Iran begins to crack under Trump’s silent war

Soaring cost of living has left many Iranians on their knees but Tehran insists it will not be squeezed into surrender

by Akhtar Makoii

In the Caspian coastal city of Sari, Akbar, 43, breaks metal and hauls loads around a scrap yard for less than £4 a day. His meagre salary is worth about half what it was a year ago.

Akbar recently started putting the little money he had left over each day to store food before another possible American bombing campaign. But two weeks ago he started raiding those supplies in desperation.

“We can’t even afford our daily things,” he said. “And it’s not just me. It’s the same for most people I know, so I can’t even borrow from them, because they’re struggling too.”

Akbar’s quiet humiliation is the face of a slower and grinding kind of warfare now bearing down on Iran.

The bombing of major cities may have stopped, but another war has taken its place – one aimed directly at ordinary Iranians.

Washington has sanctioned all of the country’s airlines, throttled its border crossings and made it all but impossible to import medicine, food and fertiliser, as part of a US campaign called Operation Economic Outcast.

In September, the US Treasury blacklisted 27 Iranian carriers and aviation bodies, cutting off access to spare parts, maintenance and safety checks.

Tehran, in a complaint to the UN Security Council, described the measures as “economic terrorism” and “collective punishment” of civilians.

The success of the US blockade of Iran’s ports is also taking hold, with almost all Iranian exports now shut off.

The oil getting out belongs to Arab neighbours in the Persian Gulf – much to the chagrin of Iranian armed forces who have restarted attacks on tankers this week.

Before the US-Israel war on Iran began on Feb 28, the strait typically handled about 125 large commercial vessels a day, and shipments through it accounted for roughly 20 per cent of the world’s crude and liquefied natural gas.

Seven months into the original blockade, The Telegraph spoke with ordinary Iranians as well as officials, clerics and analysts across the country.

They described a nation ground down by the economic siege, with a currency in freefall.

They spoke of day labourers who are now breaking into their emergency food supplies, of small businesses with no customers left, of pharmacies searched end to end for a single strip of codeine tablets, and flu vaccines that can no longer be found.

They told of a creeping despair among young people who said their futures are being stripped from them by the day, and at least one who said she wished only for it all to end.

Even within the Islamic Republic, the strain is showing.

Generals and clerics admitted a fear that the government supporters filling the streets and calling for revenge could be pushing the system towards collapse – and that it may not survive the pressure with a supreme leader who has all but vanished from view.

The leadership, meanwhile, publicly called the war a victory. Its president told the UN that Iran had “come out with our heads held high”, its commanders have declared the Islamic Republic triumphant, and the state has summoned hundreds of thousands to enlist in a mass mobilisation it holds up as proof of a nation unbowed.

The interviews revealed how Donald Trump, having failed to force Iran to its knees in war this year, is now playing a longer game and is tightening a naval blockade and economic siege designed to crush the Islamic Republic from within.

In Tehran, Reza, 36, ran a small online shop until the orders dried up.

“I haven’t made money for weeks,” he said.

“During the war there was no internet, and I thought when it came back things would improve. They only got worse – people have no money to buy anything.”

With no savings, he now works in a relative’s store.

“There too it’s bad. People aren’t buying. At least he keeps ahead of inflation by not holding tomans [an unofficial currency unit] – he turns them into stock.”

The Iranian rial has sunk past 2.7 million to the dollar. Food inflation, by some figures, has blown past 125 per cent.

Jalal, 38, drives a taxi in Karaj, west of the capital, and has decided to give up and move to Shiraz to be near his parents and relatives.

But he cannot afford to.

“Two months ago a truck to move my things cost 10 million tomans. Last week they told me 35 million” – diesel is scarce and drivers charge what they like.

“You should just hope you never need a doctor,” he added. “I went to at least 10 pharmacies to find some codeine. Even flu vaccines are hard to find.”

The despair runs deepest among the young.

Taraneh, 29, a student in Tehran, said life sinks “deeper into misery every passing day”.

She has a little more freedom now in how she dresses because of more relaxed rules, she said, “but what use is it when we can’t even afford a coffee with friends?”

More than once, she said, she had reached the point of simply wishing it would all end.

Behnaz, an 18-year-old schoolgirl in Isfahan, was more resigned than angry. “I’m not on anyone’s side. I just think about my future, which is being taken from me every day. It feels like no one cares about us – it’s all politics and we are stuck.”

That sentiment – that the people have become the battlefield – is being discussed at the top.

In interviews with The Telegraph, generals and clerics acknowledged a fear that the Iranians now filling the streets could be dragging the system towards collapse, and that some inside it knew it.

Each night, crowds of the Islamic Republic’s supporters gather in city squares, chanting for revenge against the United States and Israel and vowing to fight on.

Much of that anger is now turned inward as the demonstrators warn the government’s own negotiators against any deal with Washington, framing talks to end the war as betrayal.

The nightly rallies, an offshoot of the mass “Jan-fada” mobilisation, have become a show of hardline strength just as hunger tests the wider public’s patience and stand as a threat to Tehran’s diplomats that the price of compromise could be steep.

Iranian officials and clerics who spoke with The Telegraph argued privately that there must be talks with the Americans, unsure whether Mr Trump is simply waiting for the economy to break.

And they voiced an anxiety rarely spoken aloud that the Islamic Republic may not weather the strain with a supreme leader who has remained almost entirely out of view.

“It is clear Trump is playing the longer game now, waiting for the system to reach a point where it is forced to give concessions,” one analyst in Tehran said.

“But that may take a long time, because Shia ideology is all about resisting. When people are hungry, though, it is another case.”

Among analysts, the debate is whether the blockade is an alternative to war or a prelude to one.

Sadegh Maleki, a former diplomat, said the two could not be cleanly separated.

“We are in a fluid situation in which war is near and so is peace,” he said. America, he added, failed in its war to win what it now seeks through siege, and is betting that economic pain and the rising cost of living will erode Iranian society’s endurance.

The way out, he added, runs “step by step, from understanding to agreement and then toward normalisation”.

Ali Bigdeli, an international affairs scholar, said Trump’s priority, for the moment, was the blockade rather than a new war he can ill afford before US midterm elections, with his popularity sliding and fuel prices a live political danger.

“Opening a new front could be costly,” he said, “especially as past conflicts brought Washington no final victory.”

sist they will not be squeezed into surrender.

At a summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States this week, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, framed his country as an indispensable corridor linking Central Asia to open water through the Gulf port of Chabahar. He warned that sanctions on Iran damage the whole region’s trade and energy.

“Negotiation in the shadow of force is not negotiation,” he said. “It is coercion.”

On the ground, the siege bites in humbler ways where convoys of Iranian trucks are halted at one border crossing after another, unable to move goods out by land.

For now, the long game is measured not in territory but in the texture of ordinary life.

Akbar, the metal breaker, said he was too embarrassed to go to a recent wedding because he didn’t want to turn up without a gift.

On the streets, he said: “You see few people laughing. Everyone, everywhere, is complaining – and no one knows whom to blame.”