A look at the recent seven appointments by Mojtaba

What he says

An English translation of the talk, which is in Persian. It was made with AI from YouTube's automatic captions and may contain errors; the Persian transcript is authoritative. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

0:01 Hello. It is Friday, the 22nd, 23rd of Amordad 1405, August 14, 2026. We said before that America's strategy is shifting from war to a naval blockade and economic pressure. Mr. JD Vance, the US Vice President, said in an interview with Fox News that America's priority now is not the nuclear issue but energy prices and keeping the Strait of Hormuz open. Mr. Bessent, the Treasury Secretary

0:57 of the United States, has also said that within the coming week we will impose unprecedented sanctions and an extraordinary, unprecedented blockade and isolation on Iran's economy, which he said will be announced next week. Mr. Trump himself, in a talk he gave in New York, spoke about opening the Strait of Hormuz and things like that, though this talk had the same rambling and incoherence. The Washington Post, in its editorial, also advised the US government to give up on war and to put the aim of its effort

1:56 on the naval blockade and economic pressure. On the Iranian side, however, Mojtaba Khamenei's appointments in the IRGC have drawn close attention and analysis not only from Iranian media and commentators but from international media as well. Many have focused on the strategy, and on the regime becoming more hardline and more radical, and so on. But when we look at these six appointments Mr. Mojtaba Khamenei made in the armed forces and the secretariat of the Supreme National Security Council,

2:55 into how many groups can we divide them? Some of these appointments are in fact the confirmation of interim commands, made in place of earlier commanders who were killed and replaced by someone acting temporarily. For example, Ahmad Vahidi as Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC, who had been acting commander after Pakpour was killed; with Mojtaba Khamenei's decree, this has now been confirmed and made final. Or appointments such as placing Ali Abdollahi, commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, at the head of the General Staff of Iran's Armed Forces, and

3:50 his deputy, the former commander of the Army's Ground Forces, which in fact fills the empty place of Abdolrahim Mousavi, who was also killed at the very beginning of the war. A point seen in the decree for the chief of staff, Mr. Ali Abdollahi, is that he has been asked to pursue and accelerate the process of merging the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters into the General Staff. As you know, the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters is different from the Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters,

4:47 which is in the IRGC for economic activity, and from the Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters in the Army, which is for the country's air defense. The Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, according to a structure conceived several years ago, is something like CENTCOM or similar centers in the US military, such that in wartime all the armed forces were to place their resources at the disposal of this center so that it would command the war. But this decree says that from now on the General Staff of the Armed Forces itself will hold this command, and the path of having a special headquarters for war is dropped, and

5:50 it is said this is being done so that supplies and the provision of forces take a shorter route, with less bureaucracy, and happen faster. Or the appointment of Mohsen Rezaei in place of Zolghadr, which happened despite Pezeshkian's insistence on keeping Zolghadr. As we discussed before, this is mostly an internal matter: Mojtaba's policy, like his father's, is that no faction should gain too much power, so that he can maintain the balance among them. The concern of the Leader's office and of Mojtaba is that the Pezeshkian–Ghalibaf–Araghchi faction, known as the "memorandum of understanding triangle,"

6:54 should not rise beyond a certain level, since Zolghadr also leaned toward them. Instead, putting a buffoonish man like Mohsen Rezaei in his place, whose most important trait is being a weathervane, and who, apart from the corruption and the network and gang he has, will be Mojtaba's obedient slave, and who, in coordination with some other IRGC commanders such as Aziz Jafari, whose distinguishing feature is, for example, hostility toward Ghalibaf, serves to maintain this balance, ultimately to the benefit of the Leader who controls them. But among all these appointments, placing Hossein Taeb, known as Iran's Beria, a sadistic individual,

7:55 a murderer, a conspirator, a psychopath, a killer and torturer, at the head of the Basij in practice means nothing but baring teeth and claws at the people. The Basij is considered the infantry of the regime's machinery of repression. By once again placing Taeb at the head of this organization, and with Taeb and Vahidi, Vahidi in overall command of the IRGC, which must in practice be considered the backbone holding up the regime, he is placing a murderous, repressive pair at the head of the IRGC and the Basij, which means baring teeth and claws at the people.

8:50 Why? Because almost all of the country's intelligence agencies are constantly sounding the alarm to the Leader, the Leader's office and the ruling establishment that the economic situation is dangerous and dire and that there is the possibility of major popular explosions. Mojtaba and the gang in the Leader's office imagine that they can control this coming economic tsunami with repression as well. In fact, this economic tsunami consists, on one side, of the chronic inflation that began in the 1350s of the Iranian calendar and has continued, and which, as Dr. Nili says, has for some time now reached severe inflation, and this is the last

9:47 station before hyperinflation, where the speed of the currency's collapse will intensify; plus a widespread recession, which the International Monetary Fund says will mean negative growth of minus 10 percent for Iran's economy in 2026, if not more; along with a crisis in factory production, with more than 300 of the country's factories hit, some of which were mother industries such as steel or petrochemicals, which has disrupted the production chain, and so far at least half a million workers have become unemployed; along with the problem that

10:42 has arisen in the economic chain, not only in production; these problems of stagflation and production have spread to the services sector as well, and have disrupted shops, the bazaar and the normal turning of the economy. In fact, in Iran's economy, more than 50 percent is the services sector, roughly 20 percent, give or take, comes from oil and petroleum products and so on, 20 percent of gross domestic product is industry, and around 8 to 12, let's take an average of 10 percent, is agricultural production. The oil and production parts have run into trouble, and that

11:38 stagflation has already damaged the services sector, sectors such as transportation, trade, education, recreation, tourism and so on and so forth, banks and banking and the like. All of this together is moving at once, and that is why economists say an economic tsunami is coming whose waves are higher than the country's officials imagine, and if a proper solution and a genuine reconciliation with the people does not happen, repression is of no use. It only makes people angrier and increases resentment and rage. Plus

12:37 the high waves of this tsunami will drown the repressive forces themselves as well. Now, the passing of Iraj, the golden-voiced man of Iranian singing, Hossein Khajeh-Amiri, known as the champion of Iranian vocal music, at the age of 94, is considered one of the losses of Iranian art. Today was his burial ceremony, and with this ceremony it turned into a commemoration of Iraj and his place in Iranian singing and music. On top of the government's religious lament "Let's Go to Najaf," with which the regime was trying, before Arbaeen, to encourage people to go to Karbala and Najaf,

13:36 people posted videos of giving food to the poor, to the destitute, of feeding stray and ownerless animals and things of that sort, implying that on the people's side these problems exist and money should not be spent on going to Arbaeen. This led the regime to consider this, too, a threat to national security; it summoned some of those who made these videos and shut down their Instagram pages, including a woman who had taken part in feeding animals and whose Instagram post on this

14:27 had been viewed 30 million times. A regime for which apparently everything is a threat to national security. In hope of victory for Iran and Iranians.