As public protests against Iran’s regime grow louder by the day, Isa Kalantari, former agriculture minister and a longtime official within the regime, has declared: “In these 46 years, we have destroyed Iran.”
In an interview with the state-run Entekhab website, Kalantari pointed to the unprecedented spread of poverty across the country, stating: “About three-fourths of the Iranian people—that is, something between 70% to 75%—are living below the poverty line.”
This figure starkly contrasts with official statistics, which typically claim that 30% to 40% of the population lives below the poverty line.
He also warned that the excessive exploitation of the country’s underground water resources has led to severe land subsidence in some areas—so much so that parts of the city of Isfahan are now effectively “standing on six meters of air.”
What sets Kalantari’s remarks apart is his previous high-ranking position within the formal power structure: a senior official now openly speaking of the “destruction of the country” as a consequence of the Iranian regime’s rule.
A key point in such remarks is that the criticism is coming from within the regime and from individuals who themselves played a role in creating the current situation.
Isa Kalantari presents this shocking statistic while clearly directing his criticism at the leader of Iran’s regime, Ali Khamenei, and the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards—even if he does not name them explicitly.
He describes the regime’s overarching economic policies as “anti-development” and stresses that a country cannot be governed through poverty—a sentiment increasingly echoed among critical officials.
With his startling claim that 75% of the population lives below the poverty line, Kalantari directly challenges the official narrative of the Iranian regime. Yet his remarks reflect a deeper crisis: the voice of dissent and criticism against the regime’s supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guards is now being heard not just from protesters in the streets, but from within the ruling establishment itself. This is the very rift that, through years of recurring popular uprisings, has grown wider by the day and now questions the regime’s cohesion.
In this context, issues such as the systemic corruption of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) in the areas of sanctions, oil smuggling, opposition to the FATF, and financial profiteering from hostility toward the United States and Israel have increasingly become topics of discussion within the ruling establishment.
The IRGC, acting as the main oil vendor, pockets the primary profits from sanctions under the guise of circumventing them, while the cost of this approach is borne by the people through poverty and unemployment.
IRGC commanders, who have effectively replaced the National Iranian Oil Company and the Central Bank, are now selling oil to China at a discount. The payments remain frozen in Chinese banks in the form of yuan, and Iran is forced to import overpriced and low-quality Chinese goods in exchange. A recent example was the purchase of three second-hand Airbus planes from China at three times their actual value—an explicit example of corruption under the label of sanctions circumvention.
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At the top of these “sanctions profiteers” are the IRGC commanders. According to Mohammad Hossein Adeli, former head of Iran’s Central Bank, the volume of rent-seeking, losses, and corruption resulting from sanctions exceeds 50 billion dollars.
But the issue doesn’t stop there. One of the major obstacles to economic recovery is the opposition by Khamenei and the IRGC to fully adopting the FATF (Financial Action Task Force). The main reason for this opposition is to prevent the disclosure of financial transactions related to supporting its proxy groups in the region.
As a result, Iran has remained on the FATF blacklist for more than eight years. The consequence has been financial isolation, lack of foreign investment, and a worsening economic crisis.
Former officials of Iran’s regime now openly admit that the country is on the wrong path. But this is nothing new—and it appears that these criminal officials are trying to downplay or deflect their own role in the current situation.
However, the Iranian opposition—led by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) under Mrs. Maryam Rajavi—has repeatedly affirmed the reality that all factions of the regime bear responsibility for the current crisis. The only path to liberation for the Iranian people and the region from the clerics’ rule is through their overthrow by the Iranian people themselves.
