My latest Iran's Economy is Collapsing Understanding the IRGC's...
Zineb Riboua@zriboua
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May 12, 2026
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My latest
Iran's Economy is Collapsing
Understanding the IRGC's Dilemma
The IRGC likes to boast about its immunity to external pressure, but the economic situation reveals an organization that is disoriented, operating a model so rigid and so dependent on conditions that no longer exist that it has no productive response to the pressure now bearing down on it.
zinebriboua.com/p/irans-econom…
Iran's Economy is Collapsing
Understanding the IRGC's Dilemma
The IRGC likes to boast about its immunity to external pressure, but the economic situation reveals an organization that is disoriented, operating a model so rigid and so dependent on conditions that no longer exist that it has no productive response to the pressure now bearing down on it.
zinebriboua.com/p/irans-econom…
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What Operation Epic Fury has achieved so far is forcing the Islamic Republic to manage two fronts simultaneously, one facing outward toward protecting a mosaic military enterprise built on proxy funding, missile threats, and an unrelenting nuclear program, and one facing inward toward managing a population that has shown repeatedly, at the cost of its own lives, that there is a threshold the regime keeps pushing past.
open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…
open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…
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Drug prices have surged by as much as 400 percent, pharmacies report shortages across the country, and the internet shutdown that has long served as the regime's preferred instrument for controlling the narrative may succeed in keeping Iranians from footage of IRGC battlefield failures, but it cannot keep them from a currency that has lost more than half its value.
open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…
open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…
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Mobarakeh Steel, among Iran's most consequential industrial assets, took direct and heavy hits. More than 27,000 workers have since been left without a clear employment status. Skilled technical staff who previously took home over 100 million tomans — roughly $568 — a month now earn close to the statutory floor, a reduction to roughly a fifth of former wages, according to Iran International.
open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…
open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…
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Those watching the ceasefire negotiations and concluding that the conflict is winding down are misreading the situation in ways that carry real analytical consequence, because while the strikes have paused, Operation Economic Fury continues to function as both the accelerator and the anchor of what the military phase set in motion, converting battlefield destruction into institutional deterioration that compounds over time and denies the IRGC the fiscal and organizational capacity to reconstitute what Epic Fury dismantled.
open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…
open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…
