Washington grounds Iran’s airlines, but can it contain the fallout?
US aviation sanctions have cut routes for Iranian carriers. Tehran warns that neighboring states could face disruption of their own.
On 8 September, the US Treasury sanctioned 36 targets connected to Iran’s aviation sector, including 27 Iranian airlines. It also withdrew authorizations that had allowed some aviation services and flights into Iran.
By late September, Iranian carriers faced restrictions in the UAE, Oman, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, while flights to Baghdad and then Najaf were halted. Turkmenistan withheld overflight permission for a Varesh Airlines service to Dushanbe, forcing it back to Tehran.
The sanctions make servicing Iranian aircraft a potential liability for fuel suppliers, ground-handling firms and ticket agents, and regional restrictions have followed.
The campaign assumes Iran will absorb the damage as its air links are cut. That overlooks the country’s place in the region’s aviation geography. Iran sits underneath and beside a large share of Persian Gulf air traffic – overland corridors to Central Asia and the Caucasus, airspace bordering some of the busiest Europe–Asia routes, and the waters and skies around the Strait of Hormuz, whose shipping routes are already at the center of the wider war.
A country in that position is difficult to isolate without neighboring states also facing risks. Iran has ways to apply pressure, even as its own passengers bear the immediate costs of lost flights. The suffering of passengers is central to the sanctions story, but the neighboring states whose airports and skies Iran has long used have their own vulnerabilities. Tehran cannot compel them to serve its airlines, but their decisions do not take place outside the war that has already disrupted regional aviation.
The war’s warning for regional aviation
Since the US-Israeli war on Iran began in February, regional airspace has become a shared casualty. EASA’s conflict-zone advisories extended well beyond Iranian skies – reaching Iraq, Lebanon, and, at various points, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and the western Gulf of Oman.
By late August, EASA had narrowed its Gulf warning while maintaining advisories for Iran and Iraq. Insurers and airlines also assess routes for themselves, and a technically open airport may still lose traffic when carriers judge the approach unsafe.
The precedent is relevant to this sanctions dispute as Iran does not need to retaliate against a specific airport to make Persian Gulf aviation more expensive and less reliable.
If flights toward Iran become unsafe or unpredictable, the same instability affects the airspace immediately around it – including hub airports, like Dubai’s, whose entire business model depends on being a reliable regional connector.
Governments enforcing US sanctions have reason to weigh that possibility, though the earlier safety warnings do not prove that the flight bans will trigger another regional shutdown. A hub airport can continue operating while airlines judge particular corridors too risky or too expensive.
The resulting delays and diversions reach connecting passengers who have no plans to enter Iran. That does not mean Tehran can shut neighboring airports at will; it does give those states reason to watch how an aviation dispute develops.
The civilian cost of lost routes
Iran’s oil trade remains the more consequential target of Washington’s economic pressure. China remains central to Iran’s oil trade, though the wider US blockade and sanctions are also putting that relationship under pressure. Oil exports matter far more to Iran’s finances than passenger terminals. Aviation is one front of a broader economic campaign, with particularly direct consequences for civilian travel.
The flight bans damage ordinary Iranians’ ability to travel, visit family abroad or reach treatment and work. Western visas were already difficult to obtain, and outbound routes had narrowed during the war. That cost should not be mistaken for proof that Iran has lost every international connection.
Officials said on 26 September that flights to Turkiye and several Asian countries were still operating. The remaining routes offer little relief to a passenger whose destination has been cut. A canceled flight also affects more than the person holding the ticket.
It reaches relatives waiting at either end of the journey, clinics expecting patients and businesses that still rely on face-to-face contact. These losses are difficult to measure against the state’s oil revenues, but they are visible in the narrowing choices left to people who had already learned to travel around years of restrictions.
Iraq’s pilgrimage routes under pressure
In Iraq, the suspension reaches into religious and political relationships that cannot be measured in landing rights alone.
The relationship between Iran and some Iraqi Shia-led resistance factions runs through religious and political allegiance. Harakat al-Nujaba recognizes Iran’s supreme leader as a religious-political authority under Wilayat al-Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist), the doctrine underpinning the Islamic Republic.
That position is not shared by all Iraqi Shia factions or religious authorities. When Akram al-Kaabi condemned Iraqi political forces for submitting to a “rogue, infidel, and criminal” power, he invoked that allegiance alongside Iraq’s sovereignty and the pilgrims affected by the suspension. He also urged supporters to prepare airport sit-ins if flights did not resume.
Alongside that political-religious alignment is the pilgrim route. Najaf is home to the shrine of Imam Ali and a gateway to his martyred son Imam Hussein’s shrine in Karbala; travelers also cross into Iran for the shrines in Mashhad and Qom.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s government is caught between Washington’s financial leverage and domestic opposition to the ban. Baghdad has sought US exemptions for civilian and religious travel, though Najaf remained without one as of 27 September.
Pilgrims can still reach Najaf by road, but the journey is harder for those who are elderly, ill or traveling from farther afield. The flight ban has therefore drawn anger well beyond factions aligned with Tehran, even as Iraqi Shia leaders differ over how Baghdad should respond.
Tehran’s warning and its limits
Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Mohsen Rezaei warned neighboring states on 23 September against joining Washington’s campaign. If they barred Iranian aircraft, he said, their airports could find themselves unable to operate flights. He did not explain how Iran would carry out that threat or name the airlines it might affect.
Beyond direct reciprocity, regional airspace insecurity is a feature of the geography. The war showed that instability around Iran raises costs and advisories for Persian Gulf carriers and airports whether or not their governments joined the dispute.
Iran also retains leverage around the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for oil shipments whose disruption has already affected the region. Rezaei has tied reopening the strait to Tehran’s conditions in the wider war.
The Hormuz standoff predates the flight bans, but it shapes how Gulf states hear Rezaei’s warning. With shipping already disrupted, they must weigh what further confrontation with Tehran could mean for their airports.
None of this restores Iran’s lost passenger routes, and Tehran has not threatened a military response to the flight bans. Rezaei’s warning asks neighboring governments to consider the cost of shutting out Iranian carriers. In Iraq, where the ban has disrupted pilgrimages and stirred opposition at home, that cost is already being contested.