Syria is stepping up moves against Iran’s Guards and Hezbollah, US envoy says

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.

"Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence identified 400 members inside and outside Iran," state broadcaster IRIB reported. "Some have been summoned, detained, or warned to cease collaboration with this academic circle."

It described the operation as a move to counter "soft overthrow (efforts) ... via cultural and educational infiltration."

The broadcast featured blurred photos of alleged detainees, organizational charts mapping the network and commentary from experts justifying the actions as defense against foreign-funded subversion.

No names or exact arrest numbers were disclosed.

Iran Academia, registered in the Netherlands and founded in 2012 amid Iran's restrictions on higher education in social sciences, says it aims to served "the general public, civil society, and disadvantaged groups" according to its official website.

"70% are from Iran—spanning 21 of 31 provinces—with 40% female, 30% ethnic minorities, and 15% religious minorities," the site said.

The platform offers Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on topics like gender and budgeting, transitional justice, social advocacy and forced migration rights.

State media accused its board members of promoting "hot-button" issues—gender equality, ethnic rights and implicit regime critique via media appearances, labeling it a tool for "soft regime change" backed by Dutch, EU and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funding.

Revolutionary Guards personnel last week arrested several sociologists and economists.

The move prompted nearly 900 Iranian activists and intellectuals to issue a statement calling for unity against what they called "the suppression of thought and expression,” describing the crackdown as “a desperate attempt by a failing regime to stifle intellectual vitality.”

“The Agency’s lack of access to this nuclear material in Iran for five months means that its verification is long overdue,” the IAEA said in a report to member states seen by Reuters.

"It is critical that the Agency is able to verify the inventories of previously declared nuclear material in Iran as soon as possible in order to allay its concerns ... regarding the possible diversion of declared nuclear material from peaceful use," the agency quoted the IAEA report as saying.

The Vienna-based nuclear watchdog has not been able to confirm the amount of enriched uranium in Iran’s possession since June, when Israeli and US strikes hit its main enrichment sites at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow during the 12-day conflict.

Before the attacks, inspectors had verified about 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity—enough, if further refined, for roughly 10 nuclear weapons under IAEA criteria.

IAEA says inspections hinge on Iran’s overdue report

Under its obligations as a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran must submit a detailed report on the status of the bombed facilities “without delay,” but has yet to do so, the IAEA said. Only after such a report is received can inspectors return to the damaged sites.

The agency said it has so far only accessed some of the 13 nuclear facilities that were “unaffected” by the strikes, and none of the seven that were hit. It warned that the delay means it has lost “continuity of knowledge” of Iran’s uranium stocks, making it harder to re-establish a complete picture of the country’s nuclear activities.

The IAEA also reminded member states that its own guidelines require it to verify a country’s stock of highly enriched uranium every month.

Despite repeated requests since June, Iran has not allowed full inspections to resume. A plan announced in Cairo in September to restore cooperation has stalled, and Tehran now says the agreement is void.

IAEA chief urges return to diplomacy

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said last week that Iran still retains the technical capability and sufficient material “to manufacture a few nuclear weapons,” despite what he called “severe damage” to its program. He said diplomacy remained the only path toward a durable solution.

The IAEA’s Board of Governors found Iran in non-compliance with its nuclear obligations in June after the agency said Tehran failed to explain the presence of undeclared nuclear material at several locations.

Since then, Iranian officials have accused Grossi of bias, with some state media describing him as an Israeli asset. The conservative newspaper Kayhan, overseen by the Supreme Leader’s office, even called for his execution after the June report.