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Bangladesh has closed universities and launched fuel rationing amid a worsening energy crisis linked to the conflict in the Middle East.
Authorities shut all public and private universities across the country from Monday, bringing forward the Eid al-Fitr holidays as part of emergency measures to conserve electricity and fuel.
Officials said the move will not only reduce electricity consumption but also ease traffic congestion, which leads to fuel wastage.
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They said the university campuses consume large amounts of electricity for residential halls, classrooms, laboratories and air conditioning, and the early closure would help ease pressure on the country’s strained power system.
“The decision has been taken to reduce electricity and fuel consumption considering the current global situation,” Bangladesh’s Ministry of Education said in a directive circulated to university authorities.
Government and private schools are already closed for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, meaning most educational institutions across the country will now remain shut during the period.
Bangladesh, which relies on imports for 95 percent of its energy needs, on Friday also imposed daily limits on fuel sales after panic buying and stockpiling.
As part of broader austerity measures, the government has also asked all foreign-curriculum schools and private coaching centres to suspend operations during this period to limit electricity use.
Alongside the closures, the government has issued guidelines encouraging institutions and offices to use electricity more efficiently, including maximising natural daylight and minimising unnecessary lighting and power consumption.
The moves came as Bangladesh faces mounting uncertainty over fuel and gas supplies following disruptions to global energy markets caused by the United States-Israel war on Iran.
The war has snowballed into a wider conflict in the Middle East, severely hampering oil and gas exports, and driving up costs.
Severe gas shortages have already forced Bangladesh to halt operations at four of its five state-run fertiliser factories, redirecting available gas to power plants to avoid widespread outages.
The country of 170 million people – the world’s eighth most populous – has also bought LNG from the spot market at sharply higher prices while seeking additional cargoes to bridge supply gaps.
“We are doing everything we can to reduce consumption and ensure stability in power, fuel and import supplies,” a senior official in the Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources said.
Energy analysts say such steps can offer short-term relief for the power sector while authorities work to stabilise fuel imports and manage distribution. However, they warn that prolonged interruptions to the academic calendar could create challenges for students if the energy crisis continues.
Authorities have not indicated how long the closures will remain in place, though institutions are expected to resume normal academic schedules after the Eid holidays if the energy situation improves.
Iran’s prosecutor general’s office threatened on Monday to seize all property belonging to diaspora Iranians who expressed support for the United States and Israel, the most sweeping legal threat ever directed at Iranian nationals abroad, and one that arrived against a backdrop of mass celebratory rallies in dozens of countries where Iranians had gathered to mark the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and call for regime change in Tehran.
“Iranians abroad who align, accompany and cooperate with the American-Zionist aggressor enemy will face confiscation of all their property and other legal penalties in accordance with the law,” the judiciary’s Mizan Online website said, quoting the prosecutor general’s office.
The threat explicitly covered Iranians who sympathised with, supported, or cooperated with what Tehran called “the American-Zionist enemy” — language broad enough to encompass social media posts, attendance at rallies, financial donations to opposition groups, and any form of public celebration of the war’s progress. The prosecutor general’s office did not specify a mechanism for identifying targeted individuals, though newly established Telegram channels had already begun circulating the names and personal details of prominent Iranians abroad who had posted comments critical of the Islamic Republic, compiling dossiers that Iranian diaspora rights groups described as hit lists.
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The threat invoked legislation passed after Iran’s twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025, which introduced asset confiscation as a penalty for cooperation with foreign enemies, a law rushed through Iran’s parliament at the time as a deterrence measure and now being deployed at far greater scale against a diaspora that had responded to the February 28 strikes with open celebration.
Celebratory rallies against the Islamic Republic were held worldwide after the start of the Iran war on February 28, led by the Iranian diaspora, where Iranians gathered waving anti-Islamic Republic symbols including the Lion and Sun flag.
The scale of those celebrations was unprecedented in the history of the diaspora: a rally in Toronto was reported to have 150,000 in attendance with zero incidents according to Toronto police. Demonstrations were held in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Ukraine, Turkey, Ghana, Israel, Georgia, Armenia, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Chile.
The Iranian government was simultaneously monitoring diaspora activity through a sophisticated social media surveillance operation. Newly created Telegram channels were compiling and publishing the personal details, names, photographs, cities of residence, employers, and family connections — of prominent Iranians abroad who had posted comments supportive of the US-Israeli campaign, creating public exposure documents that security researchers described as designed to enable physical targeting by IRGC-linked cells operating abroad.
The threat of IRGC extraterritorial violence against diaspora dissidents was not hypothetical: in March 2025, Iran International journalist Pouria Zeraati was stabbed outside his London home following months of threats against the station’s journalists, and British counterterrorism police arrested four people suspected of spying on Jewish communities in London for the Islamic Republic on March 6, 2026 — the same day a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Pakistani-Iranian operative Asif Merchant of a murder-for-hire plot targeting US politicians. Foreign security officials warned following the February 28 strikes that Iranian sleeper cells abroad had been activated.
In Moscow, police detained members of the diaspora who celebrated the death of Khamenei. In Birmingham, England, clashes broke out between Islamic Republic supporters and diaspora counter-protesters.
In Washington Square Park in Manhattan on March 6, clashes between Khamenei supporters and diaspora counter-protesters resulted in multiple NYPD arrests.
The polarised environment in Western cities reflected a diaspora that was not monolithic, a significant proportion of Iranians abroad, particularly those who had left before 1979 or maintained Islamic Republic connections, opposed the war and mourned Khamenei’s killing, while the majority who had fled the clerical state celebrated it.
