Iran International
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are expanding a campaign built around sacrifice for the homeland into a route for military training and Basij paramilitary recruitment, giving a force associated with decades of domestic repression a broader patriotic appeal.
The Janfada initiative — roughly meaning someone willing to sacrifice their life — presents participation as service to Iran. Its development raises a question: how far can the authorities use national loyalty to attract recruits who might otherwise hesitate to join the Islamic Republic’s security institutions?
On November 2, Hassan Hassanzadeh, commander of the Guards’ Tehran corps, said the first Janfada brigade had been organized, completed supplementary training and received equipment. Speaking at the opening of a training center in Tehran’s Tajrish Square, he said the unit was preparing for practical exercises and specialist shooting-range training.
The announcement marked a further step toward turning a public mobilization campaign into organized military units.
A new route into the Basij
Launched on March 28 by the Guards-linked Baqiyatallah cultural and social headquarters, Janfada initially invited volunteers to participate in defense, security and relief activities during the war with the United States and Israel.
By September, organizers were announcing plans for 1,000 national resistance battalions. Training programs subsequently included firearms handling, urban defense and rescue skills.
Ali Kowsari, the Basij’s deputy for training, has said participants who complete supplementary courses can join the organization’s combat structure. Esmail Faraji, its deputy for operations, has said the campaign attracted volunteers who had not previously belonged to the Basij, although the scale of that recruitment has not been independently established.
The distinction matters because the Basij, a paramilitary organization subordinate to the Revolutionary Guards, combines military mobilization with ideological organization and domestic security. Its network extends through neighborhoods, universities, schools and workplaces, and its members have participated in successive protest crackdowns.
A campaign emphasizing defense of the country could therefore provide a more accessible entry point than direct recruitment under the Basij name. Joining a course presented as preparation to protect Iran may carry different associations from joining an institution identified with policing dissent.
That remains an interpretation of the campaign’s appeal, rather than proof of its organizers’ intentions or success. Available evidence does not establish how many participants are new recruits, how many were already Basij members, or whether the patriotic message has broadened support beyond existing government loyalists.
National defense and domestic control
The campaign’s public presentation has combined national solidarity with explicit loyalty to the leadership.
At the September 18 Janfada parade in Tehran, participants included Basij members, uniformed volunteers and children. The event began with a declaration of allegiance to Khamenei, while President Masoud Pezeshkian described it as a display of national cohesion.
That combination illustrates how the campaign places defense of Iran alongside support for the political system.
Its activities also extend beyond preparation for an external attack. Campaign spokesman Sassan Zare said in September that Janfada provided training related to urban and public security, while responsibility for deploying volunteers at checkpoints rested with the relevant security bodies.
Those overlapping functions make the campaign relevant to domestic control, although they do not establish that every participant will undertake security duties or be deployed against protesters.
A Syrian parallel, with limits
Syria offers a comparison in how governments organize loyalist forces under the language of national defense.
During Bashar al-Assad’s rule, pro-government militias and neighborhood committees were incorporated into the National Defense Forces. Research by the Institute for the Study of War describes Iranian and Hezbollah assistance in formalizing the force along a model resembling the Basij, including training recruits.
The comparison has limits. Syria involved the consolidation of existing militias during a civil war. Janfada is presented as a recruitment and training campaign connected to institutions that remain in place. There is no evidence here that the Basij has been dissolved or formally renamed.
The more defensible argument is that Janfada offers the existing security structure an additional public identity and recruitment channel. Its language emphasizes sacrifice for the country; its training pathways lead toward institutions whose responsibilities also include preserving the Islamic Republic.
Whether that approach can repair the Basij’s reputation remains unproven. What commanders’ announcements demonstrate is a growing effort to turn patriotic participation into organized manpower.
US Democratic lawmakers are stepping up efforts to end the war with Iran after their sweeping midterm election victory, promising legislative action when they take control of Congress in January.
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in the November 3 elections, a defeat for Republicans that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance acknowledged was driven in part by public dissatisfaction with the war.
“Last week, voters were loud and clear: Trump’s economy doesn’t work for Americans,” Senate Democrats said in a statement on X on Friday.
“When Senate Democrats are back in the majority next year, we will take immediate action to end Trump’s war in Iran, stop his reckless tariffs, and lower costs for everything from energy to groceries to housing.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday found that 71 percent of Americans wanted Congress to pass legislation ending the conflict, including 93 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Republicans.
The growing pressure has reached the current Republican-controlled Congress, where Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a frequent critic of Trump, has pledged to force another vote on ending the war before his term expires.
Massie introduced a War Powers resolution on November 10 directing the president to remove US forces from hostilities with Iran.
In a post on X Saturday, Massie said he could force a vote by mid-December, provided House Speaker Mike Johnson does not cancel scheduled legislative days. He added that two other resolutions seeking to end the war could reach the House floor even sooner.
But Republican lawmakers, including some who have criticized the conflict, remain reluctant to use congressional powers to force its conclusion.
“A Republican Congress is not going to send bills to a Republican president that he's going to veto,” Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters this week.
The disagreement is expected to become a central issue in negotiations over government funding, which expires on December 11, raising the possibility of another shutdown confrontation.
Several Republicans have previously joined Democrats in attempts to restrict Trump's military operations, although most of the party has remained aligned with the president.
A war that was supposed to last weeks
The pressure has intensified as the conflict approaches its ninth month, far exceeding the administration's initial expectations.
“We are now in week 37 of Trump’s ‘2 to 3 week’ war with Iran,” Democratic Representative Jason Crow of Colorado wrote on X.
Representative Jimmy Panetta, a California Democrat, also accused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of continuing the war in violation of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and failing to provide transparency over deadly strikes on civilians, including an elementary school in Iran.
“Congress will exercise its constitutional authority to hold him accountable,” Panetta said.
Democrats will have several options when they take control of Congress on January 3, including legislation restricting military operations, limits on war funding and congressional investigations into the administration's conduct.
But their ability to compel an end to the conflict remains uncertain. Trump could veto legislation passed by Congress, requiring two-thirds majorities in both chambers to override him.
Iranian state television has warned that modified versions of the country's Khorramshahr ballistic missile could reach American military bases in Europe, explicitly naming RAF Fairford in Britain as a potential target.
"The range of Iran's missiles is not limited to what they have seen," the report, broadcast Saturday, said, claiming that modifications to the Khorramshahr's warhead could increase its range severalfold.
The Khorramshahr-4, unveiled in 2023, has a claimed range of 2,000 kilometers while carrying a warhead weighing 1,500 kilograms. A lighter warhead could extend its range, although the extent of any increase remains unverified.
The broadcast included a review of missiles and drones Iran has used in its wars with Israel and the United States since June 2025, presenting the Khorramshahr as part of a broader arsenal capable of threatening American installations farther afield.
In a warning directed at Britain, the report suggested that British air defenses were not necessarily more capable than Israel's, which it claimed Iranian missiles had already penetrated during the war.
There has been no independent confirmation that Iran possesses a modified Khorramshahr capable of reaching RAF Fairford.
The broadcast invoked an order by Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei that Iran's armed forces should face no geographical restrictions in responding to attacks by the United States or Israel.
Khamenei issued the directive on October 31, calling for immediate and effective retaliation without geographical limits and ordering military commanders to update their list of potential targets.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards subsequently said the country's longstanding self-imposed limit of 2,000 kilometers on ballistic missile ranges had been lifted, although they did not specify whether longer-range missiles had been developed or deployed.
The broadcast follows a series of warnings from senior Iranian officials that American bases in Europe and on distant islands could become targets if Washington launches further attacks.
Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said earlier this week that Tehran would no longer confine its response to nearby US military installations and could strike bases in European countries.
The threats come as diplomatic efforts to end the war remain stalled, with Tehran demanding an end to the US naval blockade of Iranian ports and relief from sanctions before negotiations can resume.
Washington has maintained its economic pressure campaign, while President Donald Trump has declared that he wants a total victory over Iran and suggested the United States no longer needs a negotiated agreement.
The latest state television report went further than previous warnings by naming a specific British installation and linking the threat to a purportedly extended-range version of the Khorramshahr missile.
Seven years after a fuel price rise set off one of the deadliest crackdowns in the Islamic Republic’s history, Iran is rationing gasoline more tightly, with lines at stations across the country, but it still dares not touch the subsidized price.
Esmail Saghab Esfahani, a vice president who heads the state energy efficiency agency, admitted this week that “we really have a supply problem.” He told Iranians they could no longer count on fuel stations to cover what they need, and should save part of their monthly ration before traveling.
“All the gasoline the government has, it has given to the people,” he said. “Nothing has been held back to supply more.”
On Thursday night, residents of Bandar Abbas, the main port on the Persian Gulf, blocked a road near a fuel station in the city’s Rajaei district with their cars, protesting long lines and empty pumps. Drivers on the Minab–Bandar Abbas route had protested earlier over the lack of fuel.
Sunday marks seven years since the government announced, shortly after midnight on November 15, 2019, that gasoline prices would rise by 50 to 200 percent. Drivers who had paid 10,000 rials a liter would now pay 15,000 for their first 60 liters a month and 30,000 after that.
Protests broke out within hours and spread to more than 100 cities. Demonstrators blocked highways with their cars, burned banks and tore down images of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. On the second day, Khamenei told senior officials, “Do whatever it takes to end it,” Reuters later reported, citing people close to his inner circle.
The state cut off the internet for about a week, and security forces shot protesters with live ammunition, including from rooftops, in Mahshahr in the southwest and in cities across the country. Hundreds of people were killed and more than 7,000 arrested. Iranians call it “Bloody November,” or “Bloody Aban,” after the month in the Iranian calendar.
Those two prices, 15,000 and 30,000 rials, are still the two cheapest tiers today. In 2019 the cheaper one was worth about 12 cents. After seven years of inflation and a collapsing rial, it is worth about half a US cent.
The state has not risked a general price rise since. Each time economic pain has boiled over, it has turned on the state: fuel stations in Tehran were set on fire when rationing began in June 2007, and the uprising over the economic collapse in December 2025 ended in the January massacre.
That memory hangs over every decision. Sagheb Esfahani said this week that the price of the third tier would be reviewed every season, but that “a range of security, military and law enforcement bodies” had to give their opinion first. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said the two cheapest tiers would not change.
Each private car gets a monthly ration on its fuel card: 60 liters at 15,000 rials a liter, half a US cent; 50 liters at 30,000 rials, about one cent; and, since September 8, 50 liters at 100,000 rials, under four cents. A full month’s ration of 160 liters costs about 7.4 million rials, or $2.70.
What the government is doing instead of increasing prices is cutting access.
Until now, drivers who ran out of their ration could fill up with the station’s own “emergency” card at the third-tier price. On September 7, those station cards supplied 41 percent of all gasoline sold, about 59 million liters a day, the national fuel distribution company said.
Since November 1, station cards have been withdrawn in 11 provinces, almost all of them along Iran’s borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Iraq, Turkey and the Caucasus, plus the Persian Gulf coast, where officials say subsidized fuel is smuggled out. The plan began in Kerman, the first to lose the cards, before spreading.
Tehran, which burns about 20 million liters a day, as much as 15 other provinces combined, has been spared for now. There, each fill-up with a station card is tied to the car owner’s national ID instead. Drivers anywhere who need more than their ration are told to buy premium gasoline at about 1 million rials, or 37 cents, a liter, more than 60 times the cheapest rate.
Executive Vice President Mohammad Jafar Ghaempanah said the cards would be collected province by province within weeks, blaming smuggling.
“Several thousand Nissan pickups do nothing but collect fuel from different provinces and take it across the border,” he said, putting smuggling at 30 million liters a day. A liter of gasoline sells for about 2.6 million rials, or 96 cents, in Pakistan.
Former lawmaker Nezam al-Din Mousavi said about 90 percent of smuggled fuel was diesel, not gasoline. “Stop making excuses and say you are after price rises,” he said.
Behind the measures is a supply gap that the war has made impossible to close.
Iran consumed about 133 million liters of gasoline a day on average through October, peaking at 144 million in September, while refineries produce between 112 and 135 million, according to official figures cited by Rouydad24.
Hossein Taeb, head of the Basij militia, said on Thursday that Iran still imports about seven million liters a day. The US naval blockade of Iran’s ports, in place since April, has made those imports harder and costlier, and refineries and fuel depots were damaged in the war.
“Every effort of the government is to match gasoline consumption with domestic production,” Ata Hosseinian, an economic and energy journalist, told Iran International. “There is neither the capacity nor the money to import gasoline.”
The government, he said, is applying the method it used for electricity and gas bills: a fixed cheap ration, and a much higher price above it, while station supplies are released “drip by drip.”
“People have to go to five stations to maybe get the cheaper gasoline at one of them after standing for hours,” he said.
“The Islamic Republic is threatening people with death so they’ll settle for a fever,” he said, citing a Persian saying. Once the fate of Hormuz and the blockade is settled, he expects the third-tier price to rise step by step, each season, toward 500,000 to 700,000 rials a liter, 18 to 26 cents.
The rationing has also split the establishment.
Within a day of Sagheb Esfahani’s remarks, First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref ordered officials to stop commenting on gasoline, saying decisions would be announced only by the government spokeswoman or the national refining and distribution company.
A former lawmaker, Ahmad Amirabadi Farahani, posted a message to Sagheb Esfahani: “Doctor, please stop talking, stop giving interviews, stop getting on people’s nerves.”
The hardline daily Kayhan accused “a current” in the government of pursuing higher prices “by other methods,” called the two vice presidents’ remarks “provocative” and said they had fed “hostile media.”
“Regulatory and security bodies must step in as a deterrent,” it wrote. It also warned that without station cards, Iranians could not flee cities if war resumed, as many did during the 12-day and 40-day wars.
The hardline Farhikhtegan called the policy “a media game with society’s psyche in the middle of a war.”
Online, the measures drew anger and ridicule.
“With the fuel use of domestic cars, what can you do with 110 liters a month?” one user wrote,. Another asked what the plan was for millions who drive into Tehran every day “to earn 350 or 400 million rials a month,” about $130 to $150, “and survive on bread and eggs.”
“The government’s message is that the real price of gasoline is 1.1 million rials,” a third wrote. At that price, a month’s ration of 160 liters would cost more than the minimum wage of about 166 million rials, or $61
Kayhan, the hardline daily overseen by the supreme leader’s representative, accused President Masoud Pezeshkian’s government on Saturday of frightening the public with talk of crisis, while official data show prices up nearly 89 percent in a year.
“The country’s situation is not critical,” the paper wrote in an editorial titled “Don’t weaken the nation’s morale.” A “current,” it said, was feeding the president distorted information to make things look worse than they are.
“If you look through government officials’ statements, you will find plenty of such cases, from the electricity shortfall to the gas shortfall, from gasoline rationing to the food coupon scheme,” it wrote.
“It is as if the cornerstone of the government’s actions and its media operations is scaring people.”
Kayhan is run by Hossein Shariatmadari, appointed by the supreme leader, and its editorials are widely read as the voice of the system’s hardline core.
The editorial, by Seyed Mohammad Emad Erabi, cited two of Pezeshkian’s warnings. In November 2025 the president said that if it did not rain, Tehran’s water might have to be rationed and the capital evacuated. Kayhan noted that neither happened and that Tehran’s reservoirs are now fuller than a year ago.
It also cited the government’s claim that Iran spent about $6 billion importing gasoline last year, a figure the state Court of Audit put at $1.8 billion through December, and Pezeshkian’s statement in October that Iran no longer needed to import gasoline at all, which two of his own deputies then contradicted.
Kayhan’s answer was to stop warning the public. It quoted the late supreme leader Ali Khamenei telling officials in December 2024 that anyone inside the country who spoke in a way that “empties people’s hearts” was committing “a crime.”
The editorial also urged Pezeshkian to stop tying an end to the country’s “neither war nor peace” limbo to a deal with the United States.
Kayhan’s own example undercut it. Hossein Taeb, head of the Basij militia, said on Thursday that Iran still imports about seven million liters of gasoline a day, with output at about 110 million liters against consumption of about 135 million.
Point-to-point inflation reached 88.7 percent in the month to October 22, according to the Statistical Center of Iran, meaning a household pays on average nearly twice what it paid a year earlier for the same basket of goods and services.
The rial fell to about 2,720,000 to the dollar on Saturday.
Ali Babaei Karnami, who chairs parliament’s Social Committee, has said up to 50 million Iranians struggle to afford food and at least eight million face absolute poverty and malnutrition.
A family of four needs at least 1 billion rials (about $370) a month to live normally, he said. The base minimum wage is about 166 million rials (about $61), a sixth of that.
The International Monetary Fund expects Iran’s economy to shrink by at least 7.6 percent in 2026 because of the war and sanctions.
Messages sent to Iran International by people across the country describe essentials disappearing from their tables.
“I went to buy a lavash. I got one piece of bread the size of my palm for 400,000 rials,” one wrote. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to live.” Lavash, a thin flatbread, is the cheapest and most common bread in Iran. At about 15 cents, that one small piece cost roughly 7 percent of a day’s minimum wage.
A retiree wrote that his monthly pension does not last past the first ten days of the month, leaving nothing for food or medical bills.
Others pointed to the state’s recent unveiling of underground “missile cities” and said the country’s money was going to military projects rather than fuel, water, electricity and people’s livelihoods.
The Iranian and Israeli people are natural allies against Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), and the fight against the force will be won in public opinion as much as on the battlefield, according to Arab-Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad.
“The Iranian people and the Israeli people, we love each other, we support each other,” Haddad said in Iran International’s Washington studio. “Every place I went for a demonstration, for a protest, I had Iranians at my back helping me.”
Haddad, a Christian from Nazareth and a volunteer Israeli army veteran, is one of Israel’s best-known advocates abroad. He ran second on Amcha Yisrael, a new right-wing list led by retired Brigadier General Ofer Winter, in Israel’s October 27 election. The list won 1.68 percent of the vote and no seats.
‘The same mission’
Haddad said he wanted to turn the ties between ordinary Israelis and Iranians into a common campaign.
“My plan is to take that relationship between the Israeli people and the Iranian people and strengthen it, and with the numbers, together we serve the same mission, which is one: destroying the IRGC and bringing security to Israel and the entire Middle East,” he said.
Israel has fought on what Haddad called seven fronts since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, including direct war with the Islamic Republic. In his view, Israel won militarily but stopped short of finishing the job, and the reason was the battle for public opinion.
“You know why we were stopped? Because of the public diplomacy and anti-Israel propaganda,” he said. “The way to fight the IRGC and to destroy the IRGC is through public diplomacy.”
He said Israel’s own government had fallen short. “We could have done more for Israeli public diplomacy. We could have done more for the Iranian people’s public diplomacy, and especially for the Iranian people against the IRGC,” he said.
He accused Qatar, which has hosted Hamas’s political office and funds Al Jazeera, of dominating that arena. “We completely gave that arena to Qatar, and they are shifting the narrative,” he said.
An Arab in the Israeli army
Haddad served in the Golani Brigade and was badly wounded by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile in the 2006 Lebanon war. “It was my Jewish brothers in arms who saved my life and who brought me back to Israel,” he said.
Arab citizens, about a fifth of Israel’s population, are exempt from compulsory service, and Haddad volunteered.
“I, as an Arab, was a commander over Jewish soldiers in the IDF,” he said, rejecting the charge that Israel is an apartheid state.
In 2024 he lit a torch at Israel’s official Independence Day ceremony. “This is something huge for an Israeli, yes, but for an Arab Israeli, it’s absolutely crazy,” he said.
Criticism of Arab-led parties
Arab-led parties won a record 19 seats in the October 27 election, and their backing helped opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot win the mandate to form a government. Haddad said the result showed Israel’s democracy works, but he accused the parties’ leaders of neglecting their own voters.
“When the election comes, all the leaders stop talking about Gaza, stop talking about Jenin and Ramallah, and finally they start talking again about Nazareth and Haifa,” he said. “They’re lying to us, time after time.”
He singled out Ahmad Tibi, the veteran head of Ta’al. “He tells you that Israel is an apartheid state. He tells you that he doesn’t want Israel as a Jewish state,”
He also said Tibi was protected by his parliamentary immunity. “He hit a cop, but because he’s a politician, he has immunity. No one can do anything to him,” Haddad said.
Haddad said he had once been kept out of a Knesset committee session chaired by Joint List lawmaker Aida Touma-Sliman on the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.
“I told her, ‘You guys are actually the apartheid, because you don’t want to listen to me, and I’m one of you, an Arab just like you,’” he said. “Pure apartheid toward me.”
He also cited Sami Abu Shehadeh, head of the Balad party, who withdrew from the election in October after the Central Elections Committee voted to bar him over remarks after the October 7 attack.
“They don’t want to set a precedent,” Haddad said of the Supreme Court, which recommended the withdrawal rather than ruling. “I’m all for freedom of speech, until you start to incite to terrorism.”
Teaching children to die
Haddad said the Guards’ proxies indoctrinate children from an early age, and that education can work in both directions. He praised the United Arab Emirates, which designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group in 2014 and later began teaching the Holocaust in schools.
Of children raised by Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, he said: “When you arrive at age 12, you’re already serving in their terrorist organization, completely brainwashed. When you arrive at age 16, you’re ready to die.”
Haddad said he hoped Israelis and Iranians would build a common front.
"Together, the people of Israel and the people of Iran, we can actually do it," he said.
