United Arab Emirates billboard in Dubai on November 6, 2025. (Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images)
The United Arab Emirates and Turkey this week barred Iran’s two largest private lenders from operating and grounded Iranian airlines, the sharpest squeeze yet on Tehran’s finances since February’s war began.
Jonathan Burke, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing and a former Citigroup sanctions-compliance executive, spent two weeks this month crossing the Middle East and Europe warning Iran’s remaining trading partners that continued financial or aviation ties with Tehran could jeopardize their own access to the U.S. financial system, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Burke’s office runs Operation Economic Outcast, the sanctions campaign Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent launched in August to “sever every economic lifeline” sustaining Iran’s government.
The campaign has gained traction because Gulf states have soured on Tehran since the war began on Feb. 28, when U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
The strikes prompted Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf’s main oil chokepoint, and to strike energy targets in neighboring countries.
Iranian-backed Houthi fighters in Yemen have separately blockaded Saudi shipping in the Red Sea’s Bab el-Mandeb strait, and a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports, first imposed in April, remains in force.
Oman, the first stop on Burke’s itinerary, barred flights by Mahan Air, the private Iranian carrier the U.S. has linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Iran’s paramilitary force, within days, then halted all Iranian airline traffic by mid-September.
The UAE’s central bank this week barred every branch of Bank Melli Iran, the country’s largest state lender, from moving money to or from Iran, citing money-laundering and terrorism-financing violations.
The central bank then grounded Iranian carriers entirely.
Turkey canceled Mahan Air’s routes, and its banking regulator separately revoked the operating license of Bank Mellat, another major Iranian lender, thereby ending more than four decades of operations at its Istanbul branch.
Treasury officials met representatives of more than 50 countries during the push, and Azerbaijan and Georgia also shut out Iranian carriers.
Britain’s Treasury has told Bloomberg it will not renew a license allowing Bank Melli’s London subsidiary to operate when it expires on Oct. 22.
Mahan Air still flies to China and Russia, Iran’s two largest remaining commercial partners.
Nigel Kushner, a British lawyer who has advised companies on Iran sanctions for two decades, told the Journal that the U.S. has achieved “greater impact in a matter of weeks than during the lengthier campaigns” waged since 2010.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, speaking at the U.N. General Assembly last week, acknowledged the toll but vowed defiance: “The resistance of the Iranian people will only increase in the face of sanctions.”
The pressure comes as Iran has offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within a week if Washington lifts its naval blockade and eases sanctions, a proposal relayed through Qatar at the U.N.
President Donald Trump on Saturday rejected a truce deal proposed by Iran that Tehran said could have reopened the Strait of Hormuz to shipping within a week.
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