Tehran design event closed after online video triggers hardline backlash

“The Houthis are currently facing a crisis of options and priorities, pressing internal challenges, and a complex regional landscape that does not allow them much, especially after indications of a shift in some of Tehran’s approaches towards the countries of the region,” the outlet wrote on Thursday.

Quds Force commander Abdolreza Shahlaei returned to Sanaa after previously being recalled to Iran, the report said.

“The Revolutionary Guards and experts who are present as jihadist assistants to the Houthis do not fill this strategic void. They are essentially an extension and reflection of the confusion that exists in Tehran… The Iranians were forced to return the prominent leader, Abdolreza Shahlaei, to Sana’a after October 7.”

Shahlaei is one of the Revolutionary Guard’s most enigmatic commanders, and Iran International reported in March that the Islamic Republic had neither confirmed nor denied his existence.

The United States has imposed sanctions on Shahlaei and set a $15 million reward for information on his network and activities. US officials say he survived a drone strike the same night former Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani was killed in Baghdad and remains central to Iran’s Yemen operations.

A separate report on Friday in the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat quoted senior Yemeni political sources as saying that Iran is increasing military and security support to compensate for what they called its setbacks elsewhere.

Recent Israeli strikes exposed major security failures within the Houthis, damaging the group’s standing, according to source speaking to Asharq Al-Awsat.

Every society has its elite. But few countries exhibit as stark a divide between rulers and ruled as the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The leadership in Tehran still insists that the system built after the 1979 revolution is righteous, independent, and morally superior to the West. They proclaim that Iran is self-sufficient and culturally immune to foreign influence. They demand that ordinary citizens remain loyal, endure hardship, and treat isolation as virtue.

And yet, when it comes to their own families, the narrative implodes.

The offspring of Iran’s most powerful political, military, and clerical figures overwhelmingly choose to live somewhere else—most often in the United States, Canada, Europe or Australia. They study at Western universities, work in Western corporations, and enjoy Western freedoms.

This is neither accident nor anomaly. It is a pattern so consistent that Iranians have given it a name: the diaspora of privilege.

A list that goes on and on

Consider the Larijani family, long central to the architecture of the Islamic Republic. Ali Larijani—head of state television, nuclear negotiator, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and a twelve-year speaker of parliament—has spent years warning the public about the dangers of American influence.

Yet his daughter, a medical doctor, lives and practices in Ohio. She built a life in the very country her father depicts as an existential threat.

Or take Yahya Rahim-Safavi, former commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guard and one of the supreme leader’s closest advisers—who helped define the concept of “cultural resistance” and oversaw enforcement of compulsory hijab.

His daughter now lives freely in Australia, enjoying precisely the choices her father spent decades denying Iranian women.

Even families associated with the Islamic Republic’s “moderate” or “reformist” wings follow the same path.

The two daughters of former president Mohammad Khatami pursued higher education and lived for extended periods abroad.

So did a niece of former president Hassan Rouhani—herself the daughter of a presidential aide and senior nuclear negotiator. Factional differences vanish when opportunity abroad beckons.

The contradiction repeats. Masoumeh Ebtekar, one of the spokespeople of the 1979 hostage-takers, spent years justifying the takeover of the US Embassy. Decades later, she sent her son to study in Los Angeles—hardly the den of decadence and corruption described in her generation’s propaganda.

The Nobakht siblings, both accomplished physicians in top American institutions, followed a similar path. Their father and uncle held senior roles shaping Iran’s budgetary and economic policies—policies that left Iranian hospitals under-funded and understaffed. Yet their children built world-class medical careers abroad, in systems defined by stability and scientific freedom.

Even the grandchildren of Iran’s most senior clerics are part of the same exodus.

Zahra Takhshid, granddaughter of late Ayatollah Mohammadreza Mahdavi-Kani—one-time head of the Assembly of Experts and custodian of the regime’s ideological purity—now teaches law at an American university.

Her work focuses on rights, freedoms, and digital media: topics that would collide instantly with state censorship at home.

A transactional exodus

Taken together, these examples expose a political truth the regime cannot conceal: Iran’s rulers do not trust the system they impose on the public.

If they did, their children would stay—study in its universities, rely on its hospitals, and build their futures in the society their parents govern. But they don’t. They leave, quietly and steadily.

This exodus is not ideological. It is transactional. When you are connected to power, the world is your oyster.

While ordinary Iranians face sanctions, inflation, unemployment and severe limits on travel and opportunity, the children of high-ranking officials glide past these barriers. Western passports, long-term visas, elite degrees and high-paying jobs become accessible through money, influence and political insulation.

This is not the diaspora produced by repression or economic collapse—the path millions of ordinary Iranians have taken out of necessity. This is something else entirely: a ruling-class diaspora born of privilege and contradiction.

Louder than words

The noble-born are of course fully entitled to live wherever they wish and pursue the futures they desire. But their choices, their quiet escape, speaks louder than their parents’ slogans.

When the sons and daughters of ministers, generals, parliament leaders and revolutionary icons choose Los Angeles over Tehran, Cleveland over Qom, Melbourne over Mashhad, and Washington over Isfahan, they deliver a verdict more powerful than any opposition manifesto: The system is not good enough, not even for its architects.

The Islamic Republic demands loyalty from the public, but its own heirs refuse to live under the conditions created for everyone else. This is the heart of the hypocrisy: restriction is mandatory for ordinary Iranians, freedom is hereditary for the elite.

A government whose children flee its ideology cannot claim legitimacy. A revolution abandoned by its heirs cannot claim success. And a system that exports its privileged offspring to the West while confining its own people at home is not a model—it is a contradiction waiting to collapse under the weight of its own lies.

This is according to text and audio notes sent to Iran International TV by its audience in Tehran.

Number of households report barer tables, school truancy and outright hunger, with blame leveled at the government for policies that have turned affordable meals into luxuries.

Iran International asked its audience to share and submit messages on the effects of rising costs on their daily grocery shopping.

Families, from urban renters to rural households, describe slashing most of their food budgets, surviving on basics like low-quality rice, potatoes and bread while dreaming of proteins long unaffordable.

"Staples like red meat, chicken and fish are gone. If this government stays, other foods will vanish gradually, like it or not," another message said.

"The majority—or like 80%—of food basket items eliminated: chicken, eggs, dairy and tons more. The remaining 20%? A hard struggle to provide," one message said.

'Scarce list'

Some listed the items they had to cut from their grocery lists due to high prices and lack of affordability.

"We had to cut chicken, eggs, rice, fish, shrimp. Also nuts and dried fruits, including pistachios, hazelnuts; high-priced fruits, sweets are out," another message said.

Messages indicate that the most essential parts of daily life are vanishing from consumers' baskets.

"Meat, fish, rice, chicken, plus beans and fruits are all out. No way we could afford such luxuries," one message said.

"Every imaginable item gone from our basket. No meat in six months. Life's brutal—my 16-year-old son dropped out of school to work. Still can't cover daily needs. God curse the clerical government and Ali Khamenei."

A water shortage in Iran is becoming more widespread with people reporting pressure drops and low-quality water even as Tehran officials deny reports of rationing.

Pollution levels in 14 cities across Khuzestan had reached the red category, meaning the air is unsafe for all groups, Iran’s national air-quality monitoring system reported on Saturday. Four other cities were listed as orange, posing risks to vulnerable populations.

Concentrations of airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns, according to the report, had exceeded permissible limits at many monitoring stations, pushing much of the province into hazardous territory.

Rising hospital visits and wider spread

Khuzestan has faced repeated episodes of severe pollution in recent days. Farhad Soltani, acting deputy for treatment at Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, said hospital visits had risen sharply.

“The number of patients coming to hospitals increased 15 to 20 percent in October compared with the same period last year, and 20 to 25 percent in November,” he said, warning that pollution in Ahvaz and Khuzestan had reached a point where “the entire population is affected.”

Air quality has also deteriorated in other major cities. Iranian media reported that the air in the religious city of Mashhad was classified as unhealthy for sensitive groups for an eighth consecutive day on Saturday. The situation was driven by continued use of fossil fuels in industry, power plants and vehicles, combined with stagnant atmospheric conditions, Tasnim news agency wrote.

Isfahan choked for eleventh straight day

In central Iran, air quality in Isfahan remained in the red category for the eleventh consecutive day on Saturday, according to local monitoring data.

Pollution levels in the metropolis and some of its neighboring cities have risen to the point that the air is now deemed unsafe for the general population. Experts warned that conditions could deteriorate further in the coming days, citing the persistence of stagnant weather patterns and rising pollutant concentrations.

58,975 people in Iran had died from causes attributed to air pollution in the past Iranian year, equivalent to 161 deaths a day and around seven every hour, said Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisi last week. Pollution-linked mortality, he added, had imposed an estimated $17.2 billion in economic losses over the same period.

“Our rapid-reaction units tracked and seized the vessel following a judicial order to confiscate its cargo,” the IRGC Navy said.

The IRGC-affiliated Fars news said, citing its own sources, that the ship was carrying about 30,000 tons of petrochemical products owned by Iran that were being transferred illegally to Singapore.

Fars added that, according to its account, the tanker was sailing under a Marshall Islands flag and that the offenders were Iranian individuals or companies accused of trying to export the cargo unlawfully.

The ship, the IRGC said, was intercepted and directed to an Iranian anchorage “for investigation into violations,” adding that a full inspection of the cargo and documentation found the vessel “to be in breach for transporting unauthorized goods.”

The operation, the statement added, was conducted “under legal authority and to protect national interests,” with further details dependent on a complete review of the ship’s records.

Maritime sources earlier reported IRGC involvement

Reuters reported on Friday that the tanker had been seized in the Gulf of Oman and steered toward Iranian waters after passing the Strait of Hormuz, citing maritime security sources. Two sources told the agency the vessel changed course toward Iran’s coast after small boats approached it off the UAE port of Khor Fakkan, and that units linked to the Guards were involved.

Columbia Shipmanagement, the operator of Talara, said it lost contact with the vessel as it sailed from Sharjah to Singapore with a load of high-sulphur gasoil. The tanker is owned by Cyprus-based Pasha Finance.

The ship is owned by Cyprus-based Pasha Finance.

Ambrey, a maritime risk firm, said the tanker was about 22 nautical miles east of Khor Fakkan when three small boats approached before it veered off its course in the Gulf of Oman, calling the event “likely highly targeted.”

Broader tensions over past seizures

Iran has continued to pursue legal action related to earlier maritime incidents. In late October, judiciary spokesman Asghar Jahangir said prosecutors had issued an indictment in the case of a container ship seized by the Revolutionary Guards last year in the Strait of Hormuz.

The ship’s Israeli-born owner, he said, was charged with financing terrorism, alleging transfers worth about 1.07 million dollars. According to the judiciary, the money supported Israeli military activities and the case was handled by Tehran’s international affairs prosecution office “in line with international and domestic law.”

The vessel, the MSC Aries, was flying a Portuguese flag when it was intercepted in April 2024. Reuters reported at the time that it was operated by Swiss-based MSC and leased from Gortal Shipping, an affiliate of Israel’s Zodiac Maritime, partly owned by Israeli businessman Eyal Ofer.

Iran has stepped up maritime enforcement in recent months, especially in waters near the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, where fuel smuggling remains a persistent issue due to price differences with neighboring countries.

The IRGC regularly announces such seizures as part of what it calls efforts to curb fuel trafficking in the region, a key route for global oil shipments. Iran has also seized tankers over maritime disputes or in response to international sanctions enforcement.