The Explosion in Iran: A Mirror of a Rotten System

According to the statistics, following the explosion at Shahid Rajaei Port, 46 people have so far lost their lives, and according to the emergency services, 1,242 people have been injured. Of these, 240 have been hospitalized in Hormozgan Province hospitals, and 7 have been admitted to hospitals in Shiraz. Despite these official numbers, there are reports suggesting that the real number of deaths is higher than what has been announced.

A huge explosion in Bandar Abbas once again tore a deep crack in the polished image of the Islamic Republic. On the same days when official media were speaking about “spreading rationality,” “national unity,” and “flexibility in foreign policy” during the indirect talks between Iran and the United States in Oman, the sound of the explosion in the south of the country revealed the true face of a collapsing order. These two seemingly different events are actually two sides of the same crisis: the structural crisis of a government that has neither the ability nor the will to reform, and that, in its struggle to survive, relies only on repression, corruption, lies, and covering up reality.

Official Storytelling to Cover Up Decay

Government media, especially IRNA, tried to present the new round of negotiations as a sign of “spreading rationality” in the country’s political atmosphere. Quotes from formerly hardline officials, who now speak in a softer tone about negotiations, were highlighted. It was claimed that political factions had supposedly moved past hostility and reached an agreement over national interests.

But this image is nothing more than a deliberate distortion. In the Islamic Republic, internal power struggles are not about improving people’s lives or developing the country; they are about fighting over resources, looting more, and managing repression more effectively. The rationality praised by government media is, at best, the rationality of preserving a system of repression — not the rationality of human liberation.

The new language of negotiators and conservative figures is not a sign of democratic change. It is simply a response to the regime’s urgent need to ease economic and political pressures. Negotiations, as always, are a tool to buy time, rebuild power, and continue the same system that has made poverty, censorship, corruption, and death in workplaces part of everyday life.

Shadi Maki, a journalist from Shargh newspaper, writes in her report today: “Information sharing is very limited. Many officials, as soon as they hear the word ‘journalist’ over the phone, hang up and refuse to talk. Social activists and official organizations have gone silent. They only say one sentence: ‘We are banned from giving interviews.’ They say that by order of provincial authorities, especially the Hormozgan Governor’s Office, restrictions have been placed on releasing information, and institutions and individuals have been told not to publish anything except through the state broadcaster until further notice. Despite a lot of speculation on social media, no official has yet made a statement about the nature of the incident, the exact amount of damage, or the confirmed number of casualties.”

A Disaster That Repeats Every Day

The Bandar Abbas explosion is just one link in a chain of disasters that target the lives of workers and the poor. According to a report by the Parliament’s Research Center, nearly 4,000 workers lost their lives in 2021 and 2022 because of unsafe working conditions. This number only includes workers with insurance, while more than 96% of workers in Iran have temporary, blank-signed, or informal contracts without basic rights.

Behind these numbers lie destroyed lives, orphaned children, and shattered futures. The crony capitalist system ruling Iran sees workers not as human beings, but as disposable tools. A system that treats workers’ deaths as a small price to pay for profit.

Corruption and mismanagement in this system are not “accidents” — they are necessary tools for the regime’s survival. Most major industry owners have close ties to security and military institutions. When those who are supposed to enforce regulations are themselves benefitting from corruption, accountability becomes meaningless.

Workers Deprived of Tools for Defense

In such a situation, the lack of independent workers’ organizations has made the crisis even worse.
Every attempt to create real unions has been crushed at birth; threats, torture, imprisonment, and dismissal have been the fate of those who fought for even basic human rights. This ban has left workers defenseless against a wild capitalist system and a repressive state.

While in many countries, labor unions are a force to pressure rulers and defend workers’ rights, in Iran, workers are left alone to resist endless exploitation. Today, many labor activists like are in prison living examples of the heavy price of trying to organize independently.

In the report of the Shargh newspaper we read that, a witness was on a mobile phone call when he heard the explosion and felt the ground shake: “At the moment of the incident, I was sitting right in front of the window. At first, a small amount of smoke rose into the air, and then the color of the smoke slowly turned pink. For a moment, it became a very dark and unnatural pink. Right then, I saw a fire burst out in a mushroom shape. The whole dock was covered in dust.”

“We were in a warehouse located at the end of the dock, while the explosion happened at the beginning of the dock, about a kilometer away. Even so, the shockwave was so strong that it threw me to another spot. The windows shattered, and the glass shards hit my face. My shoulder was also torn and needed four stitches at the hospital.”

Traffic at the dock’s exit caused Houman to reach Khatam Hospital two hours later, around 2:30 PM: “When I arrived at the hospital, there weren’t many of us yet. Strangely, even in those difficult and tense moments, the hospital charged us for all the medical services, like X-rays, bandages, and so on. Since we didn’t have any companions, we had to manage everything ourselves.”

And he goes on to tell the newspaper reporter “It was hard for me to accept that they were charging us under such conditions. Is this really how things should be managed? Anyway, slowly the hospital became crowded, to the point where they put another person on my bed. Many people were injured, and some were badly hurt. I saw a woman with deep cuts on her face and leg. The person who shared my bed had burns on his feet, hands, and parts of his face. I don’t know if they continued to charge people after it got crowded.”

Meanwhile, they heard that the wife of one of their colleagues, who had been near the container storage area, was missing. Houman is surprised by the explosion: “At this dock, dangerous goods or items that require special care are not stored. Even goods with low risk are kept under very strict conditions until they are cleared. Highly dangerous materials are usually removed from the dock very quickly. I wonder what materials were being stored there and why.”

Support The Fire Next Time

Your support helps keep this space alive but also ensures that these critical discussions remain accessible to all.

Sanctions: Double the Suffering, But Not the Root of the Crisis

The role of U.S. and allied economic sanctions in worsening people’s lives cannot be denied. Sanctions, mainly aimed at weakening the regime, have directly hurt the poor and working class. Medicine, food, and raw materials for production have all become scarcer and more expensive. But sanctions have only made the crisis worse; the real roots are inside the country — in a political and economic structure that concentrates wealth in the hands of a small circle and sacrifices millions of lives for its own survival.

Sanctions have also created opportunities for certain groups to profit from the crisis. These groups, often called the “merchants of sanctions,” have used their close ties to power centers and access to state resources to amass huge fortunes and push the economy deeper into corruption and cronyism.

Some of these merchants, by bypassing sanctions and making unofficial deals, made enormous profits. For example, Babak Zanjani, a well-known figure in this area, built a massive fortune during the sanctions era through complex financial networks and special connections. These actions not only fueled corruption in the economy but also destroyed public trust in economic and political institutions.

Beyond individuals, some military and security institutions have also expanded their economic influence through sanctions. Taking advantage of legal loopholes and weak oversight, they entered various sectors, created monopolies, and crushed healthy competition. This not only boosted corruption and rent-seeking but also blocked the growth of the private sector and entrepreneurship in the country.

The role of the military-security sector cannot be ignored either. These institutions receive billions of dollars in funding without any transparency. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), under the name of “security,” has built hundreds of missile bases — according to their own claims — without any public information on the budgets used for their construction and maintenance.

At the same time, while these massive military and security costs continue alongside structural corruption, the budgets for Islamic propaganda organizations have not only remained untouched during the economic crisis but have actually increased significantly. These small and large organizations, operating in the name of religion, are growing even as the government struggles to fund basic development projects.

Power Faction Rivalries: Manufactured Crises for Survival

These rivalries are mainly about securing a bigger share of economic and political resources. In such a structure, disasters and crises — from the Bandar Abbas explosion to street protests — become tools for shifting internal power balances or stabilizing the positions of different factions. The experience of the 2017 protests is a clear example of this phenomenon. These protests started with a small, localized push in the city of Mashhad by some factions opposing the sitting government, but they quickly grew into a national movement against the entire system.

Slogans that, at first, focused on economic issues soon turned into radical calls against the whole structure of the Islamic Republic: from “Death to the Dictator” to “Reformists, Conservatives, the game is over.” The regime, thinking it could manage the crisis, suddenly faced a wave of public anger and dissatisfaction that it could no longer control. Its response was brutal repression: hundreds were arrested and dozens killed.

This trend continued in later years. In 2022, during the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising, the widespread social discontent once again showed itself. But even beyond these large national uprisings, labor and economic protests have been happening non-stop across the country. According to independent worker organizations reports and labor sources, during 2024 alone, at least 2,396 protest gatherings and 169 strikes were recorded across different sectors. These protests spread across 31 provinces and 70 cities, involving oil, gas, and petrochemical workers, retirees, teachers, nurses, and municipal workers.

This wide wave of protests paints a clear picture of the country’s deep economic and social crisis: Unpaid wages, Temporary contracts, Mass layoffs, Runaway inflation, The collapse of job security, And workers’ basic demands left unanswered. In this situation, the power factions try to use repression or artificial crises (such as steering some protests or spreading fear) to hide the real crises or redirect public anger into harmless channels. But the scale and intensity of the protests show that the gap between the people and the ruling system has grown too deep to be repaired by political maneuvering or simply changing a few faces at the top.

Today, it is not just political or labor activists who are raising their voices. The protests have expanded so much that wide sections of society — from industrial workers to teachers and nurses — have reached the conclusion that there is no solution other than fundamental change. As the slogans in the streets and workers’ strikes clearly say: The problem is not just bad management; the problem is the system itself.

The Islamic Republic cannot be reformed. This regime is built from the ground up on corruption, repression, and lies. No diplomatic shift, no change in language, no deal with global powers can change that reality. The future of Iran will only change when workers, the poor, the youth, and the oppressed build their own independent organizations, stay free from both poles of reaction — whether the Islamic Republic or imperialist powers — and take their fate into their own hands.

The Bandar Abbas explosion, the deaths of thousands of workers, the spread of poverty, and the rising military budgets — all of these are screaming that this system must be dismantled. Not through empty negotiations, not through tactical changes at the top, but through the independent power of the people.