Iran International
Iran’s rapidly narrowing international air connections are forcing travelers onto longer and costlier routes while adding friction with neighboring states, as Tehran pressures regional governments over flight restrictions.
Flight-monitoring data from Flightradar24 indicate that US aviation sanctions have reduced Iran’s international flights by about half in one week. Almost all of Iran’s international flights over the past month have been operated by Iranian airlines, as foreign carriers have largely stopped flying to the country.
The latest restrictions reach beyond Iranian airlines themselves. Airports, fuel suppliers, ground handlers, ticket sellers and other companies providing services to sanctioned carriers can risk US penalties, giving businesses in third countries an incentive to stop handling Iranian flights.
Iranian-operated flights to the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Georgia and Azerbaijan have been suspended or sharply restricted, while Iranian carriers remain barred from Iraqi airports despite a limited resumption of services by Iraq’s national airline. Flights to China and Russia continue, while services to several other destinations, including Turkey and Afghanistan, have remained available.
For passengers trying to reach countries no longer served directly, that increasingly means flying through cities such as Istanbul, Islamabad, Kabul, Beijing, Dushanbe, Yerevan or Moscow before continuing to their destinations.
The detours can add hours or even days to journeys and substantially increase costs.
Turkey has become one of the most important remaining gateways. Iran Air flights between Tehran and Istanbul were still operating Monday, according to flight-tracking data, although Mahan Air has already suspended its Turkey services and Turkish Airlines has no Iran flights scheduled before March 2027.
Turkey Today reported Monday, citing two sources, that the remaining Iranian flights to Turkey were expected to be suspended in early October. No formal announcement of a complete suspension has yet been made.
Longer routes, higher costs
Mahan, a 42-year-old Iranian who has lived and worked in the United Arab Emirates for years and regularly travels to Tehran to visit her elderly mother, said her latest return journey to Dubai showed how quickly the restrictions were changing ordinary travel.
With direct options unavailable, she flew from Iran to Armenia on Sunday, spent the night at a hotel in Yerevan and continued to Dubai the following day.
Including the hotel and transportation in Armenia, she said the journey cost almost three times what she previously paid to travel between Iran and the UAE.
The trip was also more stressful, she said, because the hotel arranged for her was a considerable distance from the airport.
Other passengers she encountered had taken an even more difficult route. They told her they had traveled overland from Iran to the Armenian border and then continued roughly 400 kilometers by bus to Yerevan.
They described carrying luggage through crowded border areas and struggling to find transportation for the long journey from the crossing to the Armenian capital.
Najaf becomes test case
Iraq has emerged as one of the clearest examples of the complications created by Washington’s aviation pressure because of the volume of religious and family travel between the two countries.
Baghdad airport stopped accepting flights operated by Iranian airlines on September 22. Iranian aviation authorities initially sought to redirect some Baghdad-bound services to Najaf, one of Shiite Islam’s most important pilgrimage centers.
Najaf airport then suspended all flights to and from Iran on September 25, cutting off the alternative route and affecting large numbers of Iranian pilgrims traveling to Najaf and nearby Karbala.
The Iraqi government subsequently opened direct talks with Washington for exemptions from US Treasury measures. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s office said it was seeking exemptions allowing travel for medical treatment, education, religious visits and other civilian purposes.
Reuters reported Monday that the Trump administration was preparing a one-month waiver allowing Iraqi Airways to carry Shia pilgrims between Najaf and Iran, with a more permanent exemption potentially following. The proposed waiver applies specifically to the Iraqi national carrier.
Iraq’s state news agency later reported that Iraqi Airways had resumed flights between Najaf and Iranian airports.
Iran, however, disputed reports that Iran-Najaf flights had broadly resumed. Civil Aviation Organization spokesman Majid Akhavan said Tehran had received no official communication authorizing a resumption and said Iranian airlines remained unable to restart the route.
The two accounts refer to different operators: the Iraqi announcement concerned Iraqi Airways, while the Iranian statement addressed the ability of Iranian carriers to return to Najaf. Iraqi media also reported Monday that the ban on Iranian airlines remained in force even as Iraqi Airways resumed flights to Iranian airports.
The distinction gives Baghdad a way to restore at least some pilgrimage traffic without immediately reopening its airports to sanctioned Iranian carriers.
The disruption had already created political pressure in Iraq. Demonstrations were held in Baghdad and Najaf against the suspension, while Iranian officials warned that restrictions on air links could affect the broader relationship between the two neighbors.
Alaeddin Boroujerdi, a member of Iran’s parliamentary National Security Committee, pointed to Iraq’s reliance on Iranian electricity and gas and warned that policies obstructing bilateral ties could have consequences in other areas.
Iranian website Rouydad24 described the flight dispute as a test of relations between Tehran and Baghdad, noting Iran’s role in Iraq’s energy supplies and its past support in the fight against Islamic State.
Tehran warns its neighbors
The aviation restrictions have also produced increasingly sharp warnings from Iranian political figures toward governments cooperating with Washington.
Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, warned regional countries last week that if Iranian aircraft were prevented from flying, airports elsewhere in the region could also be unable to operate.
The council’s secretariat later sought to distance itself from interpretations that Iran was threatening military attacks on regional airports, saying military retaliation over the flight restrictions was not on the agenda.
Mohammad Mokhber, an adviser to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, nevertheless issued a separate warning Friday.
“Alignment with America in implementing hostile policies will remain in the memory of the Iranian people,” Mokhber wrote on X.
“Flights in the region are either free for everyone or for no one,” he added. “If Iran cannot fly or receive airport services, no country in the region will have this possibility either.”
The remarks prompted support from some hardline social-media users, including calls for Tehran to impose a no-fly zone over the Persian Gulf or threaten airlines serving neighboring countries.
Others criticized the approach. Amir Abbasi, an X user, compared the aviation warnings with previous Iranian threats to prevent other countries from exporting oil if Tehran was unable to do so.
“Perhaps these threats have a domestic use, but a crisis cannot be solved with slogans,” he wrote.
Four people appeared on IRIB’s Be Vaght-e-Iran (Iran Time) program, with three speaking during an exchange on how Abu Dhabi has adapted its oil shipments to Iran’s approach to the strategic waterway.
One participant suggested Iran could target the smaller shuttle vessels moving through the strait or strike their point of origin. Another rejected that approach as insufficient.
“It makes no sense to just hit these vessels. That is not an adequate response to this change in logic,” he said.
A third participant laid out the central argument: Abu Dhabi has sought to change the economics behind Iran’s maritime leverage rather than directly challenge its military capabilities.
“The UAE has attacked the logic of closing the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.
Cheap ships change the calculation
Iran’s strategy, according to the panel, had relied partly on the vulnerability of very large crude carriers, or VLCCs, whose high value meant the prospect of an Iranian strike could make voyages commercially prohibitive as insurers withdrew coverage.
The UAE has sought to remove that pressure by creating a state-backed logistics chain and using smaller, cheaper vessels that can be readily replaced.
“It is defining a battlefield that has been designed to its advantage,” the commentator said. “It says: fight me here. You hit these small ones, and I keep replacing them.”
Abu Dhabi is also using ageing VLCCs that would otherwise be destined for scrapping because they no longer meet environmental or safety standards required at many ports, according to the discussion.
The ships can be worth considerably less than the oil they carry, reducing the economic loss if Iran damages them.
The broadcast also described a pattern in Iranian operations that the UAE could anticipate. Iranian forces radio vessels, fire warning shots if they continue and then target the bridge rather than immediately sinking the ship, giving crews around 30 to 40 minutes to evacuate.
Abu Dhabi has responded by positioning tugboats to recover damaged vessels and tow them to Sohar in Oman, where their cargo can still be unloaded, the main contributor said.
“The tugboat comes and attaches itself right there to the ship that has been hit,” he said. “They tow it to Sohar and unload it there on the Omani coast.”
The result, he argued, is that Iran can damage a vessel without preventing its oil from reaching port.
Iran’s military logic questioned
Simply striking greater numbers of replaceable vessels would not restore Iran’s leverage, the discussion suggested.
“They have attacked our military logic,” the main contributor said. “You have to hit this logic.”
The participant who opened the exchange said Iran’s problem was not a lack of political will, but its continued reliance on an approach that was no longer producing the intended outcome.
“There really is the political will to confront them. But because we are confronting them within the previous framework, we are not getting the result we want,” he said.
The main contributor described the problem as a “cognitive error.”
Another researcher and Middle East commentator Mustafa Najafi separately accused the UAE on X of spending weeks trying to reduce Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and seeking to move oil belonging to other countries through the waterway.
Najafi also accused Abu Dhabi of obstructing an Iran-Oman agreement on managing the strait and lobbying in the United States and Israel for attacks on Iran.
“After Israel, no actor dreams of weakening and disintegrating Iran as much as the UAE does,” Najafi wrote, arguing that Tehran should move beyond a solely political and diplomatic response.
The remarks reflect concern among Iranian pro-system experts that the UAE is seeking not to overcome Iran’s military power in the Strait of Hormuz, but to diminish the strategic leverage that power is intended to provide.
Among the images of the first day of the school year on September 23 were mothers who had dropped their daughters at the gate with their own hair uncovered, beside girls wearing the maghnaeh, the fitted hood that covers the hair, neck and shoulders and has been part of the girls' uniform in Iranian schools for four decades.
The scene is not new to the Islamic Republic. In the oral histories of women who remember the first years after the 1979 revolution, the same picture appears: mothers who still left the house without a headscarf, walking daughters who had to cover for school, because school was where the new state was making the rule stick first.
In the Islamic Republic's early years, compulsory hijab was established first in the spaces the state controlled most directly, government offices and schools, and only afterward extended to the street and the whole of public life.
Today the rules in schools and offices remain, and the law on compulsory hijab has not been repealed or even amended. But outside those spaces, part of the female population has been living differently for some time. This time, society has moved ahead of the rules.
Before the hood became the uniform
This summer an image of two designs for girls' school uniforms from 1979, first published by the popular weekly Javanan-e Emrooz, circulated again. Neither design includes the maghnaeh that later became a fixed part of the girls' uniform.
That interval did not last. In 1980, as the new state Islamized government offices and institutions, the dress code for schoolgirls changed too. For the 1980-81 school year, the requirement became a long-sleeved smock, loose trousers and a headscarf. In 1983, appearing in public without what the state called "sharia hijab" was made a crime.
The note to Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code later became the legal basis for action against women who appear in public without the hijab the state requires.
So the history of compulsory hijab cannot be read from the street alone. School and office were among the first places it was enforced, and only later did the requirement settle across public space.
The regulation and the mandatory hood
In schools, much of that structure still stands. Article 85 of the schools' executive regulation, adopted in 2021, says students' clothing should be "simple, beautiful, varied, neat and cheerful," appropriate to Islamic-Iranian culture and identity, social custom, the student's age and the climate. The choice of style and color is left to each school's council, with the participation of the student council.
But the note to the same article fixes the range for girls. A female student's dress is either "chador, manteau, trousers and maghnaeh" or "manteau, trousers and maghnaeh," the chador being the full-length cloak and the manteau the long coat worn over trousers.
The chador is not compulsory. The maghnaeh is. The regulation provides no option for a girl to attend school with her hair uncovered.
The requirement begins in primary school. A girl of six or seven may walk to the gate hand in hand with a mother whose hair is uncovered, and must then cover her own to go in.
The distance between society and the rules can hardly be seen more clearly than in those few meters.
The fight reaches the uniform itself
This year the argument over girls' dress did not stop at the hood. The uniform itself made news.
On the eve of the new term, a message circulated about a girls' primary school in Saadat Abad, an affluent district in northwest Tehran, saying pupils would wear a shirt or blouse with trousers in place of the usual smock or manteau. Because the school is state-run, the message spread widely and reached state television.
The education office for Tehran's District 2 denied it, saying the images being shared had nothing to do with that school's uniform.
So the case cannot be treated as a confirmed change to a state school's uniform. But that such a report could circulate about a state school, and that the ministry felt obliged to answer it, shows the argument over girls' dress has reached the definition of the uniform itself.
Official policy has not moved. This year's directives asked schools to avoid unnecessary changes to the design and color of uniforms.
The result is a split. Outside school, the way women dress has changed quickly in recent years. Inside it, the manteau, trousers and maghnaeh of the official regulation remain exactly where they were.
Today's girls are not the girls of 1980
The most important difference between the two identical pictures may be the girls themselves.
The dress rules of 1980 were imposed on a society in which the Islamic Republic was still building its political, educational and cultural institutions. Today the same rules have to be enforced on a generation whose experience of how women around them dress is entirely different.
The protests of 2022 carried that difference into the schools. Among the most repeated images of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising were teenage girls in school uniform who had taken off their hoods, in the schoolyard, the classroom and the street.
Reports of action against students over hijab followed. Amnesty International recorded the account of a 17-year-old who, after being seen with her hair uncovered on the school's cameras, was suspended and threatened with being reported to the security agencies.
That is a different experience from 1980. A student today may see bareheaded women on her way to school in the morning, be dropped off by a bareheaded mother, put on the hood to enter, and take it off again when school lets out.
For part of this generation, the maghnaeh is no longer a continuation of how they dress outside. It is a rule that applies on entering a controlled space, and stops applying on leaving it.
The law has not moved
None of this social change has become legal change.
The note to Article 638 still makes it a crime for a woman to appear in public without sharia hijab. Article 85 still lists the maghnaeh as part of a girl's dress.
The law known as Protection of the Family through the Promotion of the Culture of Chastity and Hijab, passed in December 2024, which would have widened the punishments and the means of enforcing compulsory hijab considerably, is not being implemented for now. Its suspension did not repeal the laws that came before it.
So what has happened in Iran's streets is not, in law, hijab becoming optional. The law has not recognized a right to choose. Part of society has made a different choice in practice.
A woman without a headscarf in Iran today is not uncovered because the law gave her that right. The law can still treat what she is doing as a crime, even if it is not enforced at every time and in every place.
The administrative structure behind hijab policy has not gone either. The budget for the Iranian year that began in March 2025 set aside 2.592 trillion rials, about $1.1 million at market rates, for the Headquarters for Enjoining Good and Forbidding Evil, the state body charged with policing public morality, for which hijab has been a principal concern. That is roughly the annual minimum wage of 1,300 workers.
In the budget for the year that began this March, the line was written differently: 6.284 trillion rials, about $2.7 million, in a single shared allocation for three bodies, the headquarters, Soureh University, which is run by the state's Islamic propaganda organization, and the Islamic Propagation Coordination Council, which organizes official rallies. Because the shares are not separated, the full figure cannot be described as the headquarters' budget, still less as a hijab budget.
The education ministry and other state bodies also retain duties under the existing law on dress. The retreat of enforcement in parts of public space has not removed the law, the institutions or the money behind it.
In 1980, the bareheaded mother was walking her daughter toward a rule that would soon reach her too. In 2026 she walks her daughter toward the last place the rule still holds. The picture has not changed. Its direction has. The few meters between her uncovered hair and her daughter's hood are no longer the distance between two generations, but between a society that has changed and a law that still says it hasn't.
“If Iran cannot fly and receive airport services, no country in the region will have that possibility either,” supreme leader adviser Mohammad Mokhber wrote in a post on Friday. He did not explain how Tehran would enforce the threat.
His remarks echoed Supreme National Security Council secretary Mohsen Rezaei, who warned Wednesday that neighboring airports would be unable to operate if they cooperated with Washington’s campaign. Rezaei also warned neighboring countries against joining further US military action.
Airports in Najaf, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah have suspended flights to and from Iran, further narrowing air links with Iraq following restrictions at Baghdad airport. Najaf’s suspension took effect at 2 a.m. Friday until further notice, closing an alternative Iranian authorities had considered for diverted Baghdad-bound services.
Flights to Baghdad and Muscat were canceled on September 23. Iraqi aviation sources told Reuters that Baghdad’s suspension followed government instructions; Iranian aviation spokesman Majid Akhavan said Tehran was discussing Muscat’s restrictions with Oman.
The UAE suspended Iranian airlines’ flights Thursday, explicitly citing US sanctions. Azerbaijan halted services by Iranian carriers Tuesday, while affected airlines stopped flying to Georgia from September 21.
A Tehran-Dushanbe flight also turned back Thursday after Turkmenistan denied permission to cross its airspace. Mahan Air suspended Turkey and Oman services; travel agencies said it had lost ground-handling access in Turkey.
Washington sanctioned 36 aviation-related targets on September 8, including 27 carriers it described as Iran’s remaining unsanctioned airlines and three Turkey-based companies accused of serving Mahan. Treasury says Iranian aviation networks transport weapons, military personnel and illicit cargo.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that foreign airports, fuel suppliers, ground handlers and ticket sellers servicing sanctioned carriers risked US penalties, including exclusion from the dollar system. He said Iranian airlines would effectively lose international operations from September 23.
Those measures do not automatically close foreign airspace. Their effect depends on governments and service providers, and some flights continued. Bloomberg reported at least six departures Wednesday to destinations including Bangkok, Phuket, Shanghai and Kabul.
Foreign carriers have separately withdrawn services. Turkish Airlines told Iran International it had no Iran flights scheduled before March 2027, with no guaranteed restart. Earlier Iranian announcements of continuing Istanbul flights referred to other carriers.
Emirates no longer serves Tehran. Lufthansa and Austrian suspended Iran flights through October 24, while Qatar Airways cited airspace restrictions and tentatively listed November 29 for resumption. Those dates remain uncertain.
Four travel agencies contacted September 21 reported unavailable services across several other routes. Some Pegasus bookings were subsequently canceled, although booking-platform listings were not guarantees of operation.
The disruption affects family visits, business and pilgrimage to Najaf and Karbala. Agencies described travelers flying to Turkey, then taking roughly 17 hours by bus to Van and another 16–17 hours onward to Tehran, excluding border delays.
The UAE also barred Bank Melli branches from Iran-related transactions Wednesday, including trade finance and transfers.
Rezaei linked the aviation warning to Tehran’s broader negotiating position, giving Washington four to five days to accept conditions already sent to mediators before talks or Hormuz’s reopening. He did not list them, saying Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi would convey them again in New York, and presented control of the strait as negotiating leverage.
