Where Are the Accord’s Opponents in Iran Taking the Process?
The future of the Islamabad Accord is being shaped less at the negotiating table than by the internal balances in Tehran. The fourteen-article framework signed on 17 June 2026 deferred the core files — the nuclear programme, ballistic missiles and regional assets — to a sixty-day negotiating timetable. That deferral has taken the accord out of the realm of a technical text and placed it at the centre of Iranian domestic politics. For each deferred heading corresponds to the red lines of a different centre of power in Tehran.
The accord offers Tehran the breathing space it seeks in the short term. The lifting of the naval blockade within 30 days, the suspension of oil sanctions for 60 days and a 300 billion dollar reconstruction fund are of vital importance for an economy worn down by war. In return, the document provides for the nuclear programme to be frozen at its present level and keeps the Strait of Hormuz open to international maritime traffic for 60 days. For the accord’s opponents, Iran has given up front and deferred what it receives.
At the centre of the opposition stands the Paydari Front. Referred to in the Iranian press as the “super-revolutionaries” and founded in 2011 by students of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, this structure acts today under the spiritual guidance of Ayatollah Mehdi Mirbagheri. The political face of the front is Saeed Jalili, who won 13 million votes in the 2024 presidential election. In parliament, figures such as Mahmoud Nabavian, Amir Hossein Sabeti and Hamid Rasaei speak for this line. What we face, therefore, is not a marginal protest movement but a powerful centre of resistance organized within the state apparatus. Indeed, hours before the accord was announced, claims circulated that Jalili had been pushed outside the decision-making process, though these claims have not been confirmed to date. That such a debate reached the public at all shows how far the rope between the front and the centre of the state has been stretched.
The opponents’ objection proceeds on three planes. The first is technical. Nabavian, a member of the Islamabad delegation, has described making the nuclear programme a subject of negotiation as a “strategic error” and the agreement to be reached as “absolute harm.” Sabeti finds the accord “hasty and weak” and argues that red lines have been violated. The second is ideological. While the newspaper Kayhan presents the text of the accord as “diplomatic surrender to the Great Satan,” the front’s declaration of 20 June defines opposition as a “religious and revolutionary duty.” The same declaration states that immediate withdrawal is the only option in the event of a violation of the accord. The third and most effective plane is the objection on grounds of legitimacy.
At the centre of this plane lies the discourse of “the blood of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei,” killed in an assassination. The slogan chanted at demonstrations outside the Foreign Ministry — “And what of the blood of my Leader?” — shows that the objection has been moved onto moral rather than technical ground. In this framework, negotiation is seen not as closing the balance sheet of the war but as “betrayal of the martyred Leader.” That discourse constrains the negotiating team’s room for manoeuvre far more than technical objections do. For figures can be negotiated, but blood cannot be made the subject of bargaining. This discourse acquired a new dimension on 11 July. In a written message, the new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei defined revenge as “the will of the nation” and declared that it would certainly be carried out before long. After the message, a wide-ranging campaign was launched in the state media on the theme that the blood of the martyred Leader would be accounted for. The theme of “blood,” which the opponents had been working for months, was thus carried into the official discourse of the office of the Leader as well.
The methods to which the front resorts are also diversifying. It is reported that seven deputies in parliament refused to sign the declaration of support for the negotiating team. Bills on the administration of the Strait of Hormuz aim to narrow the accord’s legal ground. Sixty-six members of the Assembly of Experts have issued a declaration describing the article on the strait as a “strategic error” and openly targeting Trump and Netanyahu. On the media front, news agencies close to the Revolutionary Guards, chief among them Kayhan and Raja News, maintain a hard editorial line. In the streets, night-time demonstrations in Tehran and protests in Mashhad targeting Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stand out. The leaking of details of the agreement to the press is also regarded as part of the same political struggle.
The pro-negotiation bloc, for its part, is not silent. According to reports in the diaspora press, Parliament Speaker Qalibaf used the phrase “people like Jalili will destroy Iran” about the opponents at a closed meeting with his advisers. Qalibaf’s political adviser denied the claim and stated that the speaker’s advice consisted of a single word: unity. Although the accuracy of the leak is disputed, Qalibaf’s public posture already reveals the distance between him and the front. The front’s discomfort with Qalibaf is not new either. The speaker argues that the United States and Israel cannot be eliminated by military means, while agreements that bring gains for Iran are possible. President Pezeshkian, accompanied by warnings that food and medicine stocks will be exhausted by the end of August if the blockade continues, has gone as far as threatening to resign. That Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani made his first public appearance in months in order to support the negotiating team suggests that the pragmatist wing of the Revolutionary Guards is also throwing its weight behind the negotiation process.
Yet the actor who truly determines the balance is Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. His formula — “I held a different view but I permitted it to proceed” — shows that the new Leader is constructing a deliberate ambiguity that leaves room for both sides. If the process succeeds, his permission will be remembered; if it fails, his reservation will be. That ambiguity gives the opponents the opportunity to work the claim that “the Leader is really with us.” Indeed, Nabavian has asserted that Mojtaba Khamenei set eleven preconditions for the negotiations and asked that the talks be halted once those conditions were exceeded. That state television was warned not to circulate the Leader’s reservations shows how sensitive these claims are for the leadership.
The Leader’s messages of revenge also serve a dual function in this respect. Mojtaba Khamenei on one hand appropriates the blood-feud discourse, incorporating his opponents’ strongest argument into his own, and on the other tries to keep the anger under control with messages recalling his father’s calls for unity. The street’s demand for “revenge now” is thereby turned into a promise whose timing will be determined by the office of the Leader. This balancing effort also has a personal background. The new Leader, whose closeness to the Mesbah Yazdi circle during his Qom years is known and who is reported to have received the support of the Paydari line during the succession process, comes in a sense from within the opposition he is trying to placate. That past gives him considerable influence over his opponents while also making open conflict with them harder.
This picture combines with the fragility of the succession process. The authority of Mojtaba Khamenei, who unlike his father does not appear before the public and speaks only through written statements, has not yet fully consolidated. Faced with a new Leader who must draw his legitimacy largely from the support of the revolutionary base, the bargaining power of the circles the Paydari represents is increasing. Ali Khamenei’s death has reopened to a power struggle a political field that had hardened over thirty-five years. The war and the accord function as levers in this contest for influence. The Paydari wing is trying to consolidate the revolutionary base through the discourse of revenge, while the pragmatist wing is trying to turn an agreement that would put the economy back on its feet into the guarantee of its own political weight. The struggle around the accord is therefore also a struggle over who will shape post-Khamenei Iran. The opponents’ objective is less to bring down the accord today than to fill the power vacuum that has formed around the Leader and thereby set the terms of the sixty-day negotiating process.
The opposition’s effect on the process is not one-directional. The negotiating team can use domestic pressure as a bargaining chip at the table. The strongest argument Araghchi can convey to Washington is that concessions have reached a point where they can no longer be defended in Tehran. But the same situation is read differently in Washington. Trump’s statements about the divisions in Iran present the opposition’s visibility as an indicator of Tehran’s fragility. That perception encourages Washington to harden the terms of negotiation, so that the very picture the accord’s opponents criticize is paradoxically fed by their own discourse.
The tanker attacks in the Gulf continuing since the beginning of July, the American strikes on more than eighty targets and Trump’s declaration on 8 July that the accord was “finished” strengthen the front’s months-old thesis that “America cannot be trusted.” A self-reinforcing cycle is at work here. Every escalation in the field strengthens the opponents’ discourse, the strengthened discourse narrows the negotiators’ room for concession, and the narrowed room opens the way to new escalations. Moreover, for the Paydari Front to succeed, it does not need to persuade public opinion. It is enough to make the political cost of concession unpayable for the negotiating team.
In the coming weeks the direction of the process can be read from three indicators. The first is the fate of the Hormuz legislation initiatives in parliament. Should the bill become law, the negotiating team’s strongest card may be confined within the limits of domestic law. The second is the language Mojtaba Khamenei uses. Should the emphasis on revenge come to outweigh the call for unity, it will signal that the balance is shifting in the opponents’ favour. The third is the activity of Revolutionary Guards-linked elements in the field. A fresh incident in the Gulf could give those who want to overturn the table the pretext they are looking for. Although the Islamabad Accord was signed on paper between Washington and Tehran, the real determinant of the process is the bargaining among Iran’s centres of power, and the outcome of that bargaining is not yet clear.
This article was first published in IRAM on July 13, 2026.
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