The US and Israel “know nothing about our vast and strategic capabilities,” an indignant Ibrahim Zolfaghari sneered on Thursday. If his statement was televised, I’m sure he wagged his finger at the camera.
If you’ve never heard of Zolfaghari, don’t worry: I hadn’t either until last month when he garnered chuckles in the West for a series of overwrought video messages, some of which mocked Donald Trump’s signature lines in an accent that’s much heavier than Zolfaghari realizes.
“Aaay Trump, ‘You are fire.’ You are fameelieer with thee sentence,” Zolfaghari said, in his most famous reel, broadcast on or around March 22. “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
He even stated his organizational affiliation at the end, as Trump does when he signs his social media messages. Shades of mid-1990s Saturday Night Live. That video has Rob Schneider 1992 written all over it.
Officially, Zolfaghari’s a “spokesperson” for Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters. That’s the operational manifestation of the Armed Forces General Staff, which is responsible for making sure Iran’s “regular” army is on the same page as the IRGC.
There’s no current chief of the General Staff, or at least not that Iran’s announced publicly. The last person to hold that position was OFAC-sanctioned Abdolrahim Mousavi, who died with Ali Khamenei in the latter’s office on the first day of “Operation Epic Fury.”
Israel killed Mousavi’s predecessor in the role, the better-known Mohammad Bagheri, in the famous opening salvo of 2025’s 12-Day War.
I included the Zolfaghari video in the interest of giving readers some context for the headlines traders, carbon-based and otherwise, were reacting to Thursday. Zolfaghari’s message was cited in part for a renewed bout of risk-off sentiment following Trump’s as-expected remarks on winding down the war.
“The centers you think you have targeted are insignificant,” Zolfaghari said, adding that — and this is verbatim — most of Iran’s “strategic military productions take place in locations of which you have no knowledge and will never reach.”
With allowances for the self-evident (i.e., that Iran will always be capable of producing drones and projectiles in some number and that trying to locate and bomb every, single production facility is a hopeless game of Whac-a-Mole), the only thing more ridiculous than Zolfaghari’s implicit contention that Iran’s real industrial base is located a million miles below the Earth’s surface in a network of subterranean factory cities, is taking investment cues from Zolfaghari.
I’m not suggesting Trump and Pete Hegseth aren’t themselves exaggerating when they speak about the destruction of Iran’s missile program. You don’t need to trust Zolfaghari to know that, you just have to read a mainstream media account of a given day’s missile and drone attacks.
But as I hope is clear from the video shown above, Khatam-al Anbiya is now producing propaganda that’s indistinguishable in tenor — and every bit as unserious — as what geopolitical junkies read for entertainment on DPRK news aggregators.
In the same Thursday message, Zolfaghari said Iran will continue to wage war until America’s “permanent and inevitable regret.” He then modestly suggested the US “surrender” to Iran.
There’s going to be a lot of noise over the next several weeks. The US will drop more bombs, Iran will fire more missiles and drones, Israel will make even clearer its intention to reoccupy southern Lebanon, more damage will be done to Gulf infrastructure, Trump will oscillate from “Everything will be fine” messaging to “I might have to blow up Iran’s electric grid after all” threats and, yes, more people will unfortunately die.
But having told Americans — in a prime time address — that the US military will be winding down operations against Iran by the end of this month, and knowing full well that nothing aggravates people quite like high gas prices, Trump has virtually no room to pivot back in the direction of an open-ended conflict that includes “regular” ground troops (i.e., infantry). Never say never, but that’s off the table now.
My best guess for what’s next is i) a gradual, stop-and-go resumption of traffic through the Strait, beginning with more Iranian exemptions for unaligned nations, ii) more in the way of evidence from Iran that in fact, the clergy has been sidelined in favor of generals, an outcome that at least reduces the role of religious fundamentalism in domestic and foreign policy, even as it means the regime will remain oppressive at home and antagonistic abroad, iii) energy prices that by and by settle into a new, higher range that’ll be uncomfortable, but tolerable.
Take that for what it’s worth. As Bagher Ghalibaf put it this week, “Do Your Own Research.”
Copy that., “makin’ copies” Richmeister! Funny times, seems long ago. Good start to the morning here in CA. Betting you will be right again.
I’m a real novice on the societal structure within Iran; in view of the seeming decentralisation of operational command by the IRGC to regional command, is there a change of further systemic collapse into previous existing ethnic sub-structures?
I think there’s considerable risk of factionalism in the military ranks if Israel doesn’t stop killing everybody who counts. You gotta leave a few Bagher Ghalibafs alive, otherwise you risk a scenario where half a dozen fortysomethings nobody’s ever heard of decide they’re going to establish local fiefdoms. I don’t think it’d be total chaos, but you could easily imagine a scenario where, six months from now, a missile or a drone slams into an apartment building in Dubai and Tehran says, “Dunno. We got nothin’ for you on that one. We’d apologize, but we don’t even know who we’re apologizing for. Chalk it up to some Ibrahim somewhere.”
Thanks for the reply. Echo’s my thoughts. It’s the prospect of regional military command devolving into existing civilian ‘family, clan, tribe’ structures, thereby avoiding total chaos (I mean, who wants chaos? Apart from well, That guy.) – without dialing down the unrest in the region.
I don’t think it’d have much to do with clans and tribes. Just decentralized power hubs. The demographic angle is highly relevant for a popular uprising / civil war scenario, but I don’t think those are the lines along which intra-military factionalism would develop.
Trump’s 2-3 weeks promises are that reliable? I think not. He started this war/not-war with the same promise. He said Covid would be gone by Easter. No one can predict what will happen over the next 2-3 weeks and how that activity might elicit an emotional reaction from dear leader.
What we should all pay attention to from that speech though is this “Trump claimed the military action was launched to help America’s allies in the region, and also pointedly thanked “Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain,” adding he would not let them get hurt.”
Huh, so we launched a military campaign that has already cost billions of taxpayer dollars and 13 Service Member’s lives because each and every one of those countries has personally enriched the President of the United States? Gosh, if only the Founders had considered such an outcome and put guardrails in place in the Constitution to prevent that from happening.
“He said Covid would be gone by Easter.”
Come on. That’s a total non sequitur. Trump gives orders to the US military. He couldn’t order a virus to stop spreading.
While I agree wholeheartedly with the generalized disdain for Trump, I strongly encourage people to note / admit that trading on that disdain since 2016 would’ve been, at best, a suboptimal strategy.
And to reiterate what I said earlier this week, there’s a fine line between fretting he might do something ruinous and hoping he does just so we can finally say “See? Told you he’d eventually be the death of us.”
We gotta be careful not to accidentally step over that line. Because if he is the death of us, being able to say, “We told you so” will be no solace, and that’s assuming we’d be alive to say it.
Historically, I’ve been a solid “buy and holder”.
However, in accordance with my guiding investment principle (invest according to the way the world actually works, not according to how I wish it works) and to entertain myself, in the past 12 months I’ve been experimenting with “swing trading”!
Whee!!! 🙂
Bagdad Bob
Uprising unfortunately doesn’t seem to be in the cards- hard to know exactly why- but I think lack of arms for anyone who isn’t in the IRGC might have something to do with that?
It’s almost as if we need to offer a bounty (varying scale depending on rank) for the entirety of the IRGC. But, to your point— then what? Who could possibly be the Iranian leader, going forward, who would be willing to work with ME neighbors and the western world?
The IRGC, including the Basij, are 200,000 plus strong and have some very, very scary people among their ranks. Interspersed throughout the country, not all hanging out in one place, either.
Strengthens Iran’s position. The US keeps unilaterally tightening the time and scope constraints on its war. Iran can endure the next couple-few weeks of airstrikes then wave goodbye to the USS Trump, ramp up its SoH tolls, and begin flexing its new power. With no peace deal, but who needs it, they’ve already collected the prize.
What could upset this apple cart? The US could do some brief special forces raids in the SoH for photo-ops; no change in the war’s trajectory, Iran might like the chance to inflict some casualties. A larger operation to excavate and haul out nuclear material is infeasible but maybe B1s drop more GBU57 and Trump gifts the English language with “re-obliteration”; no apples spilled. More airstrikes sure, but US/Israel are mostly out of military targets, strikes on Iran’s energy or power will trigger strikes on Gulf energy, that doesn’t leave so many meaningful targets to Stone Age; bad for regime figures not important enough to be underground, or the next girls’ school, but no change to the endstate.
I think that absent a big mistake – or in Israel’s case, “mistake” – the war uncertainty is rapidly shrinking, a market +ve.
Need to shift focus to the physical products shortage, how long it lasts and what economic damage it causes. I’ve been reading about bbls permanently lost, time to restart production and repair refineries, load and transit oil, etc. My impression is it may be months if not quarters before Asia aka the world’s factory climb out of the biggest oil/petrochemicals supply shock in many decades.
Talk about returning to the Stone Age. That might happen anyway, as we continue to transition to SMR nuclear and solar.
Did you see the announcements on improvements in solid state battery technology? Maybe not quite ready for prime time- but it won’t be long. From memory: a 5 minute charge for 800 miles of range and the battery life is 100,000 miles.
Remains to be seen if we see even one SMR started up, let alone a fleet.
Richard Muller, the inventor of carbon dating, and his daughter are working on a cool new project. Basically, you drill a mile deep hole, drop some enriched uranium in, and fill it with water. The resulting steam spins a 15MW turbine. If anything goes wrong, it’s buried under a mile of rock.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2026/04/02/acclaimed-physicist-and-his-daughter-are-burying-tiny-nuclear-reactors-a-mile-underground/
[Insert laughing emoji]
“Aaay Trump, we haz de missiles and de dronz. De’s under da mountain wid de nukcleer bombzes. Ifa you say one more things, we givez you ‘Fire and fury.’ You are fameelieer with thees sentince, no?”