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By Staff Writer
The regime’s second total communications shutdown in eight weeks is now operated by a terrorist veteran — installed after his predecessor was fired for not cutting the network fast enough.
Iran’s internet connectivity collapsed to approximately four per cent of normal levels on Saturday morning as US and Israeli forces struck targets across Tehran, including the Office of the Supreme Leader, the Ministry of Intelligence and the Ministry of Defence. NetBlocks confirmed a near-total shutdown of internet, mobile and SMS services nationwide.
At the operational centre of the blackout sits MTN-Irancell, Iran’s largest mobile network with more than 70 million active SIM cards and a 42 per cent market share. The company is now commanded by Mohammed Hossein Soleimaniyan, a senior IRGC member and veteran of its terrorist operations, who was installed as chief executive in January after his predecessor, Alireza Rafiei, was dismissed for taking several hours to comply with the Supreme National Security Council’s order to shut down all communications on 8 January.
That January shutdown, the most comprehensive in Iran’s history, lasted more than 20 days and provided cover for the killing of an estimated 36,500 protesters in the deadliest crackdown on civilians in the modern history of the Middle East. The regime removed Rafiei and replaced him with an IRGC operative to ensure there would be no delay next time. Today was the next time.
MTN-Irancell is 51 per cent owned by entities controlled by Iran’s Ministry of Defence and a foundation linked to the Supreme Leader. The remaining 49 per cent is held by South Africa’s MTN Group, which disclosed in August 2025 that it is the subject of a US Department of Justice grand jury investigation. MTN is also defending litigation under the US Anti-Terrorism Act brought by the families of more than 500 American soldiers killed or injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, who allege that the company’s participation in Irancell funnelled billions to the IRGC.
Iran’s shutdown capability has been significantly enhanced by Chinese technology. Iran International reported in January that a Huawei-supplied internet “kill switch” project, estimated at $700 million to $1 billion, is in its final stages at a fortified data centre near Tehran. An ARTICLE 19 report published in February documented how Chinese firms, including ZTE, Huawei and Hikvision, have supplied Iran with deep packet inspection, centralised traffic management and mass surveillance technologies since 2010, enabling the regime to build a censorship architecture modelled on China’s Great Firewall.
The IRGC is a US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organisation. The appointment of one of its operatives to lead a company co-owned by a Johannesburg-listed corporation, serving 70 million subscribers and now actively deployed as a wartime information control platform, raises urgent questions for the US Department of Justice and MTN’s institutional investors about the legal and moral limits of maintaining any association with this entity.