As Washington rolled out its "Operation Economic Outcast" sanctions package this week, Iran's media outlets — closely aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — offered distinctly different versions of Tehran's response, depending on the language of the reader.
Tasnim's English service, aimed at an international audience, stuck largely to familiar notes of defiance and dismissal. Officials quoted included Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, who mocked Washington for mobilizing "its entire economic apparatus" against a country it claims to have already defeated militarily, and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who described the sanctions as producing a "frozen economy" whose consequences would return to the United States "like a boomerang."
The Farsi edition went considerably further. A same-day Tasnim Persian report, headlined "New Hostile US Sanctions on Iran After Failure on the Battlefield," cited an unnamed "senior intelligence source" describing the entire sanctions push as a fabrication of Trump's "media team," designed purely to raise "psychological pressure on the Iranian people" — asserting flatly that "nothing new will happen on the ground."
More striking was the language used by Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei, quoted on Tasnim's English wire but with unusually sharp phrasing: Iran, he said, "will not compromise in defending its national security" and "has the right to target the source of any aggression against the country" — an explicit warning to any state hosting military facilities used against Iran.
That threat was echoed, more pointedly, by Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, who warned neighboring states against cooperating with the US economic campaign. Any country that participates, he said, would be treated as "an enemy" and could be "targeted" if it persisted — a direct threat of retaliation against third parties rather than the United States alone.
This combination — target-the-source rhetoric aimed at host states, plus explicit threats against neighboring countries — marks a harder edge than the more triumphalist, defeat-of-Washington framing dominant in Tasnim's English output and in Press TV's coverage over the same period. Where the English-language material emphasizes ridicule and claims of American desperation, the Farsi service is signaling operational intent: naming third countries as potential targets rather than treating the conflict as bilateral.