Despite their 50-million-year heritage, Iran’s ancient forests are being consumed by fire amid mismanagement, corruption, and deliberate destruction under the Iranian regime.
The inferno that has swept through the ancient Hyrcanian forests — ecosystems more than 50 million years old — is not merely an environmental tragedy but a revealing indictment of the Iranian regime’s corruption and systemic failure.
Burning these forests is equivalent to burning national heritage, yet officials insist that the situation is “under control” and only “patches of fire” remain. Such claims are part of the regime’s familiar propaganda routine, crafted to whitewash a catastrophic record of inaction and mismanagement.
Renting a single firefighting aircraft from Turkey and staging a handful of publicized gestures cannot conceal the deeper truth that specialists and even regime insiders have repeatedly acknowledged.
One of the most striking admissions came from Hassan-Nataj Solhdar, a member of the regime’s parliament, who openly stated that there had been a dedicated budget for purchasing firefighting helicopters.
His question — “Now it must be clarified where this budget was spent” — is not merely a critique but a direct accusation, pointing to systemic corruption that has swallowed the funds meant to protect the country’s forests. Such testimony underscores that the crisis is not accidental but the product of institutionalized rot.
Even regime-affiliated media have begun asking questions that expose the scale of the failure. The state-run newspaper Etemad questioned why no helicopters or water-bombing aircraft were requested at the onset of the fires, and if they were requested, why the government refused to authorize them until the destruction had already escalated.
Jahan-e Sanat went further, painting a stark picture: a nation with eleven million hectares of forest does not possess a single independent firefighting helicopter. Vast territories of twenty thousand hectares are left to one or two forest rangers who lack radios, vehicles, fire-resistant clothing, or even sufficient water. This is not oversight; it is abandonment.
The roots of the crisis run deeper than negligence. Environmental destruction and forest seizure have long been intertwined with corruption at the highest levels of power. Years ago, Abbas Palizdar, a member of a parliamentary investigation committee, revealed that the plundering of northern forests was not carried out by rogue local actors but sanctioned through official letters from senior judicial authorities.
He described how former judiciary chief Mohammad Yazdi facilitated logging and timber exports for close associates through formal approvals. These were not bureaucratic errors but deliberate acts of resource seizure.
Placed alongside today’s reports, these revelations reveal a consistent pattern — the operating manual of a forestry mafia that functions under the protection of the regime.
As Jahan-e Sanat described, the method is systematic: roads are built first, then come the mines or villas, followed by suspicious fires, and ultimately the transformation of forest land into agricultural or residential property.
This sequence has been repeated in the forests of Elimalat in Noor, in Lisar in Gilan, and across oak-covered regions of the Zagros. It is not mismanagement but a strategy.
Experts warn that the large-scale fires consuming the Hyrcanian forests are not simply due to budget shortages or isolated incompetence. They are the direct result of a destructive policy in which national resources are sacrificed for military ambitions, nuclear projects, and the machinery of repression.
Environmental infrastructure receives almost nothing, while the regime funnels the country’s wealth into projects designed to preserve its own power. For the ruling establishment, Iran’s nature is not a national treasure but a reservoir to be exploited.
The ancient Hyrcanian forests, with their 50-million-year legacy, now stand defenseless against this machinery of plunder. When a country with vast forests possesses no firefighting helicopter, the issue is not neglect but intentional destruction.
The evidence, confessions, and decades-long trajectory make clear that this is not the work of a dispersed network but of a centralized system whose ultimate authority lies in the office of Ali Khamenei. From land-use changes to sweetheart property transfers, from shielding profiteers to enabling environmental devastation, the command structure of the regime is deeply implicated.
The scorched remains of the Hyrcanian forests are not merely the result of natural disaster; they are the outcome of a deliberate, long-term project to transform Iran’s natural heritage into private wealth for a ruling elite.
Under the Iranian regime, the country is being reshaped from a landscape of forests to a landscape of ash — a transformation without precedent and without restraint.
