Iranian leader promises regime will do so

Thousands of Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran and other cities on Thursday night, heeding a call from the country’s exiled crown prince to make their voices heard in the most serious challenge to the Islamic Republic’s hardline rulers in many years.

He The protests had spread across the country for 12 days.leaving around 40 people dead and more than 2,000 detained by security forces, but despite arrests and a nationwide blackout of phone and Internet service, unrest escalated dramatically Thursday night.

It was impossible to get a clear idea of ​​the extent of the unrest, given the restricted flow of information. But Iran’s ruler appeared in a brief television address Friday morning, defiantly accusing President Trump of inspiring the protests, demonstrating that he was still in office and promising that his regime “would not back down.”

The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, called for unity and accused “a group of vandals” in Tehran, where a state television building was set on fire, of having “destroyed a building that belongs to them to please the American president.”

As he spoke, the audience in front of him shouted the familiar refrain of “Death to America!”

Given the communications blackout, which continued Friday morning according to internet monitoring organization NetBlocks, short videos posted online, largely by anti-regime activists, provided the only real window into the chaos across the country.

It appeared to increase dramatically starting at 8 pm local time on Thursday, by which time exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi had urged Iranians to shout and chant from their windows against the regime.

“Iranians demanded their freedom tonight,” said Pahlavi, son of former head of state Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who fled the country just before the 1979 Islamic revolution that brought the current regime to power.

In remarks posted online, he called on European leaders to join Trump in “holding the regime accountable,” using “all available technical, financial and diplomatic resources to reestablish communication with the Iranian people so that their voice and their will can be heard and seen. Do not allow the voices of my brave compatriots to be silenced.”

Pahlavi had made his call several days earlier to hold mass chants against the regime at 8 pm, which is noon on the east coast of the United States, on both Thursday and Friday, making it possible that the regime could face another night of mass unrest.

In the videos, which are difficult to independently verify, many people can be heard shouting “Death to the dictator!” and “Death to the Islamic Republic,” while others called for the return of the monarchy and declared, “Pahlavi will return!”

As of Thursday, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which relies on a network of contacts within the country, said at least 42 people had been killed and more than 2,270 detained, but that was before a clear picture could be obtained of the chaos on Thursday night and Friday morning.

“All the big crowds in my neighborhood are pro-Pahlavi and in several areas my sources report the same thing: pro-Pahlavi crowds prevail, without a doubt,” a source in Tehran told News themezone Thursday night, calling them “monarchists responding to Reza,” before their communications were cut off.

“For the first time, the government decided to shut down the Internet yesterday, and normally when they shut it down, it means they are going to use violence against people,” Maziar Bahari, editor of the independent news site IranWire, told News themezone on Friday.

Bahari said activists and journalists outside Iran had heard reports of security forces shooting people in different parts of the country, but that the information was impossible to verify. Other News themezone sources, both people inside the country and those in contact with family members in Iran, said there did not appear to have been massive, widespread violence Thursday night, but stressed that it was difficult to get a clear picture amid communications outages.

“Even Starlink, which has been the main line of communication for some activists in different parts of the country, has been blocked,” Bahari said, referring to the satellite communication system run by Elon Musk.

News themezone sought comment from SpaceX, which manages Starlink, but did not get any immediate response.

Bahari said this would likely result in the “imprisonment of hundreds or even thousands of protesters. It will lead to the torture and interrogation of thousands of protesters, up to the murder of protesters. But it has not prevented protests in the past. People have continued to protest, and this time, because the middle classes – the traditional bazaar traders – have joined the youth, I think it will be very difficult for the regime to stop the protests.”

How might Iran respond?

“Many people have called what is happening in Iran right now a revolution, and we can see different signs of revolution in Iran right now, but a revolution usually needs a leader for the revolution… We don’t have that leader,” said Bahari, who was working as a journalist in Iran in 2009, when a previous round of mass protests spread across the country. He was arrested and detained for more than 100 days.

He said he expects the protests to continue regardless of what measures the regime takes to suppress them, which he said could vary significantly depending on the whims of local and regional commanders.

“I think people are more desperate than before. In 2009, the economic situation was not as bad as it is now,” Bahari said. “In 2009, the protests were really about dignity and citizen rights. In 2022, the ‘woman life freedom’ [movement] It was primarily about the rights of women to determine their own destiny. But I think these protests have to do with the economic situation, but also with dignity. It’s about national pride. And because of that, these protests will be very, very difficult to contain.”

“I was very lucky to be a journalist for a foreign publication at the time… and so I wasn’t treated the same way as unknown prisoners,” Bahari told News themezone.

But despite his status as a “VIP prisoner,” Bahari said he was “physically tortured. I was psychologically tortured. I was threatened with execution. And I know for a fact that many of the protesters in 2009 who were arrested with me and did not have my profile, were treated much harsher by prison guards in different parts of the country.”

“The Iranian people do not lack courage. They lack leadership in terms of opposition to the government,” Bahari said. “But at the same time, many of the protesters have nothing to lose. Their suicide rate over the last two decades in Iran is really high. And when you’re suicidal, when you have nothing to lose, you don’t care what happens to you in a protest. So you just go out and ask for your rights.”

Echoing Khamenei, Iran’s state-controlled media on Friday accused “terrorist agents” from the United States and Israel of causing the violence. He recognized the victims, but did not give details.

The protests began on Dec. 28 when Tehran merchants closed their shops and took to the streets to vent anger over Iran’s ailing economy, which has been hampered for years by global isolation and a series of sanctions imposed by the United States and other nations over its nuclear program and support of armed groups across the region.

Iran’s autocratic regime has violently quelled several previous waves of unrest, and the source in Tehran told News themezone that there was significant fear among many people that the current protests would spark a similarly draconian crackdown.

This time, however, the protests are taking place under the threat of direct US intervention by President Trump.

“I’ve let them know that if they start killing people, which they tend to do during their riots (they have a lot of riots), if they do that, we will hit them very hard,” Trump said Thursday during a radio interview.

Vice President JD Vance told reporters at the White House that the United States supported anyone participating in peaceful protests in Iran. Asked whether the United States would join, as it did over the summer, any new Israeli attack on Iran, Vance called on Tehran to negotiate with Washington over its nuclear program, but said he would “let the president talk about what we’re going to do in the future.”

Bahari said Iranian officials had told him they were concerned about the possibility of Trump intervening in Iran even before these protests.

The recent US attack on Venezuela “has really scared many Iranian officials and may have affected their actions in terms of how to confront protesters. But at the same time, it has inspired many protesters to come out, because they know that the leader of the world’s leading superpower is supporting their cause.”