British couple jailed in Iran are on hunger strike, son says

“Damascus will now actively assist us in confronting and dismantling the remnants of ISIS, the IRGC, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist networks, and will stand as a committed partner in the global effort to secure peace,” Barrack wrote, saying the pledge came during Syrian President Ahmed al Sharaa’s visit to the White House, the first by a Syrian head of state since independence.

Al Sharaa told the Washington Post this week that Syria had driven out Iranian and Hezbollah forces and was ready for a new phase with the US after decades of strain. He said Syria and Israel were in direct talks and had made progress toward a deal, and he said Israel should pull back to its pre Dec 8 lines to seal an accord. He said President Donald Trump backed the push.

He added that Syria wanted a working tie with Russia to secure its vote at the UN Security Council even as the two sides tried to settle the future of former president Bashar al Assad, who is in Russia. He said Syria wanted to bring Assad to justice and would press its case.

Washington has suspended most sanctions on Syria for 180 days while keeping curbs tied to Iran and Russia. US officials removed al Sharaa from a terror list before the visit as part of the effort to reopen ties.

Jamaran news website said the incident occurred in the capital's subway system, but provided no names, charges, or further details on the arrests.

A video circulating on social media showed the pair unfurling the green-white-red banner emblazoned with the Lion and Sun emblem— a potent symbol of the ousted Pahlavi monarchy and frequent emblem in anti-government protests—on a crowded platform.

Bystanders film as the men, in camouflage fatigues, pose defiantly amid commuters.

The Jamaran report said they were wearing imitation military uniforms. Iran International cannot independently verify whether they were members of the armed forces.

Jamaran said metro security forces swiftly intervened, detaining the duo for "disrupting public order."

The pre-revolution flag, banned under the Islamic Republic, has surged in visibility during nationwide unrest, from the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests to recent economic demonstrations, representing calls for secular governance and fundamental change.

'Call to action'

Another video surfaced on social media on Wednesday showing a man introducing himself as Colonel Ebrahim Aghaei Kamazani, delivering a speech to the people of Iran and calling on them to act.

“The fact is that we, the people of Iran, have handed our country over to the enemy for 47 years. People of Iran, come to Iran's aid. The criminal regime has done nothing but create poverty, vice, and Iran's destruction,” the man is heard saying.

“We too are playing a role in the country's destruction through our indifference. Rise up on November 25. People, hear your son's voice. Long live the Shah; long live Iran,” he said.

Asked in a 2017 interview about his 'success', Hamidreza Aref, son of moderate politician Mohammadreza Arf, said with calm assurance that his talents were inherited.

"I’m proud to say that my abilities come from two good genes," he added, "one from my father and one from my mother.”

The “good gene” generation was never defined by ideology but by access, the invisible currency of name, family and connection.

In a country where most citizens fight for the barest margin of survival, the noble-born inherit both the stage and the script.

It’s close to midnight in Tehran when I open the phone lines for my live call-in show, The Program. The night’s question is simple but piercing: Why have so many children of Iran’s political elite left the country their fathers built, and what are they doing in the West?

Within minutes, the microphone that begins in my hand belongs to the people.

The conversation ignited after photographs surfaced online showing the daughter of a senior Revolutionary Guard commander, one of the architects of Iran’s “cultural jihad” and a defender of compulsory veiling, living freely in Australia.

No veil. No slogans. No fear. Sometimes a single image can dissolve decades of propaganda.

This one exposed the contradiction at the heart of the Islamic Republic: a state that has spent forty-some years warning its citizens of Western corruption while quietly sending its own families to live within it.

The father’s ideology collapses in the daughter’s freedom. She doesn’t need to rebel; she only needs to exist and live her life.

Calls pour in. From Tehran, a mother describes the daily arithmetic of survival, rising prices, shrinking futures, the quiet negotiations with fear. From Khuzestan, a woman recounts raising two children while the authorities police her clothing more zealously than their own corruption.

Power preaches sacrifice at home and practices privilege abroad.

Ordinary Iranians sell heirlooms, borrow from relatives, and wait years for visas. The powerful simply transfer assets and arrive with ease. It isn’t exile, it’s insurance: a second passport for the family while the father appears on state television condemning the West.

In Farsi, we have a phrase for this duplicity: yek bam o do hava, meaning one roof and two climates. The body stays in Iran; the future does not.

This hypocrisy has roots. After the Iran-Iraq War, during the so-called Reconstruction Era, a new class emerged, publicly pious, privately prosperous. Their children became the first generation of Aghazadeh, literally “the noble-born.” Around them grew an ecosystem of lobbyists, academics, and businessmen who laundered not only money but meaning, translating repression into the vocabulary of “cultural nuance.” You can find them now in Western universities and think tanks, where moral clarity often gives way to the comfort of complexity.

But the leadership has misread its own people. The young Iranians who call my show, students, teachers, workers, aren’t asking for Western salvation; they’re asking for a normal life at home. A seventeen-year-old from a provincial town once listed Iran’s riches, its gas, its minerals, its history, and then asked a question no economist could answer: “Why does a land so rich make its children feel so worthless?”

For readers outside Iran, it may be tempting to treat such stories as distant tragedies. Don’t. What you’re hearing is a society struggling to reclaim the simplest tools of citizenship: free speech, accountability, choice.

The photographs of officials’ children living comfortably in Western cities are not gossip; they are evidence. If the guardians of a revolution refuse to let their own families live under its rules, why should anyone else?

There is another revolution already underway, quiet, persistent, deeply human. A mother keeping her son out of prison, a teacher urging her students to ask questions, a teenager refusing the false choice between exile and obedience.

What ends on nights like these is not faith or tradition but the official story of power. What begins is the practice of freedom, first in conversation, then in life.

The microphone is open. The nation answers. The show ends. I close my eyes and whisper to myself, we need a Martin Luther King.

"The United States is obliged to fully compensate Iran and Iranian citizens for the material and moral damages resulting from these violations," Araghchi wrote in a letter, official media reported on Wednesday.

Araghchi called for an emergency session, independent investigation, ceasefire enforcement, sanctions, reparations and General Assembly condemnation.

Trump said last week the US directed Israel’s initial attack on Iran during the June conflict.

“Israel attacked first. That attack was very, very powerful. I was very much in charge of that.” Trump said. “When Israel attacked Iran first, that was a great day for Israel because that attack did more damage than the rest of them put together.”

Compensation demand

Tehran first demanded US compensation in July over the war's damages, including strikes on nuclear sites—tying it to nuclear talks resumption. The US State Department dismissed it in August as "ridiculous," rejecting any liability.

Iran's UN Permanent Representative Amir Saeid Iravani wrote to Guterres and the Security Council last week, registering Trump's admission as "incontrovertible evidence" of US leadership in the June 12-day war, which caused civilian deaths and nuclear site damage.

The United States and Israel launched strikes on Iranian facilities in June after talks over Tehran’s nuclear program collapsed. A ceasefire ended the 12-day conflict, but inspections of damaged sites remain suspended under Iranian law.

MP Mojtaba Yousefi, who represents Ahvaz, the city where the incident occurred this week, said officials “must face legal consequences” if found negligent, blaming what he described as the system’s deeper rot.

“Just as they can secure consultancy jobs in petrochemical and oil companies for their friends and family members,” the member of parliament from the oil-rich province said, “they should also try to find work for the unemployed youth of Hoveyzeh, Bagh-e Malek, Susangerd and Khuzestan.”

“Some ministers and vice-presidents receive salaries from two positions—hundreds of millions of tomans—so if they can arrange that, surely they can create jobs for our jobless young people,” he added.

Yousefi’s comments came amid mounting anger over the death of Ahmad Baledi, who suffered burns to 70 percent of his body and died Tuesday at Ahvaz’s Taleghani Hospital.

Witnesses said municipal agents had arrived without warning at the family’s kiosk in Zeytoon Park. His father told the reformist Ham-Mihan newspaper that when he begged for an extension, one official mocked his son—“Should I give you a lighter? Matches?”—moments before Ahmad set himself ablaze.

Enquiry

Ahvaz’s prosecutor later said the municipality had acted “unilaterally and at an inappropriate time,” suspending the district mayor and the municipal enforcement chief.

President Masoud Pezeshkian has ordered an investigation and sent condolences to the family.

The tragedy has fueled wider outrage over joblessness and inequality in Iran’s oil-rich southwest, where many rely on informal work to survive.

Another Ahvaz lawmaker, Mohammad Amiri, blamed “personal connections rather than regulations” for the city’s chronic mismanagement.

Authorities have since arrested several citizens who wrote about the case online and restricted access to the burn hospital, signaling a desire to contain unrest. But Yousefi’s unusually blunt remarks suggest growing unease within Iran’s conservative establishment itself.