidelined and eliminated former allies. Abolhassan Banisadr, the country’s first president, was impeached and forced into exile after clashing with the clerical establishment. Hossein Ali Montazeri, once positioned as Ruhollah Khomeini’s successor, was stripped of his role after criticizing mass executions and systemic abuses. Reformists, pragmatists, revolutionaries—each, in turn, has been discarded, silenced, or rebranded as a threat when no longer useful.

The Khomeinist regime has always been a system that consumes its own, but what is different now is the context. These fractures are coming to light under conditions of sustained external and internal pressure.

One faction believes survival now requires tactical retreat—a negotiated pause with the United States to stabilize a deteriorating position. Another treats any suggestion of compromise as betrayal, responding not with debate but with threats and mobilization. Between them stands a nervous middle, attempting to contain escalation while leaving the underlying conflict unresolved.

This dynamic is not new to outside observers of the regime. During the administration of George W. Bush, senior officials and advisors—including figures such as John Bolton—were repeatedly briefed on the depth of factional divisions within the Islamic regime. Several experienced analysts and activists alike emphasized that the regime was far less monolithic than it appeared, and that exposing and amplifying these internal rivalries could intensify pressure on the system from within. The argument was not simply that the regime could be confronted externally, but that its internal contradictions—once illuminated—could accelerate internal strain, deepen mistrust among elites, and push dormant conflicts into the open.

And yet, as so often happens, the lesson went unheeded. The West has long been presented with clear-eyed assessments of Tehran’s internal fractures—along with practical strategies for exploiting them—but such insights rarely translate into sustained policy. Instead, decision-makers drift between overcautious restraint and short-term tactical thinking, mistaking hesitation for prudence and incrementalism for strategy. In capitals from Washington to Brussels, the tendency persists to be penny wise and pound foolish—avoiding immediate risks while forfeiting long-term leverage. The result is a familiar pattern: opportunities to apply meaningful pressure from within are recognized, discussed, and ultimately sidelined, leaving the regime’s internal contradictions to fester rather than fracture in ways that might have altered the course of events. Will history repeat itself with the tumult in Tehran over Zarif, or will the leaders in the war against the regime seize an opportunity to divide the enemy against itself?

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By Banafsheh Zand and Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour

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The 2019 detention and rapid release of Press TV anchor Marzieh Hashemi during a visit to the United States passed with little notice. The event was never, in itself, the story. It was merely a moment—brief, procedural, and legally unremarkable—that exposed something far more significant: the existence of a deeply entrenched, transnational system through which the Islamic Regime in Iran recruits, cultivates, and deploys ideological assets across the West. As such, it should have received more notice

What appeared to casual observers as a civil liberties controversy was, in reality, a window into a decades-long strategy. For over forty years, the regime has methodically invested in influence operations designed to penetrate Western societies—not only through espionage in the traditional sense, but through something far more insidious: ideological recruitment disguised as activism, journalism, and cultural exchange. Through this process, people became mentally poisoned through the simple act of consuming information.

At the center of this system lies Press TV, the Islamic Regime’s English-language broadcasting arm, launched in 2007 with the explicit aim of shaping global narratives and countering Western media. It was never intended to function as a conventional news organization. From its inception, it was designed as an instrument of state power, embedded within the broader architecture of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting system, whose leadership had been directly appointed by the Supreme Leader.

The channel’s outward presentation—professional studios, Western-accented presenters, and the aesthetic trappings of legitimate journalism—was carefully constructed to obscure its true function. In practice, Press TV has operated as a conduit for regime propaganda, disinformation, and ideological influence, projecting Tehran’s worldview into Western discourse while simultaneously identifying and cultivating sympathetic audiences. To make a comparison, Press TV is for Tehran what Russia Today is for Moscow.

The most notorious illustration of Press TV’s function was provided by the case of Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari. Arrested during the 2009 post-election protests and held in Evin Prison for 118 days, Bahari was subjected to physical and psychological torture before being forced to deliver a televised confession. That confession, broadcast by Press TV, was presented to international audiences as voluntary testimony.

British regulators later determined that the interview had been conducted under duress, without consent, and in violation of fundamental broadcasting standards. The network was fined and, in 2012, had its license revoked in the United Kingdom after failing to comply with regulatory requirements and continuing to air the coerced material.

This episode was not an aberration. It was a defining revelation of Press TV’s operational ethos. The channel was not merely biased; it was complicit in the machinery of repression itself, serving as a platform through which the regime laundered coerced narratives into the global information space.

Yet despite its expulsion from British airwaves, Press TV did not disappear. It adapted. It moved online, continued broadcasting globally, and maintained a presence in London through digital operations and affiliated networks. Its persistence underscores a key feature of the Islamic Regime’s strategy: resilience through decentralization. When one avenue is closed, another is opened.

Central to the channel’s effectiveness has been its ability to recruit Western political figures of the extreme left and right who lend credibility to its messaging and allow Tehran’s ideas to penetrate milieus far beyond the narrow Muslim audience a purely Khomeiniist line would presumably only appeal to. Among the most prominent were radical British politicians George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn, both of whom hosted or appeared on Press TV programming. Their involvement was not incidental, nor was it symbolic. It was instrumental.

Galloway’s programs on the network were repeatedly found by British regulators to have breached standards of impartiality, reflecting the overtly propagandistic nature of the content he helped produce. Corbyn, for his part, accepted tens of thousands of pounds for appearances on the channel, even as it was implicated in the broadcast of coerced confessions and widely criticized for its alignment with the Iranian regime.

These associations reveal a critical dimension of Press TV’s role: it does not merely broadcast propaganda; it legitimizes it through Western intermediaries. By placing recognizable political figures at the forefront of its programming, the channel blurs the line between state-controlled messaging and independent analysis, creating the illusion of credibility while advancing a tightly controlled narrative.

This model—propaganda cloaked in legitimacy—extends far beyond media.

The case of Marzieh Hashemi exemplifies the next stage in the process. Born Melanie Franklin in the United States, Hashemi converted to Shi’a Islam, relocated to Iran, and became a citizen of the Islamic Republic. Her career trajectory—from American convert to state media figure—mirrors a pattern that has been replicated across multiple contexts.

Her detention in 2019, under a material witness warrant, did not result in charges. Yet the reaction it triggered was immediate and revealing. Figures such as Louis Farrakhan and Cynthia McKinney mobilized in her defense, framing the incident as an act of political persecution.

This response was not spontaneous. It was the activation of an existing network.

For decades, the Islamic Republic has cultivated relationships within African-American communities and self-proclaimed revolutionary political circles, exploiting historical grievances and ideological fault lines. The regime has positioned itself as a champion of anti-colonial struggle and racial justice, even as its own domestic record reflects systemic repression and discrimination.

This strategy is neither accidental nor peripheral. It is central.

The regime’s outreach to African and African-American populations has been sustained through a combination of religious institutions, cultural programs, financial incentives, and media engagement. Organizations such as the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization and Al-Mustafa International University have played key roles in this effort, establishing networks of schools, seminaries, and cultural centers across Africa and beyond.

These institutions function not only as vehicles of soft power, but as recruitment pipelines. They provide ideological training, foster loyalty to the regime, and, in some cases, facilitate the selection of individuals for more direct involvement in state-linked activities.

The results of this strategy are visible in multiple contexts. In Nigeria, for example, Tehran has supported the development of pro-regime Shi’a movements, funded religious infrastructure, and engaged in both overt and covert operations aimed at expanding its influence.

Photo: INMINDS.com

At the same time, the regime has demonstrated a remarkable willingness to align itself with actors across the ideological spectrum. It has collaborated with radical left-wing groups, such as Code Pink, which have actively promoted its narratives under the banner of anti-imperialism. It has engaged with fringe religious figures like Farrakhan, despite profound theological differences. And it has even maintained relationships with far-right and neo-Nazi elements when such alliances serve its strategic interests. More recently, Tehran has engaged with American isolationist conservatives, most notably Tucker Carlson.

This is not ideological inconsistency. It is strategic opportunism.

The Islamic Regime’s guiding principle is not doctrinal purity, but utility. Any individual or group capable of advancing its objectives—whether by amplifying its message, legitimizing its positions, or undermining its adversaries—is considered a potential asset.

In this context, Press TV operates as both a broadcast platform and a recruitment tool. It identifies sympathetic voices, elevates them, and integrates them into a broader network of influence. The transition from commentator to collaborator is often gradual, obscured by layers of ideological alignment and personal engagement.

What begins as participation in a media program can evolve into something far more consequential.

Recent reporting has made clear that what once appeared to be a loose ecosystem of propaganda and ideological alignment has, in fact, matured into something far more structured and operational. A March 2026 investigation revealed that Iranian intelligence-linked networks are actively running a recruitment hub in London, exploiting what British security officials describe as a “permissive environment” to identify, groom, and deploy assets. Individuals are reportedly approached online—often through seemingly innocuous channels—offered money, and gradually drawn into low-level tasks such as surveillance, filming, or information gathering, before being escalated into more serious operational roles. The process mirrors, almost exactly, the ideological funnel long visible through platforms like Press TV: initial exposure, narrative alignment, personal engagement, and eventual use.

What is striking is not simply the existence of such a network, but how seamlessly it connects to the regime’s long-established influence apparatus. The same pathways that once elevated Western voices on Press TV—presenting them as commentators, activists, or journalists—now appear to function as early-stage filters in a broader recruitment pipeline. The boundary between media participation and operational involvement has eroded. What begins as amplification of regime narratives can evolve, incrementally and often invisibly, into direct collaboration with state-linked intelligence structures. In this sense, the London network is not a new phenomenon, but the logical continuation of a strategy that has been unfolding in plain sight for decades.

This represents a shift from influence to penetration.

The same mechanisms that once served primarily to shape narratives are now being leveraged to build operational capabilities within Western societies. The distinction between propaganda and espionage, never entirely clear, is becoming increasingly blurred.

The implications are profound.

What was once dismissed as ideological posturing or fringe activism must now be understood as part of a coordinated strategy with tangible security consequences. Individuals who appear on foreign state media platforms, attend Tehran-sponsored conferences, or participate in ostensibly benign cultural exchanges are not merely expressing opinions. They are operating within a system designed to identify, cultivate, and deploy them.

The Hashemi case, viewed in this light, takes on a different significance. It was not simply about one individual’s detention. It was about the visibility of a network that typically operates in the shadows.

And it demonstrated, with unusual clarity, how quickly that network can be activated.

From Washington to Tehran, from media studios to protest movements, the response followed a familiar pattern. Narratives were constructed, alliances were mobilized, and the machinery of influence moved into action.

This is the Islamic Regime’s true strength - not its military capabilities, nor its economic resources, but its ability to operate within the informational and ideological domains of its adversaries - to embed itself within their societies, exploit their divisions, and turn their own freedoms into instruments of its strategy.

Press TV is not an outlier in this system. It is its most visible manifestation: a channel that broadcasts narratives, recruitment signals, and ideological alignment under the guise of news.

Sources

• The Telegraph, “The Iranian spy recruitment hub operating in London”
  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/28/the-iranian-spy-recruitment-hub-operating-in-london/

• The Guardian, “George Galloway rapped by Ofcom over impartial Press TV chatshows”
  https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/aug/03/george-galloway-ofcom-press-tv

• The Guardian, “Iran’s Press TV loses UK licence”
  https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/jan/20/iran-press-tv-loses-uk-licence

• Jewish Chronicle, “Press TV blames Israel and British royals for Ofcom problems”
  https://www.thejc.com/news/press-tv-blames-israel-and-british-royals-for-ofcom-problems-ay74g8gb

• Wikipedia, “Press TV” (background + Ofcom ruling + Bahari case references)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_TV

• Wikipedia, “George Galloway” (Press TV work, payments, Ofcom breach)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Galloway

• The New Arab, “George Galloway under fire over Press TV show appearance”
  https://www.newarab.com/news/galloway-under-fire-over-press-tv-show-appearance

• ADL / CCDH Report, “State Hate: How Iran’s Press TV Uses Social Media to Promote Anti-Jewish Hatred”
  https://www.adl.org/resources/report/state-hate-how-irans-press-tv-uses-social-media-promote-anti-jewish-hatred

• Ofcom Broadcast Bulletin (example of repeated regulatory scrutiny)
  https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/about-ofcom/bulletins/broadcast-bulletins/2019/issue-375-ofcoms-broadcast-and-on-demand-bulletin.pdf

Listen to the article ☞

The Islamic Republic does not simply censor information in moments of crisis—it engineers the visual field itself. When strikes occur, when buildings collapse, when unrest spreads, ordinary Iranians are pushed into digital silence through throttled internet, surveillance, and the threat of severe punishment for filming or sharing images. In recent years, authorities have gone so far as to warn that documenting sensitive sites or damage can be treated as collaboration with hostile actors. Into that enforced silence steps a narrow, regime-approved media class—photographers and crews tied to outlets like the Islamic regime’s IRI Broadcasting and Press TV—who remain fully connected, mobile, and able to publish almost immediately. The result is a stream of imagery that does not resemble the chaotic flood of raw documentation seen in open societies, but something far more composed: dust suspended mid-air, debris arranged into symbolic ruin, grief captured at precisely the angle that translates best to an international audience. None of this requires inventing suffering; Iran has more than enough of that. What it requires is control—control over who can document, who can transmit, and which moments are elevated into “evidence” for global consumption.

What has drawn increasing scrutiny across Persian and English social media—including diaspora analysts and posts circulated by outlets such as Mihan—is the recurrence of familiar faces across different “strike site” imagery. The same individuals appear days apart, presented as residents or mourners in entirely different locations, recast each time within a new narrative frame. Whether every individual case can be forensically proven is almost beside the point; the pattern itself fits a system built for narrative production. Restrict independent filming, eliminate competing footage, and then flood the space with approved visuals before scrutiny has time to catch up. Under those conditions, repetition is not an accident—it is a byproduct of a controlled casting pool operating inside a restricted environment. The speed and polish of the imagery further reinforce the point: in places where communications infrastructure is supposedly disrupted, high-resolution, emotionally calibrated photographs appear with remarkable consistency, suggesting not spontaneous documentation, but organized access. The first images out become the story, and by the time discrepancies are noticed—if they are noticed at all—the narrative has already hardened.

This model is not unique to Iran, but Iran has refined it with particular discipline. In Gaza and southern Lebanon, media access has long operated under the influence or control of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, where affiliated platforms like Al-Manar function as extensions of political messaging rather than independent journalism. This dynamic has been examined directly in documentaries such as The Road to Jenin by French-Israeli journalist and filmmaker, Pierre Rehov, a counter-investigative documentary that set out to challenge widely circulated claims from the 2002 Jenin battle and, in doing so, highlighted cases where scenes were allegedly staged, reconstructed, or misleadingly presented for media consumption. The film itself remains controversial, but its core implication is difficult to dismiss: in tightly controlled environments, imagery is not merely captured—it is shaped. The underlying principle is consistent across all three arenas: when access is restricted, when filming is permission-based, and when affiliated media dominate distribution, imagery ceases to be neutral. It becomes an instrument.

That is the crucial distinction too often missed in international coverage. A photograph can be real and still be manipulated in meaning. A grieving civilian can be genuinely mourning and still be placed within a curated visual sequence designed to convey a specific political message. The regime’s method is to select which suffering is visible, which is amplified, and how it is framed. In a country where independent journalists are constrained, citizens are silenced, and the digital space is intermittently shut down, the images that emerge are not the product of open observation. They are the product of controlled access.

The Khomeiniists have used the tools of media manipulation since their rise to power in 1978-79. They themselves revealed some of their tricks in a training manual for Islamist militants written in the early 1980s by the late Ayatollah Montazeri, in which he states “here are the techniques the revolutionaries employed in order to destroy the satanic regime of the Shah.” Montazeri wrote that Islamists should create a “psychosis of the blood” which would act as a “powerful drug” on the masses, provoking their anger. He recommends doing this by, among other actions, covering the bodies of demonstrators with mercurochrome so it would appear as if they’ve been shot; arranging fake funerals with empty coffins for journalists to witness; convincing the press that non-existing street battles are occurring by using audiotapes of gunfire amplified by loudspeakers. These tactics worked to great effect during the Islamic Revolution and the Regime has only continued to further develop them.

Iran has built a system in which reality is filtered at the source. The public is blacked out, the loyal are empowered, and the outside world is fed a steady stream of emotionally optimized “post-impact” visuals that arrive too quickly, too cleanly, and too consistently to be purely organic. Social media comparisons—whether highlighting repeated faces or improbable visual continuity—are not anomalies; they are signals pointing toward a larger architecture of narrative control. What the world receives from regime channels is therefore not simple documentation of events as they unfold. It is the output of a system designed to shape perception under conditions of enforced silence. This is not documentation. It is production.

January 19, 2019

By Banafsheh Zand and Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour

Originally published in The Free Iranian (now offline)

Marzieh Hashemi, a Press TV presenter, is accused of recruiting spies for Iran

The detention and quick release of Press TV anchor Marzieh Hashemi in the US this month, and the international forces Tehran rallied together to demonstrate on her behalf, have put a spotlight on the over 40-year effort the Khomeiniists have made to actively court and recruit Africans, African-Americans, and political extremists across the world to their side. These efforts, which began even before the regime came into power, have achieved great success in gaining support and agents for itself by exploiting racial tensions, anti-colonialist feelings, and the Muslim faith among Africans and African-Americans. Most of these “useful idiots,” to use Lenin’s word for a pawn, do not understand that they are only being played by a cynical and power-hungry cabal that will do anything or use anyone to achieve their goals.

Arrested by the FBI at a St. Louis airport on January 15^th, Hashemi was born Melanie Franklin into an African-American Christian family in 1959. Hashemi converted to Shi’a Islam as a student, and has lived and worked in Iran since 2008. Her husband is Iranian, and she has become a citizen of the Islamic Republic. In St. Louis to film a documentary on the Black Lives Matter movement for Press TV, the FBI detained Hashemi under a material witness warrant, meaning she was not accused of a crime, but was obligated to provide testimony for an ongoing criminal investigation that hasn’t been disclosed to the public.

One of the first voices to speak out in Hashemi’s defense was Louis Farrakhan, leader of the pseudo-Muslim sect the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan frequently travels to Iran, meets with regime leaders, receives money from them, and spreads their anti-Semitic and anti-western conspiratorial worldview. Hashemi interviewed Farrakhan during his most recent trip to Tehran, in November to commemorate the anniversary of the US embassy seizure. Despite the fact that the Nation of Islam’s teachings are considered heretical by all Muslim scholars, the Khomeiniist clerics have never made an issue of it or questioned the Nation’s religious purity, as Farrakhan and his group have proven themselves to be of great use to the regime. In addition to the stature he enjoys among some everyday African Americans, Farrakhan has served as a link between the regime and some American Democratic politicians, most notably Keith Ellison. Thus, he receives red carpet welcomes in Tehran while more traditionalist Shi’a clerics who have raised issues regarding Khomeini’s and Khamenei’s interpretations of Islamic law have been imprisoned and exiled.

An additional voice quickly raised in Hashemi’s support was that of former Georgia congressperson and radical leftist firebrand, Cynthia McKinney. McKinney has been a perennial supporter of the Tehran regime, dating at least back to her association with Ramsey Clark’s (one of the figures during the Carter administration who helped the regime come into power) ANSWER coalition. In 2010, she attended a dinner hosted in New York by then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for “American social justice activists” i.e. leaders of the US’s extreme left. The dinner occurred at the same time as Ahmadinejad was seeking to enhance the regime’s influence in Africa.

In her statement on the Hashemi affair, amidst the typical denunciations of “American imperialism” and “Zionism,” McKinney referenced 1950s Black French leftist intellectual Frantz Fanon’s writings on “the colonization of the mind and body.” One of the primary influences on left wing third world politics, McKinney’s mentioning Fanon is significant, due to the fact that his ideas directly influenced the 1979 Khomeini ‘revolution’ through their interpretation into the Iranian context by Jalal Al’e Ahmad and Ali Shariati. Via Al’e Ahmad’ and Shariati’s refashioning of Shi’ism into a rallying force for ‘class struggle’ and ‘anti-western imperialism,’ based on Fanon’s concepts, many educated, leftist, formerly secular Iranian intellectuals and students were drawn to Islamic radicalism. It was also through Fanon’s contacts, which included Jean-Paul Sartre and other western notable leftist thinkers, that the Khomeini movement during the 1970s was able to win quick alliances and propaganda for itself through the international radical left wing and student movements.

One of these radical left-wing groups that still maintains close ties to Tehran is Code PINK. Just this month, in addition to joining the Nation of Islam at protests for Marzieh Hashemi in Washington, D.C., the group sent yet another delegation to Iran itself to express support for the regime. Iranian activists have long been monitoring this group’s propaganda campaigns on Tehran’s behalf, which have gone to the point of deceitfully manipulating photographs and Internet articles. CodePINK’s founder, a wealthy heiress named Medea Benjamin, has been helpful to the regime by getting even feminists, such as Gloria Steneim and Eve Ensler, to attend events in favor of Tehran, using the leftist trope of “anti-imperialism.”

The main link through which Americans are exposed to radical leftist worldviews are, of course, the universities, and it is hence not a surprise that Tehran has for years been funding multiple US higher education institutions, endowing Middle Eastern and Iranian studies faculties, and ensuring that students learning about the region only hear the regime’s perspective. In August 2017, a New York congressman demanded the federal government investigate the multi-million dollar contributions made to various universities by the Alavi Foundation, the US branch of the Bonyad’e Mostazafan, one of the largest Khomeinist clerical holding companies in Iran. In addition to disseminating biased information, these regime-funded ‘scholars’ emerged as key voices promoting the Obama administration’s 2015 JCPOA nuclear that allowed Tehran to exponentially expand its power across the Middle East.

The Black Lives Matter movement that Hashemi was filming has also been courted by Tehran for several years. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on several occasions has tweeted support for it, and in 2015, activists from the movement received an all-expenses-paid-for trip to Tehran from the regime to speak at a conference on ‘American police brutality.’

The most well-known African-American who found a career in Iran at Press TV is, of course, Dawud Salauhuddin, aka Hassan Abdurrahman, born David Belfield. Belfield has been a fugitive from the United States since 1980, when he assassinated an imperial Iranian diplomat on the orders of a Khomeiniist intelligence cell that had infiltrated and recruited a number of African-American Muslim converts. Belfield edited Press TV’s English language website for three years, from its inception in 2006 until his identity was exposed in 2009.

Nigeria’s Tehran-aided Islamic Movement held a demonstration demanding the US government release Marzieh Hashemi on Friday, January 18^th, in the country’s north-western city of Kano. The regime has been seeking power and influence in that country for quite some time. As journalist Banafsheh Zand noted in a 2011 article:

In July 2010, after the world began to see the Iranian regime for what it is, Ahmadinejad(the former regime president) traveled to Nigeria and Mali in an attempt to forge new alliances with African states, hoping to do damage control on Iran’s growing isolation…..The Iranian regime has offered the Nigerian government a bribe, and despite everything, the Nigerian government seems happy to accept it.

In a press conference in Abuja, Nigerian ambassador to Tehran Al-Haj Abubakr Chika told reporters that Iran has offered Nigeria a one billion dollar “loan” in order to help Nigeria with a trade and economic development project. Chika added: ‘This loan will strengthen and expand trade and economic relations between Iran and Nigeria.”

These moves came after Tehran was discovered to be conducting illegal arms trafficking in Nigeria: “In late October 2010, Nigerian intelligence officials discovered weapons in 13 shipping containers marked building materials in Lagos’ Apapa Port. Following an investigation, Nigerian agents learned that Iran was behind the shipment of arms. At first it was assumed that the shipment was going to the Gaza Strip, however further investigations revealed that the weapons were bound for Gambia under the supervision of a group of Nigerian officials.

The shipment had been organized through International Trade and General Construction, an IRGC front company. It was picked up from the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas by CMA CGM (a French shipping company) and transported to Nigeria.

After the discovery of the shipment, the Nigerian government reported Iran to the United Nations Security Council, and Gambia has cut all diplomatic ties with Tehran.

A fall 2018 Middle East Quarterly article by Hassan Dai went into further details regarding Tehran’s activities in Nigeria, and gave some background information on the above-mentioned Islamic Movement there:

To win the hearts and minds of African Muslims, the Iranian regime and its institutions organize conferences, conduct religious and political events, work with local partners, and run more than one hundred Islamic centers, schools, seminaries, and mosques in more than thirty African countries ….. In addition, Tehran has offered financial and economic incentives to African governments….. The two main organizations spearheading this quest for soft power are the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization, which operates through cultural attachés at Iranian embassies, and the Al-Mustafa International University, which trains foreign clerics and missionaries around the world….. They also provide the regime with a recruiting pool for the IRGC’s Quds Force and other Iranian institutions responsible for terrorism or military activities abroad.

……Al-Mustafa and ICRO work together to organize al-Quds rallies in African countries such as Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Uganda.

Al-Mustafa’s most important African centers are located in Nigeria, a country with several million Shiites, where the university operates five schools and seminaries with nearly one thousand students from Nigeria and neighboring states.

In December 2015, during a bloody government crackdown, the Nigerian army attacked the centers of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria—a pro-Tehran Shiite organization with thousands of members—killed dozens of activists, and arrested its leader Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky. Since the crackdown, Al-Mustafa’s Nigeria operations have been under government scrutiny.”

In spite of all this rhetoric and effort made to promote itself as the champion of oppressed black people across the globe, the regime has no problems with also allying itself with white supremacists and open neo-Nazis. The appearance of Hitlerphiles such as David Duke, David Irving, and Michele Renouf at the regime’s annual Holocaust denial conferences has received wide press coverage. Less well known is the regime’s outreach to extreme conservative Catholics in the US, among them anti-semitic writer and theologian E. Michael Jones, who has visited Iran and appeared on Press TV numerous times. These far-right ties are not just a recent development.

Modern Islamic fundamentalism from its beginnings was deeply tied to global fascism, and after their defeat in World War II, many ex-Nazis found sanctuary and new leaders to follow in Islamists. It was support from ex-Nazis that crucially aided Khomeini’s rise, his bills during his Paris exile were paid by Francois Genoud, a Swiss neo-Nazi lawyer who was the heir to Adolf Hitler’s last writings. Genoud founded Al-Taqwa bank to aid Islamist movements, and after his death, the bank was run by Swiss Nazi and Muslim convert Ahmed Huber, who used it to help fund pro-Tehran terrorist movements, including Hezbollah. General Otto Remer, a Nazi officer who saved Adolf Hitler’s life in 1944 and then became a neo-Nazi leader in Germany after the war, publicly stated his admiration for Khomeini in an interview with an Islamist newspaper shortly before his death during the 1990s. The regime today continues to have close relations with both German neo-Nazis, and Italian neo-Fascists.

It is evident that at least some in the Khomeiniist leadership share the racist views of their friends, as evidenced by the case of Mohammad Javad Larijani, who referred to Barack Obama in 2010 using the Farsi equivalent of the N-word. Internal regime media directed towards only Iranian audiences have also been known to depict black people in a derogatory way.

Marzieh Hashemi was released on January 23^rd after giving her required testimony to a Washington, D.C. grand jury, and she returned to Iran on January 30^th. Amid all the rumors and questions surrounding this incident, which is sealed by the American courts, the relatively quick manner in which she was dealt with and then freed has led some to claim that Hashemi might actually be a US intelligence agent, whose work and propaganda activities for Tehran are merely a clever means of infiltrating and gathering information about the regime’s inner workings. The fact that she was given a welcome home parade on her arrival, just as Shahram Amiri, a nuclear scientist who claimed he was kidnapped by the CIA in 2010, was, is spiking questions regarding what Hashemi’s ultimate fate will be. Amiri was also treated as a hero upon his return to Iran, but soon afterwards he was imprisoned and ultimately executed on charges of spying for the US.