Iran International
Iran is seeking to turn the US maritime blockade back on Washington by expanding its retaliation beyond the Strait of Hormuz, threatening shipping across a wider area after US attacks on Iranian tankers.
Nour News, a website close to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Wednesday that the latest escalation showed signs of reversing the logic of the blockade.
“The US naval blockade was supposed to target Iran’s economic resilience by cutting or restricting its export routes,” it said.
But with both sides now attacking tankers and military vessels and traffic through Hormuz again sharply reduced, “the cost of the blockade is no longer distributed solely on the Iranian side.”
The Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) said Wednesday that Iranian forces had responded to US attacks on five Iranian tankers by targeting two US warships and eight oil tankers, as well as 10 “violating vessels” attempting to pass through Iran’s restricted zone in Hormuz.
The US denied that its warships had been hit.
‘An eye for an eye’
Iran is now threatening to widen that confrontation geographically.
IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi said a new restricted area would extend from the direction of Chabahar through parts of the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea along routes leading towards Hormuz. Its precise coordinates have yet to be announced.
The IRGC has also warned tankers and other vessels at ports and anchorages in Kuwait and Bahrain to leave, threatening those that remain.
Ships entering without Iranian permission would be placed on a sanctions list and denied maritime, insurance and other services, Mohebbi said, including during future passages through Hormuz.
Conservative political activist Amir Chizari, who is close to parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, advocated going further, calling for Iran to prevent ships from using ports in Persian Gulf countries hosting US military bases.
“Head for head, eye for eye—that means all these ports will be blockaded by Iran,” he wrote on X.
Nour News said the significance lay not simply in creating another restricted zone but “in changing the logic of confrontation with the blockade.”
“Tehran does not necessarily need to seize a ship to change the behaviour of an actor; it is enough for the cost of interacting with a vessel or network to rise so that the other side retreats in advance,” it said.
Diplomacy narrows
The increasingly expansive strategy comes as prospects for reviving diplomacy appear to be shrinking.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tuesday that a US return to its commitments and the Islamabad understanding would “pave the way for a return to normality.”
But Middle East Eye reported Wednesday, citing two sources close to the Iranian government, that President Donald Trump had conveyed through Pakistani and Qatari officials that Washington would not return to the previous understanding.
The absence of a diplomatic route raises the stakes of Iran’s strategy: Tehran is betting that making the blockade more expensive for Washington, commercial shipping and regional states will eventually create pressure to ease it.
A costly gamble
Inside Iran, critics warn that the same strategy could inflict enormous damage on the country itself.
Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, a conservative former chairman of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, accused hardliners of risking Iran’s tanker fleet.
“The National Iranian Tanker Company is the largest tanker company in the world. They are setting the country’s unparalleled wealth on fire. This Iran-burning must end,” he wrote on X.
Hardliners counter that such economic calculations make little sense when they believe Iran faces an existential threat.
One user responding to Falahatpisheh asked what guarantee Iran had that peace would last if it compromised now, or that the United States would not attack again months later.
The costs of escalation are already becoming apparent. Brent crude rose above $100 a barrel Wednesday, while flows through Hormuz fell as low as two million barrels a day after reaching eight to nine million before fighting resumed.
In Iran, the dollar rose above 2.33 million rials on the foreign exchange market, another record low for the national currency.
Iran’s strategy amounts to a gamble that widening the geographic and economic costs of the blockade will eventually make it harder to sustain. But the deeper Tehran extends the confrontation beyond Hormuz, the greater the risk that those costs return to Iran itself.
In the early hours of July 9, cruise missiles hit the Aq Tekeh Khan railway bridge near Aqqala in Golestan province, in Iran's far north-east. The Revolutionary Guards' regional corps and state media attributed the strike to US forces. Damage was limited, as it has been at other bridges hit in the war, and trains were running again within days. Washington has not commented, which is common for many strikes in this conflict.
The bridge sits on the Gorgan–Incheh Borun line, one of two railways connecting Iran's network to Central Asia through Turkmenistan. Iranian outlets described the strike as an attack on the corridor linking Iran to China through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, a reading that spread widely.
What the line actually carries
Iran's official statistics are opaque and frequently incomplete, and under nearly five decades of sanctions the state has had every incentive to blur figures that touch on trade, let alone anything with a military dimension. But even taken at face value, the numbers do not support the corridor claim.
Iran has two main rail gateways to Central Asia: Sarakhs, in the north-east, and Incheh Borun. Shortly before the war, in early 2026, the head of the Khorasan railway said 75 percent of all rail transit into and out of the country passed through Sarakhs, which handled 1.27 million tons in the ten months to late January. The Incheh Borun line's entire nominal capacity is around 500,000 tons a year, and how much of that is actually used is unknown.
Rail was never central to Iranian trade in any case. Before the war, the bulk moved by sea and road, with high-value, low-weight goods going by air.
Nor does the line point at China. Opened during Hassan Rouhani's first term as the Iranian section of a 930-kilometre Kazakhstan–Turkmenistan–Iran railway, completed in 2014 at a cost of about $1.4 billion, it was designed to link Russia and the Caspian region to warm-water ports through Iran, connecting northward toward Astrakhan and the Russian network.
The natural, cheaper route for Chinese rail freight is Sarakhs. Chinese traffic on the Incheh Borun line is not zero, with some reports counting several dozen freight trains from China over the past year, but it is marginal, and the line matters far more to Russia and Turkmenistan, notably for minerals, than to Iranian trade with the east.
Which leaves the question. If the bridge was not hit for what it carries for Iran, one possibility is what it carries for someone else.
Where Russia and Iran meet
Turkmenistan's neutrality is written into its constitution and recognized by the United Nations, and it has taken no side in Iran's wars. It has also become, since the US naval blockade closed Iran's ports, one of the country's principal overland routes to the east. That gives a small, closed and rarely reported state an unusual position: the place where Iranian and Russian logistics physically meet.
The Islamic Republic has a long, documented history of military exchanges with Russia and China. Alongside the rail and road routes, which carry their own risks, combined routes for moving equipment are routine.
Ashgabat's airport is the nearest major airfield to Iran's north-eastern border. Iran International reviewed data on roughly 6,500 flights that landed there between the start of November 2025 and early July 2026, a window running from before the war through the ceasefires and the resumption of strikes.
The review has limits, and they should be stated first. Flight-tracking data depends on aircraft transmitting their position and on receivers within range picking it up, so gaps occur. The pre-war portion of the window is short, less than four months. And a change in what tracking systems record after a war begins may reflect changed behavior across a whole region rather than anything specific to one airport.
One category in the data carries more meaning than it might appear to. Scheduled passenger and cargo flights file public flight plans, so their origin and destination almost always appear in tracking records.
Flights that show no origin at all are therefore disproportionately state, military and private operations, which do not file in the same way. The category cannot tell a military transport from a government delegation or a private charter, and some freight operators also fall into it, but it does separate the traffic that files paperwork from the traffic that does not.
The Antonov from China
The most concrete item is a single flight. On April 13, an Antonov An-124, the largest transport aircraft in regular service, landed at Ashgabat from Urumqi in western China, paused, and left early the same day for Cairo. Nothing like it appears elsewhere in the nine months of data.
The aircraft belongs to Volga-Dnepr Airlines, which is designated by the United States, the European Union, Britain, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Ukraine and France. Britain listed it in June 2024 for "the provision of heavy airlift capacity to the Russian Armed Forces."
The EU, listing the group's owners and directors the same month, said Volga-Dnepr has been "playing a crucial role in servicing Russia's military-industrial complex and providing air transportation services for Russian military purposes," importing electronics and communications equipment for the war on Ukraine and receiving Russian government subsidies for doing so. The US designation carries a secondary sanctions risk, which applies in principle to any third party that does business with the airline, including by servicing its aircraft.
The specific aircraft carries the registration RA-82074. A Ukrainian investigation named it among Volga-Dnepr An-124s that sharply increased flights to countries friendly to Russia, including China, after the 2022 invasion, in transport the investigators linked to sanctioned goods and military products.
The website openDemocracy reported in 2023 on the company's role in carrying equipment critical to the Russian military from China. Only three of the company's An-124s are currently active.
There is an ordinary explanation available. Egypt is a major destination for commercial heavy cargo, and an An-124 routing from China through Central Asia to Cairo is consistent with legitimate project freight. Egypt is also a longstanding Russian arms customer. Volga-Dnepr has said it stopped carrying military cargo in 2018; Western governments that have examined its record disagree, and the Islamic Republic has spent more than four decades perfecting the art of moving sensitive goods under commercial cover.
The pattern around it
Around that flight, several categories of traffic rose after the war began.
Local callsigns in the 795 series, searchable under identifiers such as 795M12 and 795A01, were rare before the war and rose sharply from April: 11 in April, 7 in May and 15 in June. Most were logged with no recorded origin or as Mil Mi-8 military transport helicopters, sometimes several times in a day.
On July 6, three days before the bridge was struck, three such flights were logged. One caveat matters here: the same callsign sometimes appears several times within minutes, which may mean genuine repeat flights or may mean several ground receivers logging one signal, so these counts may be inflated.
Flights with no recorded origin rose from a single instance in January to 8, 6, 4, 9 and 7 in the months from February to June, with two more in the first nine days of July. Given what that category captures, this is the closest the data comes to a measure of non-commercial traffic, and it went from one a month before the war to an average of nearly seven a month after it began.
Callsigns in the RSD series, used by Russian state and military flights, together with Tupolev Tu-204 and Ilyushin Il-96 aircraft, increased noticeably in May. Ilyushin Il-76 heavy transports arriving from within Turkmenistan were logged twice in February and twice in May, with none in the pre-war months. Three AgustaWestland AW139 helicopters, a type used in government and military roles, landed in May and June, though similar flights also appeared in November.
None of this is evidence of military transfers through Ashgabat. There is no official statement or document to that effect, and the relative rise in irregular traffic could have explanations that have nothing to do with the bridge 100 kilometers to the south.
What the data does show is a change in the rhythm of arrivals at Turkmenistan's main airport that coincides with the intensification of the war, and that was building in the weeks before a railway line to Russia was hit.
Iran International has asked US Central Command to confirm the strike and explain the choice of target. It had not responded at the time of publication; this report will be updated if it does.
But the fighting is also showing why a weakened axis can remain dangerous: it does not have to win territory to impose costs on Iran’s adversaries.
Yemen’s Houthis dramatically escalated their attacks on Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, striking four southern cities with missiles and drones. The group targeted a Saudi airbase in Khamis Mushait and Saudi Aramco assets in Abha, Najran and Jazan, setting oil installations ablaze. Saudi authorities said 73 people were wounded, including women and children.
The attacks also threatened to widen the war’s economic impact beyond the Strait of Hormuz, where the US-Iran conflict has already disrupted energy flows. Brent crude briefly touched $99.46 a barrel on Tuesday, its highest level since July 24.
“They’re not really fighting five separate wars, they’re just using five instruments of the same coercive strategy,” Fatima Abo Alasrar, a researcher and author on Yemen and Iran and founder of The Ideology Machine, told Iran International.
The timing, Alasrar said, matters.
Iran is exerting pressure around the Strait of Hormuz while the Houthis can create another pressure point around Bab al-Mandab, forcing Iran’s adversaries to contend with threats near two of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints.
“The lesson that the Houthis appear to have learned is that escalation produces leverage,” she said, even without territorial gains.
That leaves Saudi Arabia with a difficult choice: escalate in an effort to substantially weaken the Houthis and risk a wider war or seek a political exit that could reinforce the belief in both Sanaa and Tehran that military pressure can ultimately produce concessions.
Houthis called Saudi Arabia’s bluff
Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemeni-American geopolitical analyst and risk adviser who heads the Washington DC-based Basha Report, said the Houthis helped bring about the renewed war by assuming Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s internationally recognized government would avoid a return to full-scale fighting.
“The Houthis were hoping to call a bluff — a Saudi and a government bluff,” al-Basha told Iran International.
Asked whether they miscalculated, he replied: “Of course, of course.”
Yet al-Basha said the Iran war has also reinforced the Houthis’ belief in the value of escalation.
“They feel that the best way for you to get what you want is to use force,” he said.
The confrontation follows an earlier dispute over an Iranian aircraft carrying a Houthi delegation back from Tehran following the funeral of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Analysts told Iran International at the time that the flight may have been an opening move in an effort to establish an air bridge into Houthi-controlled Yemen and rebuild the group’s strategic capabilities.
“The alliance is no longer secretive or covert, it’s very public,” al-Basha said of the Iran-Houthi relationship.
Can battlefield gains change the equation?
Forces loyal to Yemen’s internationally recognized government have now launched counterattacks across several fronts, with officials openly declaring their intention to eventually recapture Sanaa.
But al-Basha cautioned against assuming the Houthis are close to defeat. He said losing strategically important territory, rather than simply patches of ground, could eventually push them toward negotiations.
One place to watch is Hodeidah, whose port al-Basha described as “the lung that the Houthis breathe from.” The group’s position around Hodeidah, Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea is central to its ability to threaten maritime traffic.
Alasrar, however, said territorial losses do not necessarily eliminate Houthi leverage.
“They can lose ground and still increase their regional leverage,” she said.
The Houthis have threatened further attacks against Saudi economic and military infrastructure, raising the prospect of greater disruption around Bab al-Mandab while the Iran conflict continues to put pressure on Hormuz
A ‘win-win’ for Tehran?
Danny Citrinowicz of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies sees that predicament as advantageous for Iran.
“For them it’s amazing. So it’s a win-win for them,” Citrinowicz told Iran International.
If Saudi Arabia backs down, he argues, Iran gains room to strengthen the Houthis. If Riyadh keeps fighting, instability around Bab al-Mandab creates another source of economic pressure while Iran contests Hormuz.
“It definitely worked in the Iranian favor,” he said. “The Iranians are learning from that, unfortunately.”
But it leaves Saudi Arabia with two costly options. Citrinowicz said the Houthis have “crossed the Rubicon” and are unlikely simply to retreat. As Saudi-backed forces approach areas the group considers critical, he expects Houthi attacks against the kingdom to intensify.
A moment of truth for the Mecca Defence Alliance
The escalation is also posing an early test for the Mecca Defence Alliance, the collective defense pact signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan on August 7.
The agreement stipulates that an armed attack against any one of the three countries is to be regarded as an attack against all three.
Yet neither Turkey nor Pakistan has so far entered the fighting militarily on Saudi Arabia’s behalf.
Citrinowicz calls it “a moment of truth” for the alliance, with neither country so far entering the fighting militarily.
Will Washington hold Iran responsible?
The United States is now explicitly pointing toward Tehran.
“The Houthis in many ways are agents and proxies of the Iranians. I think behind some of this is clearly the Iranian hand,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters when asked about the attacks on Saudi Arabia.
Rubio said Washington has a strong defensive military relationship with Riyadh and is closely watching developments.
His comments revive a warning President Donald Trump issued on July 23.
Trump said then that Washington would hold Iran responsible if the Houthis resumed attacks, describing the group as a “Surrogate and/or Proxy of Iran” and warning of “major military punishment” against Iran and the Houthis.
The Houthis have now resumed major attacks against Saudi Arabia. Rubio has publicly pointed to an Iranian hand, but Trump has yet to publicly repeat the threat he made in July.
That leaves a consequential question as the conflict widens: if Washington considers the Houthis an Iranian proxy, how far is it prepared to go in holding Tehran responsible for what they do?
The coming days and weeks are likely to bring advances and retreats on both sides, with territory changing hands and apparent victories proving temporary. The battlefield remains highly fluid, and both sides appear determined to keep fighting, making it too early to draw sweeping conclusions from any single development.
But even without a clear Houthi victory, Iran may stand to gain. As long as the fighting forces Saudi Arabia to expend resources, keeps pressure on Bab al-Mandab and stretches the attention of Tehran’s adversaries, the Houthis can continue to provide Iran with leverage even while under pressure themselves.
The conflict has a long way to go for now and consequences reverberate from Yemen across an already destabilized region.
Messages, videos and accounts sent to Iran International described deployments of police, special units and Basij forces in Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, Karaj, Isfahan, Tabriz, Birjand, Khorramabad, Khomein, Abadan and Qeshm.
Reports of slower internet connections also emerged from several cities, including Tabriz and Babol.
Petrol prices doubled on Monday for drivers buying fuel outside their monthly subsidised quota, rising from 50,000 to 100,000 rials a litre, about 2.3 to 4.5 US cents. The government announced the increase two days earlier.
Monthly subsidized allocations remain unchanged. Motorists can buy 60 liters at 15,000 rials per liter, about 0.7 cents, and another 50 liters at 30,000 rials, about 1.3 cents.
The dollar figures are negligible. The wages are the point. Average monthly pay in Iran is around 250 million rials, about $113 at Tuesday's rate, and many workers earn closer to 200 million, or roughly $90 a month.
Security forces gather around fuel stations
Several residents of Mashhad told Iran International that security forces appeared around petrol stations on Sunday, hours before the new price took effect.
“On Monday evening, I passed three gas stations. Several police vehicles were stationed outside each one, and at one station there were large numbers of Basij motorcyclists and special unit forces,” one resident said.
Another Mashhad resident described police and special units positioned at fuel stations across the city.
Video sent to Iran International from Khorramabad in western Lorestan province showed security personnel, vehicles and motorcycles deployed around the city, including what appeared to be a mounted machine gun.
Fuel supplies had already faced disruptions over the previous three weeks in areas including Razavi Khorasan, South Khorasan, Tehran and Alborz provinces.
Citizens in early September reported station closures, long lines, restrictions on purchases and waits of about two hours to obtain 10 liters of gasoline.
A Birjand resident said some filling stations had closed and displayed notices blaming “technical problems,” while police were positioned at others.
Similar deployments were described in Shiraz, where a local reported a large security presence around Maali-Abad early Tuesday, and in Karaj, particularly Fardis, Gohardasht and Mehrshahr.
A resident of Khomein in Markazi province also described a long line and numerous police officers at a fuel station on Shohadaye Daneshjoo Street.
Special units deploy in Tehran
Several Tehran residents reported increased security deployments from Monday evening, including in Shahr-e Rey and Salsabil neighborhoods.
“The station was heavily secured. Special units and the Basij were constantly moving around, and the streets were crowded,” a resident who visited a fuel station near Ferdowsi Square in central Tehran around midnight said.
Another who went to a station on Pirouzi Street in the east described long vehicle lines with special units positioned nearby.
People in Isfahan and Abadan also reported armed police at filling stations. In Qeshm, a resident said armed personnel were deployed around major squares on Monday evening and that a confrontation occurred at the entrance to a filling station in Dargahan.
Two messages from Tabriz described a large security presence alongside deteriorating internet service.
“The city of Tabriz is full of special units. The forces are armed, and heavy equipment can also be seen,” one said.
A Babol citizen also reported slower mobile and fixed internet connections, though the reason for the disruption could not be established.
Gasoline prices carry particular political sensitivity in Iran. A sudden increase and rationing in November 2019 triggered demonstrations across dozens of cities that quickly expanded into nationwide anti-government protests.
Security forces killed around 1,500 people during the crackdown, according to a Reuters tally at the time. Thousands were arrested and authorities imposed a nationwide internet shutdown.
Government defends higher gasoline price
First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref defended the new rate, arguing that even 100,000 rials per liter remains far below the government's cost of importing gasoline.
Imported gasoline costs the government more than 700,000 rials per liter, equivalent to about 30 cents, Aref said. Imported fuel would gradually be sold at prices closer to its cost, he added.
The government's figures for what petrol costs to produce have not held up well to examination. In November 2025, after officials put the cost at 340,000 rials a litre, about 15 cents at current rates, Iran International went through the refineries' own financial statements. They showed operating costs, excluding the value of the crude going in, of around 35,000 rials a litre, roughly 1.6 cents, a tenth of the official figure.
Economist Mousa Ghaninejad has estimated actual gasoline consumption inside Iran at about 70 million liters a day and argued that much of the remainder recorded as consumption is smuggled out of the country.
Iranians warn of knock-on price increases
Thousands of people responding to an Iran International question about the fuel increase focused on its potential impact beyond filling stations, warning that transportation costs could push up food prices, fares and other everyday expenses.
“100,000 rials for a liter of gasoline may just be a number for some people, but for people it means another step toward making life harder,” one respondent wrote.
Another said petrol was not the problem on its own, and pointed to food. A five-liter container of cooking oil that used to cost 22 million rials, about $9.90, now sells for 40 million, roughly $18.
On a monthly wage of 200 million rials, that is a fifth of a month's pay for one container of oil.
“We buy everything at expensive dollar-linked prices, but our base salary is only $100. Where in the world can you see something like this?” one person wrote.
Another said wages would have to rise alongside prices, since households could not absorb repeated increases on incomes that had barely moved.
For younger respondents the loss was smaller and more particular. "The feeling of going on a trip is gone. Going out for a 10-minute drive is gone. We young people said goodbye to small pleasures a long time ago," one wrote.
