This is a book about the Iranian faction that has everything to lose if it reaches a deal, as told by the men who don't want peace.

While Washington and Tehran work toward a framework agreement, a small band of Iranian ultra-hardliners is doing everything they can to ensure it doesn't take place — and they don't want it for ideological reasons at all, they want it for power reasons.

Foreign armies cannot stop revolutions. They are hollowed out from the inside — through the slow erosion of the myth which justified them. The fear is always quiet, and lurks in the minds of Iran's Endurance Front, radical group Jebhe-ye Paydari, as peace negotiations between Tehran and Washington enter what may be their most critical stage.

They say they are the protectors of ‘79 revolution. Their opponents (and now many of their allies) have started referring to them by a more derisive name: Kharijites. The term carries the history of the Shias, a sect which has been the most violent in Islam history with the assassination of the first Shia imam, Imam Ali. If such a label is starting to be spotted in Telegram channels affiliated with Revolutionary Guards, then you have reached a line that even the establishment dare not show you.

Their identity and importance today

It is called "Jebhe-ye Paydari" — the Endurance Front — and its members are sometimes referred to by observers as "Super Revolutionaries," who consider themselves to be the defenders of values from the 1979 revolution, which toppled the pro-Western Shah. It could well appear to the outside observer that this was but one conservative voice in a multitude of power centres. It is not. The Endurance Front is entrenched in parliament, state radio, religious training institutions and street mobilisation systems, which means it has a voice bigger than the numbers.

Its most prominent figure, former national security chief Saeed Jalili, garnered 13 million votes in the 2021 elections, finishing second — and his brother, Vahid Jalili, is a top official in the state broadcaster, IRIB. The final one is really important. Domestic information control, in a nation with a history of shutting down the internet during conflict, is not a tool of leverage, but a form of power.

According to Khabar Online, an “average” Iranian news outlet, 8 out of 10 of the pundits appearing on IRIB during the recent conflict were conservatives, including 15 percent who were specifically associated with the ultraconservative Paydari Front. The outlet continued: "The problem isn't simply with the removal of the reformists; the data indicates that even moderate conservatives or critical insiders are not found in large numbers in these programs. A country in war is a country in war, and in such a country, the control of the state broadcaster determines what the people know about what is being fought for in their name.

A revolt in the delegation

The campaign against negotiation of the Paydari Front has been well-planned. A parliamentary colleague of the Paydari, Mahmoud Nabavian, joined Iran's negotiating team to Pakistan, but went out on the record to say negotiating with regards to the country's nuclear programme is a "strategic mistake," and that Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi should be removed from the negotiating team. The image that creates — one of the delegation doing their own work to sabotage the delegation — is exactly what the Paydari want to project domestically — and give Trump some ammunition to make Iran look riven.

Seven of the parliamentarians who belong to the group did not sign a statement supporting the negotiating team. On Monday, 261 of 290 MPs signed a statement in support of chief negotiator Ghalibaf but none of the prominent members of the Paydari party were among the signatories.

Even if they sacrifice our Imam (Ali Khamenei) for a ransom, there are some groups here who are ready to negotiate, shake hands with Witkoff, Vance, and Kushner, and smile at the killers of our martyr Imam", the Paydari Front's Raja News article put it. To speak like that at the negotiating table with Iran's negotiating team is a statement of intent. It is a brand of treason, a betrayal of pragmatism.

What people want.What people really need.

The Endurance Front does not oppose making a deal, here's the paradox that most Western media has overlooked. Amwaj.media's editor Mohammad Ali Shabani says the hardliners are not against an agreement with the US but they want it to be made by themselves to give themselves influence and change the balance of power in the country. They are saying that if we continue fighting we can make the US surrender and then dictate their terms, Shabani said. No one in Iran is opposed to a deal, it's only about the tactics of how to reach a deal and who gets to make it.

This is the key component. What the Paydari Front is fighting for isn't a peace agreement, it's the chance that the peace agreement will be offered by the pragmatic parliamentary speaker, Ghalibaf, or the reformist President Pezeshkian, who will reap the political rewards. If it could mark the end of the war on a favourable term, it would be game-changer in post-Khamenei Iran where the succession battle is already underway and the power dynamics are changing. Its public discourse is purely ideological, but the Endurance Front knows that.

But the supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who was elevated under foreign affairs' terms, based in part on IRGC pressure on the Assembly of Experts, has no formal religious credentials. He never wrote any jurisprudential book and his legal capital is institutional authority, especially from the Revolutionary Guards. This institutional fragility affects all of Iran's current negotiations: agreements made will have to be designed to meet, at least not displease, the leadership of the IRGC, which installed the new supreme leader.

This is a context aspect that is hardly ever discussed in the economy:

The West sees the Iran nuclear issue in terms of security. It's also a serious economic deal, and that has an impact on the meaning of a deal for normal Iranians.

World Bank estimates claimed that over a third of Iranians are living in poverty, and that poverty could increase even more due to years of sanctions and the various impacts of corruption and mismanagement. That trend has been accelerated by the dual blockade and war. The government's main source of income – the oil industry – is now effectively losing all of its sources of income – as it was exporting around 1.5 million barrels per day before the war. The rial's exchange rate has been on a downtrend and the domestic inflation rate has been high for years prior to the ongoing conflict with Israel.

Mojtaba will probably turn to Russia and China to help Iran get back on its feet—militarily and economically—but he will also have to figure out how to mend the gap between the regime and the average Iranian, if he is ever going to be able to secure popular backing, or at least grudging popular acquiescence. The void is more than just a war ravaged chasm. It was seen in the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022 and January 2026 unrest. The war only temporarily muted the expression of that chasm – it did not close it.

The Paydari Front's apocalyptic theology, influenced by late spiritual leader Ayatollah Mahdi Mirbaqiri's conviction that a universal battle between civilisations with the West was expected to occur in the near future, has little to say about inflation or poverty. It is a politics of permanent mobilisation that works in crisis and that fails in normality. The sole reason of the Paydari Front is to pursue their destabilisation campaign was eliminated when Iran reached a stable peace, and sanctions were lifted.

Real time backfiring

Its increased profile has caused concern among many in the country, with an increasing number of attempts to isolate it. It has been attacked by even rival Iranian politicians and received a resounding criticism from Iranian media, a barrage from political commentators and on the streets. It appears the initiative has actually had a negative effect," Shabani said. They're making a lot of noise and are seen as having helped Israel and the US in their depiction of a rift in Iran.

According to a Telegram post by Iranian security institutions-aligned channel Saberin News, the Paydari Party has been labeled a Kharijite, meaning “sowing division on the battlefield” and “playing in favor of Israel and the United States.” As the security services themselves are writing such talk about a domestic faction, the limits of acceptable dissent within the Islamic Republic are being redefined right before their eyes.

The greater danger, however, is not the fact that the Paydari Front might be blocking any deal, but rather that it is tainting the domestic political arena in which any deal will have to be passed. The history of the world is littered with such deals, which are unlikely to last if they are not supported by strong domestic constituencies. In part, the 2015 JCPOA was a fragile agreement because it was always opposed by some Iranians who viewed it as the wrong kind of engagement on the wrong terms with the wrong people.

This time the faces are different. The problem is the same, structural.