Operation Epic Fury, a war of aggression launched on false pretenses, has failed to topple the government of Iran or force the “unconditional surrender” President Donald Trump demanded on the seventh day of a war that’s now in its seventh month.
In April, the Trump administration escalated America’s long-running economic war on Iran by launching Operation Economic Fury. Grasping at straws in August, the administration announced a sequel, Operation Economic Outcast, which aims to “sever every economic lifeline” of the Iranian government until it succumbs to “economic asphyxiation.”
Though the rhetoric focuses on Iran’s government, economic sanctions always fall hardest on innocent citizens. Make no mistake, that’s the point: Mirroring the morality of terrorism, economic sanctions intentionally inflict suffering on civilian populations to force political change. When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent crows that Iran’s economy has been “decimated…to a point where the rial has never been weaker and inflation has rarely been higher,” he’s implicitly celebrating misery imposed on 93 million people.
Comfortably detached Westerners are prone to equating economic hardship with declining stock indexes or shrinking macro-economic measures like GDP. However, economic hardships are manifested in deeply personal ways, to include soaring prices for goods and housing, job loss, poverty, psychological depression, substandard health care, homelessness, malnutrition, starvation, disease and death.
Most are oblivious to the fact that sanctions kill, but the death toll is truly staggering. In a 2025 study published by The Lancet, researchers concluded that, between 1971 and 2021, sanctions were associated with 38 million deaths around the world. Indeed, the study found several times more people are killed by sanctions than by military action, which underscores a stark reality: sanctions are not an alternative to war, they are a different form of war.
Rearranging the old expression, the death of millions is a statistic; the death of one person is a tragedy—so let’s examine the tragedy that U.S.-led sanctions inflicted on one innocent young woman in Iran, and on the many people who loved her.
To the extent any American has ever heard of Bushehr, Iran, it’s likely because the Persian Gulf port city is home to Iran’s only commercial nuclear reactor, and has been targeted by US and Israeli bombs. Bushehr is also home to nearly 300,000 people. In October 2016, one of those people was a promising 23-year-old Iranian woman named Ameneh Abbasi (AH-meh-neh ahb-bah-SEE).
Ameneh had earned a bachelor’s degree in laboratory sciences from Payam Noor University of Bushehr. Having passed qualification exams, she was in the midst of registration to further her education with the study of biology when a routine blood test indicated she was anemic. Though she felt fine, the test led to a sequence of conflicting diagnoses and treatments.
The previously asymptomatic young woman began experiencing dizziness and nausea. As doctors struggled to effectively treat her with medicines and transfusions, she began having breathing problems, heart palpitations, loss of consciousness and eventually a heart attack.
Ameneh’s hemoglobin count was beyond alarming: Healthy young adult women typically have hemoglobin readings between 12 and 15.5—Ameneh’s was only 2. When a blood sample was sent to Tehran for advanced analysis, it became clear why transfusions seemed to be worsening her condition: Ameneh’s blood type was the rarest in the world, RH-null.
“Probably only a handful of people in the world have this blood type,” Dr. Mostafa Moghadam, who was then director of the Iranian National Rare Donor Program, explained in a heart-wrenching documentary created by Dr. Habib Ahmadzadeh, a Tehran University professor. “It is known as the Golden Blood Group.” (The full documentary, Ameneh’s Golden Blood, is embedded below. The documentary, along with additional information provided by Ahmadzadeh, is the source for my telling of her story.)
To call RH-null blood “rare” is the greatest of understatements: According to the Cleveland Clinic, fewer than fifty people in the world have ever been reported to have this blood type.
Iran keeps an inventory of rare blood, but it didn’t include RH-null. As Ameneh lay in a hospital bed, her doctors and family instantly recognized the desperation of her situation. The race was on to find a bag of RH-null blood from somewhere—anywhere—on Earth, so Ameneh could receive a life-saving transfusion.
Moghadam reached out to colleagues in twenty-three countries and anxiously awaited replies. First came a flurry of similarly disappointing responses: “We don’t have it.” A few countries had individuals with the right blood type, but who were too old or ill to donate. A few others had units of RH-null blood in their repositories, but weren’t allowed to send it away.
