Buried under yesterday's @USTreasury Iran sanctions is something not done before. This is the first time khums (the one-fifth levy observant muslims pay on surplus income) is named as a channel the Islamic Republic exploits for sanctions evasion and terror finance. The alert publish by FinCEN didn't hold back saying some collectors act "on behalf of prominent Iranian ayatollahs with ties to the regime or on behalf of the Supreme Leader himself." The U.S. government is asking banks to be on the look out for these flows and report them. In 2024 two men in Texas pleaded guilty to collecting khums on Khamenei's behalf, carrying cash out in amounts under $10,000 to evade detection, and once used 25 pilgrims bound for Iraq to hand-deliver dollars to Iran.

You probably have the Iran war backward: sanctions didn’t fail before the conflict. They helped make its military outcome possible, by depriving the regime of the money, technology and components needed to field a credible modern defense. My op-ed @WSJopinion

The internal Iranian regime narrative has shifted markedly in the past 72 hours. Multiple officials have now openly acknowledged Iran’s structural gasoline deficit, war-damaged energy infrastructure, and the urgent need for consumption management. Fuel shortages and tightened rationing are pushing drivers across the country into a rapidly growing gasoline black market. Citizens are describing hours-long lines at filling stations and sharply inflated under-the-table prices. a clear signal that the official quota system is breaking down on the ground. @IranIntl On the export front, the picture is just as stark: Iranian crude exports have collapsed by more than 80% between mid-March and late April, measured against a March baseline of 23.4 million barrels. @Vortexa. And there is no easy workaround. Iran’s overland export alternatives, via Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan, have a combined capacity of only 250,000–300,000 bpd. The math simply doesn’t work for Tehran. The cumulative picture: a regime now publicly conceding what it long denied, a domestic fuel market under acute stress, and an export channel with no viable replacement.