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A prolonged armed confrontation shook IranShahr in Sistan and Baluchestan on September 29, 2026, with sustained gunfire heard for hours in the Gharibabad district. Videos circulated by local media recorded heavy firing, while local sources reported the use of RPGs and said dozens of security vehicles, a tank and drones were deployed as roads into the area were sealed. Local reports said security forces surrounded a house during the operation.
State media confirmed the scale of the shooting but gave a markedly different account of who was involved. Tasnim said police had launched an operation against “armed robbers,” initially reporting that the suspects had been trapped while withholding their number, casualties or identities pending an official police statement. Local sources later identified the man killed after the hours-long standoff as 26-year-old Morteza Sotoudeh, from Abtar near IranShahr, and reported that security forces demolished the house where he had been surrounded with a loader after the fighting ended.
The confrontation comes amid a conspicuous run of armed security incidents in southeastern Iran. Only six days earlier, the IRGC confirmed that Brig. Gen. Hossein Zarifi, commander of the Sajjad operational headquarters in Saravan, was killed during another armed operation. A police officer was also killed and three others wounded in an attack on the Bazman-IranShahr road last week. Whatever the still-unclear nature of Tuesday’s IranShahr confrontation, the frequency and scale of the recent operations point to sustained security pressure in Sistan and Baluchestan.
"On the morning after the ceasefire, every exhausted and exasperated mind, long numbed by the #IranWar, will turn instinctively toward the search for real change and the practical means to bring this regime to an end." https://t.co/8Tmh0Sl0Kc
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) April 9, 2026
Currency Crisis Meets Police Action
Elsewhere, the free-market dollar crossed another psychological threshold. It rose above 250,000 tomans on September 29, with market reporting putting it above 253,000 and Eghtesad News recording an intraday rate above 254,000 tomans. A year earlier, the dollar traded at roughly 111,000 tomans—meaning its toman price has risen about 128 percent in twelve months.
The authorities are increasingly treating the currency market as a policing problem. Police announced the arrest of 11 currency traders, including an alleged organizer of forward and paper transactions, and blocked five bank accounts. The Financial Intelligence Center has separately placed 214 individuals on a suspicious-transactions blacklist, including 45 added in its latest round.
The approach recalls earlier currency crises in which authorities blamed individual market actors without stopping depreciation. In 2018, authorities executed Vahid Mazloumin, dubbed the “Sultan of Coins,” for disrupting the monetary system; the price of the benchmark gold coin nevertheless continued rising after his arrest and execution.
Students in Iran are putting tuition, inflation, unemployment, compulsory #hijab and political repression into the same slogans—as the dollar hits a new record and retirees again take to the streets.
The lines between economic, social and political discontent are fading.
Today’s…— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 28, 2026
Medicine and Schools Show the Strain
Pressure on foreign exchange and supply chains is reaching essential services. Food and Drug Administration spokesman Mohammad Hashemi said inputs associated with nearly 700 essential and vital drug items are now receiving priority monitoring, citing vulnerabilities involving raw materials, currency, financial transfers, transportation and customs. He stressed that the monitoring list should not itself be read as 700 medicines currently in shortage.
There are already visible disruptions. Acetaminophen-codeine is being rationed in pharmacies, while pharmaceutical officials have said transportation costs for raw materials have risen six- to tenfold and a European banking channel has been effectively closed for more than six months. Imported influenza vaccines have also faced delays. In Plan, Dashtiari, local media separately reported that medical staff treated an emergency patient by mobile-phone light during a power outage because the facility lacked functioning backup power.
Education is facing its own personnel crisis. Videos of teachers announcing resignations have multiplied since the school year began. The Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations attributes the departures to inadequate salaries, deteriorating working conditions and systemic neglect. Teacher activist Esmail Abdi described a monthly salary of about 20 million tomans—roughly $80 at the current market exchange rate—as “insulting.” The same teachers’ network previously estimated a shortage of at least 100,000 teachers, meaning departures add pressure to a system already short of staff.
Tehran’s infighting is testing Mojtaba Khamenei’s authority.
Hardliners are turning on FM Araghchi over his #NewYork contact with the U.S. envoy—despite reports the Leader approved the talks. MPs demand impeachment. Pezeshkian is under fire too.
Loyalty to the Leader is looking…— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 29, 2026
Social Control Returns to the Security Agenda
The judiciary, meanwhile, is again elevating compulsory hijab from a social regulation to a national-security concern. Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei instructed the prosecutor-general to place what he called “indecency and nudity” before the Supreme National Security Council and coordinate enforcement with police, the Interior Ministry and prosecutors nationwide. He also said that the regime’s president Masoud Pezeshkian had repeatedly described the situation as intolerable.
That intervention comes immediately after university students protested compulsory hijab alongside inflation, tuition and unemployment—illustrating why dress enforcement carries a political significance extending well beyond clothing. The regime is confronting a generation for whom economic and personal-freedom grievances increasingly appear in the same protest vocabulary.
The broader significance of Tuesday’s developments is therefore not simply that several crises happened at once. Areas normally governed through economic policy, public services, social regulation and ordinary law enforcement are increasingly being handled through coercive institutions. State security forces pursue currency traders as the rial falls, the judiciary pushes women’s dress toward the national-security apparatus, teachers leave a depleted education system, medicine supply chains strain—and in IranShahr, a security operation escalates into hours of gunfire, heavy deployments and an urban siege.