Trump’s top security aides hold secret Camp David talks on Iran, Yemen — Axios

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Central Bank shoots it into its own goal’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inflation approaches 90 percent

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

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

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

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

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

Wages fall behind as prices surge

The pressure is also increasingly visible among salaried workers.

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

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

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

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

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

The organization documented the unlawful killing of 95 Kurdish protesters and bystanders, including 13 children, across 17 counties in Kurdistan, Kermanshah and West Azerbaijan provinces.

Its findings describe repeated patterns of lethal force used to disperse demonstrations, punish protesters and deter further gatherings.

Among those killed was Yahya Rahimi, a 30-year-old man shot in his car in Sanandaj on October 8, 2022, apparently in retaliation for sounding his horn in solidarity with protesters while stuck in traffic.

Sources interviewed by Amnesty said plain-clothes agents smashed Rahimi’s car windows. Shortly after, an agent aimed a shotgun at his head and fired metal pellets from about half a metre away.

Amnesty verified five videos supporting accounts of the killing and reviewed his burial certificate, which recorded extensive brain damage and shattered skull bones caused by a fast-moving projectile.

Wounded protesters left without help

The investigation also documented cases in which security forces obstructed assistance after shooting people.

Shahou Bahmani, 36, was fatally shot in Sanandaj on November 17, 2022, during protests following a memorial gathering for people killed earlier in the uprising.

According to eyewitnesses cited by Amnesty, Bahmani remained bleeding for 30 to 40 minutes while security forces fired at protesters trying to help him. People took him to hospital after the forces withdrew. He was declared dead shortly after arrival.

“The agents would shoot anyone in their sight,” one witness, identified as Iman, told Amnesty.

The organization reviewed two videos showing Bahmani wounded and bleeding as people attempted to assist him, as well as his death certificate.

In Kermanshah, Minoo Majidi was killed on September 20 while fleeing police Special Cohorts on motorcycles. Amnesty said the agents chased protesters and bystanders while repeatedly firing shotguns loaded with metal pellets, hitting Majidi at close range.

Bystanders were also killed. Fereydoon Faraji was shot in Baneh on October 27 while looking out of a window at his workplace as security forces fired at people fleeing the crackdown.

A more militarized response

Amnesty recorded 35 unlawful killings in Kurdistan province, 19 in Kermanshah and 41 in West Azerbaijan.

It found that forces in the three provinces adopted a more militarized response than elsewhere, frequently deploying military-grade firearms soon after protests began.

Weapons included assault rifles, designated marksman rifles, sub-machine guns and heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks.

The organization said the lethal force in the documented killings was used to disperse, intimidate or punish people, rather than defend against an imminent threat of death or serious injury.

Kurdish and Baluchi victims together accounted for about 62% of the 326 people Amnesty recorded as killed during protest dispersals or in areas with a militarized security presence.

That figure includes 106 Baluchi protesters and bystanders killed in Sistan and Baluchistan.

Amnesty concluded that the disproportionately high toll could not be explained by protest size alone.

It found that murder and torture against Kurdish and Baluchi protesters were committed with discriminatory intent on political and ethnic grounds, meeting the elements of the crime against humanity of persecution.

The uprising began after the death in custody of Zhina Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman arrested by morality police in Tehran in September 2022.

Amnesty said it sought comments from Iran’s leadership and senior officials before publishing its investigation on September 16, 2026. It had received no responses by publication.

Rahman Salehi, 35, and Salam Ahmadyan, 36, were arrested on September 20, on the eve of Yom Kippur, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter and charged with preparing or assisting an act of terrorism.

Police allege the two men were in contact with a third party overseas who may have been in Iran, though authorities have not publicly established that the Iranian state directed the alleged plot.

Vicki Evans, the senior national coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, said: “This week also brought into sharp focus some of the wider threats being projected into the UK from Iran.”

The case follows a separate suspected plot near RAF Fairford, a British airbase used by US bombers in operations against Iran.

Five British men were arrested near the base on September 27 on suspicion of terrorism and explosives offences, while a dual UK-Iranian national was detained days later.

In March, police arrested four men suspected of spying for Iran and conducting surveillance of Jewish targets in London, while MI5 previously said it had disrupted 20 Iran-linked plots in Britain over a 12-month period.

In July, Britain formally designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a threat to national security, making public support for the organization or assistance to it punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

The IRGC is one of the Islamic Republic’s most powerful military and political institutions. Its overseas Quds Force oversees Tehran’s relationships with allied armed groups and has been accused by British authorities of directing operations against dissidents, journalists and Jewish or Israeli-linked targets in Europe.

British authorities said Quds Force members were behind the Islamic Movement of Companions of the Right which claimed responsibility for seven attacks this year against Persian-language media and locations linked to Jewish and Israeli communities in Britain.

Those incidents included an antisemitic arson attack that damaged four ambulances belonging to the Jewish emergency service Hatzola in Golders Green, north London, on March 23.

Education Ministry spokesman Ali Farhadi said Friday that reports of teacher resignations were “not true” and accused unspecified actors of trying to undermine in-person education.

“The resignation of teachers is a rumor,” Farhadi told the Tasnim news agency, saying teachers and students had welcomed the return to classrooms across the country, including in southern provinces such as Hormozgan.

But the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations has offered a sharply different account, saying numerous videos and reports of resignations have emerged from different parts of the country in recent weeks.

The council said teachers were leaving because of a combination of wages below the poverty line, worsening living conditions, administrative pressures and what it described as the securitization of the profession, including dismissals, suspensions, arrests and legal cases against teachers and union activists.

It warned that experienced teachers were being driven out of classrooms by policies that had pushed the education system toward decline.

Videos circulating on social media in recent days have shown teachers announcing their resignations and citing financial hardship, workload and a lack of recognition for their work.

The dispute comes as Iran’s education system is already grappling with teacher shortages and longstanding discontent over pay and working conditions.

Teachers have repeatedly protested over salaries and benefits, including at a demonstration outside the Planning and Budget Organization in Tehran in September.

Labor activists have also warned that financial pressures are forcing some teachers to work multiple jobs, while shortages of teaching staff are affecting the quality of education.

The resignations have emerged against a wider backdrop of pressure on teachers and union activists, who in recent years have faced arrests, prison sentences, dismissal and suspension from work.

The Coordinating Council rejected the government’s portrayal of the unrest in schools as the product of outside agitation, arguing that the discontent stems instead from conditions within the education system itself.

Whether the resignations amount to the “wave” described by the teachers’ council is difficult to establish. The pressures it says are driving teachers out are considerably easier to document.

Before trading closed on Wednesday, the final working day of the week in Iran, the Tehran Stock Exchange reached a record 7,766,000 points.

The market has risen 109 percent since the start of the Iranian year, while small investors poured roughly 4.7 trillion tomans, or about $19 million, into shares in a single day.

Iran’s prominent economic daily Donya-ye Eghtesad argues that the surge is not necessarily a sign of confidence. People are buying shares as political and economic risks rise, it says, while savers are also moving into gold, coins and dollars, all of which hit record highs on the same day.

The open-market dollar has passed 250,000 tomans, while measured in dollars, the stock market remains well below previous peaks.

At least part of the rally therefore appears to reflect a search for protection against the falling rial rather than confidence in the underlying economy.

Similar pressures are visible in consumer markets, where prices for cheaper mobile phones rose 33 to 42 percent in a month, outpacing the currency’s decline as import quotas, registration rules and fees hit lower-priced devices particularly hard.

Earlier this week, the government announced that the central bank would sell up to $2 billion in cash. The first $1 billion tranche is being sold through banks, with adults holding a national ID card allowed to buy up to $10,000.

The government’s own newspaper, Iran, warned that selling cash may slow the dollar’s rise but cannot reverse the underlying trend while inflation, budget pressures and political uncertainty remain unresolved.

Tehran’s prosecutor also ordered action against “market disruptors,” including online channels publishing exchange rates. Eyewitnesses on Ferdowsi Avenue, the capital’s main currency-trading hub, reported shorter queues and more sellers than buyers on September 30.

The respite was brief. On October 1, the open-market dollar rose 1.49 percent to 2,593,000 rials, its highest level in a year.

The central bank has been steadily raising the official exchange rate, from about 137,000 to more than 174,000 tomans this year, to encourage exporters to repatriate their foreign-currency earnings. Even so, the open-market rate remains much higher.

Because official imports are priced at the exchange-center rate, increases can feed through into the cost of imported goods. They also reduce the real value of the government’s electronic food-voucher scheme unless the state spends more rials to maintain it.

Hardline outlets including Kayhan and the IRGC-linked Javan portray the rial’s fall as part of Washington’s economic war. But their criticism is also directed at Iranian policymakers.

Kayhan calls currency sales a repeatedly failed policy and a waste of resources in wartime. It wants the government to reverse its economic liberalization and use judicial and security pressure to force exporters to repatriate their foreign-currency earnings.

The criticism exposes an argument within the establishment over how Tehran should respond: spend scarce foreign currency trying to contain demand, or preserve it while tightening controls over exporters and the domestic market.

That argument is becoming more urgent as the US blockade curtails Iranian oil exports, depriving Tehran of a major source of foreign currency.

Diplomacy could provide some relief, with Iran seeking access to frozen assets and an easing of sanctions and the blockade as part of negotiations with Washington.

For now, however, the clearest signal comes from the markets themselves. Stocks, gold and the dollar are all setting records. The simultaneous rush into them suggests that for many Iranians, almost anything that might preserve its value increasingly looks preferable to holding rials.