The Islamic Republic's most powerful security coordinator just said the quiet part out loud. Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and Mojtaba Khamenei’s representative on the body, made the extraordinary remark on state television while arguing that Iran was attacked despite remaining in the NPT and accepting international nuclear inspections.
A proposal to withdraw Iran from the NPT is now being pursued in parliament, while lawmakers have repeatedly demanded that the Islamic Republic revise its defense doctrine and move toward nuclear weapons. This is no longer fringe rhetoric. The official responsible for coordinating the regime's national security apparatus is publicly making the case for why Iran should pursue the bomb. For years, the Islamic Republic insisted its nuclear program was peaceful and that it had no interest in nuclear weapons. Its own senior officials are increasingly destroying that claim themselves.
Esmail Saqab Esfahani, a presidential deputy responsible for fuel optimization and strategic energy management, says both major political wings of the regime are involved in fuel smuggling. He went even further, warning that if he tried to shut down their operations, “they would smash the windows of my office.”
This is not small-time border smuggling. Iranian officials have estimated that roughly 20–30 MILLION liters of fuel are smuggled every day. Moving fuel on that scale requires organized access to distribution, storage, transportation and border networks. The economics are staggering. Iran sells heavily subsidized fuel domestically for a fraction of regional prices, creating an enormous arbitrage opportunity potentially worth billions of dollars annually.
And now a senior government official is effectively saying politically connected networks inside the Islamic Republic are feeding from it and are powerful enough to threaten the officials tasked with stopping them.
Meanwhile, ordinary Iranians are told shortages, deficits and economic misery are entirely the product of sanctions. The regime subsidizes the fuel with public money, connected networks allegedly siphon it out of the country for enormous profits, and Iranians are left with the shortages and the bill. This is not corruption around the edges of the Islamic Republic. It is corruption embedded inside the system itself.
https://x.com/TheIranWatcher/status/2091575095726883117
What's new here isn't that massive quantities are being smuggled,
(this is from 2024: Pakistan's intelligence agencies have disclosed in their joint report a notable surge in the smuggling of Iranian oil within the country.
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/iranian-oil-smuggling-into-pakistan-exposes-official-terrorist-ties-801531 )
but that Iranian authorities are reporting it.