Ebrahim Azizi, chair of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said on 19 August that France's constant betrayals over contaminated blood, INSTEX and snapback would not be forgotten. He warned that continuing an anti-Iranian course would worsen conditions for France1.
Two of the three items on that list are recent and specific. INSTEX (Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges) was the European payment channel built to keep legitimate trade with Iran moving after Washington left the nuclear deal, and Tehran has long argued it delivered almost nothing. Snapback is the process for reimposing suspended United Nations sanctions, which Iran treats as a European threat held in reserve. The contaminated blood affair sits decades further back, and Azizi offered no detail on it.
Azizi threatened no expulsions beyond the two staff already barred, named no French official and set no deadline. The quarrel he is speaking into became public on 15 August, when Iran's intelligence ministry alleged a French infiltration scheme. He chairs a parliamentary committee, not the ministry that would carry out any measure, and his warning arrives as rhetoric rather than instruction.
The list does more work than the threat. By reaching back past this month's expulsions, Azizi casts the dispute as a pattern of French conduct rather than a quarrel about two diplomats. Patterns are not closed out by a concession on one incident, which lowers the price Paris can pay to end this.
