As Iran enters the third week of nationwide protests, the pace of events has become dizzying. News breaks by the minute, and, as Persians say: ‘One eye is filled with tears, the other with blood.’ We are all waiting anxiously for a change that feels both inevitable and profoundly uncertain.
For five to six consecutive days now, the Iranian regime has completely severed the country’s communication with the outside world. Not only has internet access been cut, but even ordinary landlines and direct mobile phone calls to and from Iran have become impossible. In a digital age in which nearly every aspect of daily life depends on connectivity, the blackout has erected a towering wall around Iran – one that prevents the world from seeing what is happening to protesters and ordinary citizens inside the country.
The few images that do manage to escape this blackout are so horrific that many are marked with content warnings. Bodies lying on the ground outside hospitals in Tehran. Medical centres overwhelmed with the wounded. Funeral processions for slain protesters, where chants of ‘Death to Khamenei’ accompany coffins to their graves. The anguished cries of mothers searching for the bodies of their children. Once again, these scenes make painfully clear that the regime’s approach to suppressing dissent has not changed in the slightest. Reports yesterday said that 12,000 protestors may have been killed.
The current wave of demonstrations began after a sudden spike in the price of foreign currency and gold, alongside strikes in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. From there, demonstrations spread rapidly to other cities, including many small towns that suddenly became unexpected centres of unrest. Economic hardship has reached such extreme levels that the word ‘poverty’ is used in protest slogans. As the movement grew, it reached major cities such as Tehran, Mashhad and Shiraz.
Amid these developments, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi issued a two-day call to action, urging people – whether at home or in the streets – to chant slogans against the government. He went further, announcing for the first time that he is prepared to return to Tehran. At the same time, US President Donald Trump has repeatedly emphasised his support for the Iranian people.
At this point, it is crucial to look more closely at the internal power structure and the guiding strategy of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Over more than three decades, he has absorbed many lessons from previous waves of protest. His inner circle and loyalists are fully prepared for moments like this.
Khamenei’s governance model is built on total control – over society and over all civic institutions. He has succeeded, with remarkable thoroughness, in paralysing genuine political parties and social organisations. Over the past two decades, political figures and activists have been imprisoned, executed or subjected to such sustained pressure that, when released, they emerged broken by illness and fear, permanently pushed into political passivity.
As a result, while a small number of activists inside Iran – such as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, prominent human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, and a handful of others – have managed to continue their work, their social and political weight has not been sufficient to form a strong, unifying axis for change. Meanwhile, opposition groups outside Iran have never succeeded in sustained, close cooperation with one another. This may explain why the name that continues to stand out most prominently remains that of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.
From a young age, Pahlavi has devoted his efforts – slowly but persistently – to a single political path aimed at change in Iran. These days, at least a significant portion of the population has concluded that the 1979 revolution was a mistake, and Pahlavi’s name is increasingly heard in protest chants across the country.
On another front, Khamenei has deliberately extinguished the very concept of a free press. In recent years, only a handful of journalists have been able to publish material even slightly outside the regime’s approved framework, and only with extreme caution. The judiciary, too, has been engineered into a system of complete loyalty and dependence.
What we are witnessing is not chaos, but a carefully planned strategy
Under these conditions, even as the images of the dead grow more harrowing, as new names are added to the list of those killed, and as the death toll rises – with some reports now speaking of several thousand killed – the policies of Ayatollah Khamenei stand more entrenched and resolute than ever in the face of public anger. It appears to make little difference how many more children or citizens must be killed for his position to remain untouched.
What we are witnessing in Iran today is not chaos, but a carefully planned strategy by the Islamic Republic to preserve power – a system hardened by experience, fully aware that if even the smallest opening were allowed, if even the faintest scent of democracy were released, the accumulated rage of years would become impossible to contain.
Now, after countless deaths, injuries and immense collective trauma, if the Iranian people see no meaningful change, their capacity for endurance will weaken even further, even if Donald Trump said yesterday that ‘HELP IS ON ITS WAY’. Iran risks entering a post-despair phase similar to that which followed previous failed movements.
That is unless, in the midst of all this, a truly exceptional development occurs – one capable of finally tipping the balance in favour of the protesters.
