Transcript: Webinar – Iran, Bloody Iran
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PANELISTS
Mehdi Parpanchi
Executive Editor, Iran International; Former Lead Presenter, BBC Persia
John Hannah
JINSA Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow; Former National Security Advisor to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney
The discussion was moderated by JINSA Vice President for Policy Blaise Misztal.
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TRANSCRIPT
Transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.
Blaise Misztal:
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar discussing the most recent protests in Iran and specifically the bloody crackdown that suppressed them. We are gaining more details about just how bad it was. We will also discuss where we go from here going forward – both what the situation on the ground in Iran is and the options facing the United States in terms of a response, and what that response might look like.
I’m Blaise Misztal, JINSA’s Vice President for Policy. I am delighted to be joined this afternoon by Mehdi Parpanchi, the Executive Editor of Iran International. This media outlet, I think, has had some of the best, most detailed and fascinating coverage of Iran generally, but specifically for these protests over the past couple of weeks. I am also glad to be joined by John Hannah, my colleague, and the Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow here at JINSA.
Mehdi and John, thank you both so much for being with us. Mehdi, maybe I could start with you, because Iran International has really been paving the way and giving us insight into what happened in Iran over the past couple of weeks of protests. Specifically, when other outlets are reporting dead figures of around 4,000 Iranians killed, I think Iran International has reported the death toll of these protests to be much higher.
So, I’d be really interested to hear from you about both what Iran International has learned and what other details you can share about what happened on the ground in Iran, particularly in those first two weeks of January.
Mehdi Parpanchi:
Thank you so much for having me, Blaise. I’ll try to be brief, but if there are any more questions, then we can go into details. The massacre itself, I guess most of your audience would know, happened exactly three weeks ago today, within two days, most of it was on Friday. I think it was Friday, the ninth of January, if I’m not wrong, yes, the ninth of January.
So, there were protests before that for about two weeks, and mostly in the bazaar, Tehran’s bazaar, which is the traditional market. And it was because of the economic situation and also the fall of Iran’s currency — the rial. As you and your audience would know, it’s been falling very sharply — the value of the rial against the dollar.
So, the protest started from there, but it immediately gained traction in many other cities as well, including Tehran. But it was concentrated in Tehran’s bazaar most of the time. And it very quickly turned to political protests with slogans that people were chanting. The vast majority of them were in support of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who resides in the U.S. There were many people basically doubting it. In the beginning, some people were saying that these are voiced over videos and stuff like that. But the truth of the matter was that people were chanting in support of him.
It continued until Reza Pahlavi called for two days of protest at 8 pm Tehran time on Thursday and Friday, the eighth and ninth of January. I couldn’t find anybody who was predicting how it would be received on the ground in Iran. When it happened, it caught everyone by surprise because millions of people, and this is not an exaggeration, [were on the streets]. At that time, we didn’t have video evidence because the internet went dark. They closed down the internet on the same day, on Thursday at 11 pm Tehran time, so we didn’t receive many videos. But in the past week, the internet has become, not normal, but it is working for some people.
We have received plenty of video clips and visual evidence of the number of people, which shows those videos in various cities, in Tehran and other cities. According to the official figure from the Interior Ministry of Iran, in 400 cities, basically, the protest occurred on those two days. The massacre started on Thursday evening and continued Friday, all day, basically.
So, how many people were killed is very difficult to verify. When we issued our first editorial board statement, it was three days after the massacre. As you mentioned, some outlets were reporting a few hundreds, some a few thousands. You know, 2,000 or 3,000, but nobody really believed what had happened on those days. Three days after the massacre, in the statement that we issued, we reported 12,000 deaths.
It was unbelievable. It was unbelievable for us as well. But that was not an estimate. The number did not come from our own observations or estimates. It came from the interior ministry and presidential office and also the [Supreme National] Security Council, the one that Ali Larijani basically heads.
At that time, we noticed that something extraordinary happened in Iran, because we don’t have contacts in those offices. People were reaching us to leak the information. And 12,000 was the number of killed reported by the IRGC’s intelligence section to the Security, but again, that was an estimate. They didn’t have the exact number or that’s what we believe.
Two weeks after that, after the massacre, we issued our second editorial board statement, and in that, we reported 36,500 killed. Again, that number is not our figure. Again, that comes from the leaks from inside Iran, specifically from the Security Council. I think, as we are speaking, nobody really has any doubt that thousands of people have been killed. My own very cautious estimate will be somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000, although that number comes from the Security Council of Iran — 36,500.
We had other figures. I will ask your audience to read our second editorial board statement because we explained in detail the numbers that we had from one of them was from the security and foreign affairs committee of the Iranian Majlis, basically Iran’s parliament. There was another one from the presidential office and the other one from the Security Council. Each one of them was slightly different — one was saying, 32,000 the other 30,000, the other 36,000 — but what is important is to know that those reports were from different days. Each one was like three days apart or four days apart from each other. And we had all of them, and we gave basically detailed numbers in our statement.
So, in a nutshell, that’s basically what has happened, and I just want to re-emphasize that those numbers were not our estimate. They were leaks. And again, it shows that what has happened was so extraordinary that even some people inside the system thought that they have to leak the truth and they have to talk.
Blaise Misztal:
Those are truly staggering and heartbreaking numbers. Do you have any sense, Mehdi, were the deaths sort of spread out across all of the 400 cities where protests were seen in Iran? Were they concentrated in just a couple of cities? What is the pattern?
Mehdi Parpanchi:
It was everywhere. But different cities had different [circumstances] depending on the intensity of the clashes. Some of the cities, like Mashhad, Rasht, Tehran, Isfahan — they had very high death tolls. For instance, again, in our statement, we have mentioned the numbers that we had for Mashhad. It was 1,800. I think it was around the same time that the New Yorker had a very good report. They reported for Mashhad 2,000 as far as I remember. But the figure with which we had was 1,800. I’m not saying their number was not correct. I’m just saying, you know, the numbers that we have. In Rasht, Tehran, and Isfahan, the death toll amounts to thousands. In some of the cities, it’s like 40, 60, you know, depending on the big cities, the small cities, but it has been across the country.
Everywhere, they had to kill people to send people home. We have information now that basically, the regime put an order to put an end to the protests. There was a specific order from Khamenei’s office. As you know, Khamenei is the head of the armed forces. So, Khamenei has an obsession with color revolutions. If you read his speeches throughout the past two decades, he has mentioned it many, many times.
And he has a fear, probably rightly so, that he sees color revolutions as a kind of an existential threat to the Islamic Republic. The information that we have is that there was a specific order that they must put an end to this kind of protest. The protests were peaceful protests, but they started killing people indiscriminately just to send everybody home and also create a climate of fear for the people so that they don’t come back again. That’s the conclusion that we have for now.
Blaise Misztal:
There have been other protests in the history of the Islamic Republic. Is this level of violence sort of in line with what you’ve seen in previous protests? Or is it unusual?
Mehdi Parpanchi:
Never in Iran have we ever had anything like this before or after the revolution. Definitely, in the Islamic Republic’s 47 years of rule, we never had anything even close to this. There was a massacre in prisons in 1987, if I’m not wrong. That figure was about 3,000. But that included executions in prisons.
In the past years, we had four rounds of protests. One was about four years ago, if I’m not wrong. It took about 10 days, and the official figure was 36, but we believe about 50 people were killed in a span of 10 days. The second round came a year later. You would remember when the price of fuel basically tripled overnight and everybody, in most cities, almost everywhere in the country, experienced unrest. In that one, Reuters reported 1,500 deaths; however, organizations like Amnesty International and other human rights organizations managed to put together 365 — something like that. Whichever you believe, the number was in the hundreds again. A year after that, there was another round of protest called the Women, Life, Freedom protests. It took about six months, but there were people who got killed in a span of four months. Again, the figure is about 560 people.
So, we never had anything like this before. We are talking about thousands of people, 10,000s of people, in two days. This has never happened in Iran’s history, neither before nor after the revolution. One thing that your audience, I guess, may find interesting is that before the revolution, during the Shah’s time, the seeds of the Islamic Revolution started about 12 years before 1979, when Khomeini was basically exiled from Qom.
That was the beginning of the revolution, if you like. And we are talking about some 12 or 13 years. The official figures of the Islamic Republic itself — this is not my number; there is a foundation of martyrs in Iran, Bonyad Shahid — provide official figures and lists. So, within that over a decade time period, which ended with the toppling of the Shah’s regime, everyone who was killed, including executions in prisons, the protests, everything, totaled 3,164 people.
This toll led to, basically, the Islamic Revolution and the Shah leaving the country. The number is 3,164 in a span of more than a decade. Now we are talking about 10,000s of people in two days. This has never happened in Iran’s history, and I believe neither in world history. I don’t remember for a street protest in two days any deaths totaling 30,000. I have never seen it. Maybe you would know, but I believe that is unprecedented.
Blaise Misztal:
One more question for you, Mehdi, and then I want to bring in John. Do we know who perpetrated these horrible massacres? Was it the IRGC? Was it the Basij? Was it Iranian proxies brought in from Iraq? Who was the regime relying on to pull the trigger and kill these protesters?
Mehdi Parpanchi:
Mostly the IRGC. In Tehran, the Thar-Allah headquarters is basically the main organization that was responsible for the massacre. And there are other headquarters around the country. Each one of those headquarters is responsible for either one province or two or three provinces depending on how big those provinces are.
But the main body that is responsible for it is the IRGC. However, we have credible reports that they have used proxies, mostly Iraqi proxies. We received the report yesterday that there were some Chechen fighters among them, even some from Sudan. But the main organization which is responsible for it is the IRGC. The number of people that they have deployed to the streets cannot be any foreign force. Yes, they have used Iraqi proxies. But nobody can say that those were responsible for this type of massacre. When we are talking about 10,000s of people, the main responsibility falls on the IRGC and the Basij.
Blaise Misztal:
So, John, I would be interested to get your insights here about what this tells us about the Iranian regime — that they were willing to turn to such ferocity and savagery to make the streets of Tehran and Mashhad and Rasht run red with blood. What does that tell us about the regime and the mindset of the Supreme Leader? Is it a sign of weakness? Is it a sign of strength that they are able to get their security forces to keep pulling the trigger 10,000s of times? What’s the takeaway?
John Hannah:
It’s a good question, Blaise. I think you could see evidence of both. I think, fundamentally, it’s evidence of weakness and the regime’s knowledge and internal sense that the stakes now really are existential. They’ve engineered a crisis for Iran, in terms of the country’s economic collapse, in terms of its international isolation, the defeat of its entire regional strategy over the last couple of years, primarily at the hands of Israel, the dismantling of its proxy network, the attacks during the 12-Day war that neutralized a good chunk of the nuclear program, and some of the missile program.
The Islamic Republic really has now come to a dead end, a process that’s been underway for a couple of decades. I think this is a sign that it’s reaching its culmination, because the regime really has no answers, other than to start engaging in this kind of slaughter on a scale, as Mehdi says, that we’ve never ever seen before, despite a lot of protests over the last 15 years. This is on a completely different scale, and I think it’s a sign that the regime really knows that it’s perhaps approaching a real climactic point in its ability to survive.
On the other hand, as you say, the fact that the regime can give an order to Iranian forces and troops to engage in this kind of mass slaughter on the orders of the Supreme Leader to kill essentially as many people as they could [shows a certain degree of strength].
Again, I think Mehdi’s right. You rack your brain, and you can’t find a historical precedent in terms of people going out in the street and having civil protests against a government and being mowed down in this way. Your memory only reaches back to things like the Holocaust and the Einsatzgruppen in making their way through Eastern Europe and slaughtering Jews and throwing them into mass graves at places like Babi Yar.
But other than that, this is really quite unique. I’d be interested in what Mehdi has to say about the state of the security forces of the IRGC and Basij now that the regime called, Khamenei ordered, and they were prepared to mow down these people in these kinds of numbers because it does get to the issue there: the regime may be at a dead end, but it still looks like it’s been able to hold together coherently, particularly the people with the guns.
We don’t see any real serious evidence of cracks, and at least on the outside, among the elite or the security forces, other than these examples of very damaging leaks that Mehdi suggests are coming from inside the system. Maybe that’s something that we need to work much harder on exploiting – by leveraging that kind of discontent. But for the moment, it does look like the regime has succeeded in silencing these forces for the moment. But you can’t imagine that it could be for very long, given the fundamental nature of the crisis the regime is in now.
Blaise Misztal:
Yeah, Mehdi, I would be interested to get your thoughts on that question as well. What is the status of the regime, of cohesion, of the loyalty of the security forces? Clearly, there are those who have grave doubts if they’re leaking that information to you. But do you see that discontent potentially spreading throughout the regime?
Mehdi Parpanchi:
We will see. I think we can put what happened three weeks ago in a historical context, and then I will get back to your question. John mentioned it right today. I want to second him, basically. On the sixteenth of September 2022, Mahsa Amini was killed, and then we had the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which everybody would remember. That’s about three years and a couple of months ago, almost three years now.
In the past three years, the Islamic Republic has experienced five major defeats. And I think it’s worth mentioning every one of them. One of them was the hijab. The imposition of the hijab on Iranian women is almost gone. They are not able to enforce the mandatory hijab anymore. This assessment is based on images which come out from the country and our daily contact with Iranians. The hijab is gone. Nobody is able to enforce the hijab. And it is important to understand that the hijab was an ideological symbol like a Berlin Wall for the Islamic Republic. It was not about just the veil on the head. It was how the Islamic Republic’s apparatus was enforcing its will on people and on their lifestyle.
They couldn’t continue doing it anymore. That was massive. Khamenei himself, three times after that, has basically mentioned that hijab must come back, but they didn’t manage to do that. And there, I don’t want to go into details, but I want your audience to understand that when they lost the ability to enforce, the hijab that was a massive setback for the Islamic Republic.
The second one came when they had to leave Syria. Losing Syria was like an Afghanistan moment for the Islamic Republic – similar to what happened for the Soviet Union after leaving Afghanistan. This was on a scale akin to that. They lost their narrative of strategic depth. They have been ruling on it, and they have been emphasizing for the past decade that Iran now has four major capitals in the Middle East, the Shia crescent and strategic depth. They created a narrative around it, and it was a projection of power. They were saying that now we have access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Iran rules from Tehran to Beirut; everywhere is under our control.
And they were right, but they lost it after October 7th. And we saw what happened after that. [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah was killed, of course, before Syria’s Assad regime fell, and Hezbollah is seriously degraded. They don’t have the ability that they used to enjoy anymore. So that was another massive setback, and I want to emphasize that. When you look at the history of wars around the world, many political systems collapsed after they were defeated in a major war. And Syria, for Iran, was such an experience, basically.
The 12-Day War was another defeat. The regime invested billions and billions of dollars into Iran’s nuclear program. It was not destroyed altogether, but we all agree that it was seriously damaged. And that was another narrative that the regime was saying — that this is a deterrence for us. Nobody can touch Iran, because now we have a nuclear program, so on and so forth. And then we saw that it was gone overnight. All of these basically were eroding. It was an erosion of power inside the country as well. People feel empowered after, as I said, the hijab is gone, which lasted for four decades in Iran.
The Women, Life, Freedom Movement was the first time that people won the race against the state. And then came the Syria moment. And then came the 12-Day war. All of these are not just for the people. The system itself sees that there is a domino of defeats, and each one is coming after the previous one. Amid the damage of each one the Islamic Republic experiences is then followed by the next wave. The cumulative damage therefore becomes more and more.
There is another thing that happened in the past months. In the past 47 years, the Islamic Republic’s main effort, its main mission, was to prevent any political figure or any political group from being seen as an alternative to the Iranian regime. Basically, the regime established itself as the only force, as the only power, as the only people who can manage Iran as if there is no one else. It’s the Islamic Republic, and that’s it.
They closed the political system that Iran has, the election system and everything, everybody would know that it’s a very closed system. It’s impossible to penetrate through the election and everything or anything else. And they have also cracked down inside the country on any political dissent, which has always been crushed, either through executions or imprisonments.
They have even killed opposition figures outside the country. There are plenty of reports in Germany, in France, in many other European countries — they have killed anyone who got even closer to being seen as a credible alternative. But now, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is emerging as an alternative. Inside Iran, some people may disagree with it, but based on what we saw in Iran three weeks ago, there was a call, and millions of people answered. So, I think that in itself shows that there is a good base for him. So that’s another defeat for the Islamic Republic and it is the fourth. We had hijab, Syria, the 12-Day War, and also a serious alternative of Pahlavi emerging.
The fifth one is what we witnessed again three weeks ago. When a regime kills 10,000s of people in 48 hours, John rightly mentioned, it shows weakness. It does not show strength. That’s not power, that’s weakness — when you have to kill people to send them home. Yes, you can say that we don’t see a crack in the IRGC, for instance — they are still killing people.
But IRGC members have families. Many of those people who are killing people outside in the streets have kids. They have young kids who don’t subscribe to the ideology of the regime. The best thing that proves it is that thousands of the sons and daughters of Islamic Republic regimes live in Europe, some of them, many of them, hundreds of them, live in the United States.
If they liked what is happening in Iran, if they subscribed to the regime that their fathers have established and run, they would have stayed inside the country. So, the regime will be under pressure. I don’t think the Islamic Republic, with or without foreign intervention, will be able to continue for long. I hope that I managed to explain what I was trying to.
Blaise Misztal:
I think, particularly, the narrative of the five major losses that the regime has suffered provides a really important context for us to understand. I’d also be curious if you could tell us, Mehdi, what the current status of the protests is. How successful was that massacre on January 8th, 9th and 10th in driving people home? Are people still coming out to protest at all? I think there was a New York Times story just the other day about what’s happening at some of the cemeteries and the funerals of the protesters. Are there still protests going on? Has it mostly quieted down now? What is the status?
Mehdi Parpanchi:
The answer is yes and no. No new protests. But yes, there are protests at funerals. Those funerals are protests. In every single one of them, there is plenty of footage that we received. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people take part in those funerals, and they are still chanting “death to Khamenei.” It is surprising to me that people are still defiant.
By tradition, in those funerals, when they carry the body, they would always say, “la ilaha illallah,” which is an Islamic phrase. You don’t see any of this anymore. People are playing music. They are dancing. There are really extraordinary images. And now that I’m describing it, it makes me emotional, because we see all of these videos every day. We receive thousands of clips every day from our audience inside Iran.
And for me, it is unbelievable that despite the massacre, despite the level of brutality that people have experienced in the streets, they are still defiant. So, I don’t think it’s going anywhere. You remember I gave you the figures of the mass protests in the past five years. I said this to start at the 36 deaths, then 360, then 560 and now you have thousands. What is that telling you? Every time there is a wave, it comes, then it’s pushed back, but when it returns, it becomes even bigger. Every time they have to kill more because the protests are larger. Otherwise, they wouldn’t need to kill more people. And this one was massive. This is unprecedented.
I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere soon. People will return to the streets without any doubt. I have zero doubt about it, and I don’t know if it is going to be tomorrow, next week or next month, but we need to understand that many people have been killed in provinces that have tribal systems, like Lorestan, for instance. In those areas, first of all, people are armed. Traditionally, lords have arms, right? Secondly, there is a tribal culture there. If you kill one, that blood is not going to go wasted. People will look for revenge. That is the culture.
I’m not saying that is the culture in Tehran. In Tehran, protests, but it will take other shapes and forms. But specifically in those provinces with tribal systems and cultures, there will be revenge.
Blaise Misztal:
John, as you’re hearing this, I wonder what the implications are for the United States, particularly at this moment, where President Trump appears to be weighing what the U.S. response should be. After having promised more than two weeks ago that help was on its way on January 14, he abruptly, sort of changed direction.
We’ve been waiting for the U.S. carrier group to arrive in the Middle East in the meantime. Now it has arrived, and the President appears to be weighing his options. And some of the pushback on the U.S. taking action appears to be that the protests are over. The regime won. It’s sort of too late for the U.S. to do anything. U.S. strikes aren’t going to topple the regime.
But what we’re hearing from Mehdi is that the protests are still bubbling up. The regime has suffered all these defeats, one after the other. Maybe it is weaker than it looks from the outside. How would that and how should that affect U.S. decision-making about what to do next?
John Hannah:
Well, listen, there are a couple of forces, I think, operating now on the President. One, it’s just clear to me that he got way ahead of his skis when he began telling the regime on January 2 that if they started killing, he was prepared to come to the rescue of the people, that he was “locked and loaded” and ready to go. He clearly was not ready to go.
JINSA has put out at least seven or eight specific threats by the President over the course of a couple of weeks. President Trump set an obvious red line that he wasn’t at that time prepared to enforce because the red line got absolutely shredded on the evening of January 8 and then into the 9th, as we’ve heard from Mehdi.
So, the President may, out of the best of intentions, wanted to support the Iranian people. Probably there were some thousands that might have heard the President of the United States, the most powerful country in the world, promising to come to their rescue, who decided, “Okay, I’m now going out into the streets. I’m prepared to risk this, because the United States is behind me,” and a lot of those people might be dead now. So, there’s a tremendous moral hazard here that the President has gotten into and put the reputation of the United States on the line.
Now he’s doubled down on that because he wasn’t ready, and now he’s introduced this massive force into the region with the intention, presumably, of doing something to follow through and make good on the red line that he had set and to actually punish this regime and to somehow help the Iranian people and to advance American interests.
So, he’s put an awful lot of chips on the table for the United States and for him now to walk away and do nothing [is unlikely] because he’s not going to get the kind of deal that Steve Witkoff is proposing to the regime. There’s no way that they can come close to doing what Steve Witkoff would like. Nor should they, frankly, in the context of 30,000 to 40,000 Iranians dead in the street that the President helped call there. It would be heaping moral abomination on top of moral abomination to now cut a deal and get rid of sanctions and empower this regime when it’s done this horrific crime to its own people.
If I had to say, is the President going to actually take some kind of action or not, I’d say he will. The intelligence will be important. I can’t imagine he’s getting intelligence that says these protests are dead forever. Anybody can see from the outside, given the progression of these protests over the last 10 to 15 years, that they’re growing, and the legitimacy of the regime is decreasing. Its ability to reform itself, economically, politically, or otherwise, is dead. It’s weaker than it’s ever been.
So, I think there’s an opportunity here, clearly, for the United States to play a role. I’d be interested to hear Mehdi’s opinion of whether, even given the events of the last few weeks, the Iranian people would still like to see the United States act against the regime in a forceful manner. I imagine a lot of them probably would, even if they do feel somewhat betrayed by the lack of action in response to the eighth or ninth of January.
So, I think there’s a lot of pressure on the President to do something. His red line has been shredded. He looks a little bit like Barack Obama did in 2013 with his Syria red line. Now, the President’s perfectly capable of saying it just doesn’t make sense for us to do this and to get away with it because he has done the 12-Day war, he has done the snatch of President Maduro in Venezuela. He’s demonstrated American strength. So maybe he doesn’t feel like he needs to take action on the regime to maintain his credibility and the credibility of the United States. I think he does. I think having climbed up this tree, I think he does need to probably act. And I think there are things that he can do.
Another calculation in his head, of course, is that he likes clean wars. He doesn’t like to see American casualties. He likes one and done. We go in, boom, and we get out. The intelligence will be important. Are we going to see a repeat of the Iranian kind of performative response as they did to the Soleimani assassination in 2020, or to the 12-Day war with just a handful of missiles on a base in Qatar that they warned the United States and agreed ahead of time? Or is it now so existential that they feel they need to up the ante and to take that risk of either attacking American forces, attacking infrastructure in the Gulf, oil infrastructure of our Gulf allies or going after Israel in a major way, and being willing to risk going up an escalation ladder in a way that will draw this out and keep U.S. forces engaged for a period of time with an uncertain end.
We just have to see. We know in Yemen, in 2025, the President engaged. I think he was told that we could defeat the Houthis relatively quickly. And within two months, it became too open-ended for the President, and he quickly found an exit ramp and got out of the business of going up against the Houthis. The Iranian regime is as weak as it is. It still has a significant arsenal, particularly on the missile front, anti-ship missiles, fast boats in the Gulf, and a fleet of submarines. So, if it wants to go down fighting, it’s possible that the regime could see whether or not President Trump really is willing to get into a more drawn out and serious conflict that could last days, weeks, or even a couple of months.
So, a lot depends on what the President is hearing and what his appetite is now for risk and how weak he thinks this regime is. My guess is, whatever he does against the regime, if and when he does, I don’t think anybody can tell him it’s likely to bring down the regime. U.S. airstrikes and missile strikes are not going to be enough to bring the regime down. It’s possible that they could bring some people out in the streets quicker or revive the protests. But at a minimum, I think you could punish the regime, degrade its military capabilities, missiles, naval assets, the IRGC, the Basij command and control political targets to significantly weaken the regime. Another way to punish the regime is to dramatically ratchet up economic pressure on the regime, stopping the flow of oil to China in a much more serious way and begin preparing to build the assets for a longer-term struggle that’s got to be led by the Iranian people.
Blaise Misztal:
Thanks, John. Mehdi, one more question for you, and then I’d like to open it up to the audience for their questions. So, if you are watching and you’d like to ask Mehdi or John anything, please feel free to type it in using the Q&A function in Zoom, and then I’ll be happy to read it out to them.
Mehdi, John asked whether the Iranian people would still like to see the U.S. hit the regime. And let me ask the same question, or a variant of it. One of the pushbacks or arguments that’s trotted out against the U.S. taking action is that it would cause a rally around the flag effect. It would make the Iranian people suddenly rush to support the regime against the foreign intervention of the United States.
Which of those is more likely here? Is it more likely that the Iranians would like to see some sort of action? Is it more likely that foreign intervention would force them back to supporting the regime? What would you see as the effect of a U.S. strike?
Mehdi Parpanchi:
Rallying around the flag is a joke. It has always been a joke. I know that there have been a lot of people in DC and other Iran experts who have argued it. It never was reality. And even now, with the level of rage and hatred that they have caused, when you are talking about 30,000 people being killed — they have been killed in a protest where other people were witnessing it. If, let’s say, I don’t know, 10 people saw every one of them get killed, just see how many people you are talking about. Every single one of them has family members. They have a network of people, including friends and family. You are talking about millions of people who have been directly affected during the past three weeks.
It is a massive, nationwide grief and tragedy that people are experiencing. So, talking about rallying around the flag, like I said, has always been untrue, and even now is simply unrealistic. It’s not going to happen. Yes, there are people who are against foreign intervention, but the vast majority of people are watching the skies day and night.
I was talking to somebody who basically works in a bazaar, Iran’s market. And he was saying that anything that we hear, everybody is just jumping out to look at the sky, and Iranians are basically happy that [anticipated foreign intervention seemingly] started. So, I don’t know if the U.S. or Israel is going to hit anytime soon, but if it happens, at least now, the momentum is there, and people will support it. There is no doubt about it. If it’s just one attack, I have my doubts, but if it sustains for a few days or a week, I have zero doubt that people will come out to the streets. There is no question about it.
I agree with what John said. The Israeli element is also there. Israel has an unfinished job in Iran. They know that President Trump is not going to be in the White House forever, so there is a window of opportunity of two or three years. I don’t think Israel is going to lose or miss this opportunity. I don’t think that for President Trump, who keeps talking about a deal, that Iran also wants a deal. We know that there is no negotiation right now.
And I will remind you of what was happening during the two months of negotiations before the 12-Day War. You would remember that President Trump kept saying that the negotiations are going very well. The deal is close. “We are reaching a deal with Iran.” It even made many people in DC, including some friends who are Iran watchers, nervous. They even wrote publicly that maybe there is another Obama-type deal coming.
And we saw that it never happened. We had the 12-Day War immediately after that two-month ultimatum that they gave. On day 61, Israel hit Iran. President Trump gave Iran two months for negotiations. Iran did not accept President Trump’s terms or demands, putting aside Iran’s nuclear program altogether, curbing the missile program to a range of 300 miles or 500 miles, I don’t remember, and basically abandoning its proxies altogether. Iran did not accept it at that time, and they are not going to accept it. That’s for sure. Khamenei will not accept it.
I think there is an irreconcilable enemy. Khamenei, as long as he is alive, is not going to abandon Iran’s nuclear program. He will never ever abandon the missile program, and he will never abandon proxies. That is for sure. It’s not going to happen. When there is an irreconcilable enemy, the textbook answer is to eliminate it.
So, I would say maybe the U.S. or Israel may go for it. That will start an opening. Because if Khamenei is out of the game, then there’s a new opening. We will see what happens. Will the IRGC or other influential people make a different decision? I don’t believe anything is going to change. I personally believe that even if Khamenei is out of the game, nothing will change. However, I might be wrong.
I think if President Trump or Israel is looking for a solution, that can be a new opening, and after that, we will see what happens. But, generally speaking, I think Israel is also keen to see what is happening, and I don’t think they will miss this opportunity, and I don’t think President Trump himself will miss this opportunity. But we will see what happens.
Blaise Misztal:
Thanks. So maybe on that last point about Khamenei not necessarily changing anything, we have our first question from General Chuck Wald. He asks, “Would the IRGC support a Pahlavi presidency?” So, I guess, could you see a coup?
Mehdi Parpanchi:
A coup happens when a military force wants to take power. They already have it. The IRGC has everything. I don’t think that there is a potential for a coup against Khamenei.
Blaise Misztal:
A second question is, what percentage of the Iranian adults today are sympathetic to the mullah-led regime?
Mehdi Parpanchi:
We don’t know. The participation or turnout in the most recent election, which was a presidential election, was less than 40%. 60% of the people chose not to go to polling stations, basically. They did not cast the vote in the first round. And the level of the votes was so small that, by law, no president could be announced as the winner, so they had to go for a second round of the election.
Again, the official figure was nearly 49%. So, half of the population did not vote. I don’t want to judge their reasons for voting, because many people have to vote, because if you are a student, you want that stamp in your birth certificate to show that you have cast your vote, because not voting can be a problem if you are going to university and other stuff.
The number that I want to give you is an estimate. So, I don’t have hard evidence for it. I would say less than 20% support the regime, and I’m becoming very, very cautious. One can easily say even less than 10%, but I will say less than 20% really support the Islamic Republic, and they are not ideological.
Again, this is important to understand – the Islamic Republic has lost its ideological legitimacy. Those who are still supporting it have financial benefits from the regime. It’s not about ideology. They can easily change their support for the regime because it is based on financial interests. If somebody else is providing it, they will change their side.
Blaise Misztal:
John, maybe I could end with you with one final question. Another reason that’s often given for the U.S. doing nothing, or the U.S. not pushing for the collapse of the Iranian regime, as JINSA has advocated, is that it is better to have the devil that you know.
What could come next after a regime collapse would be worse. Given how little support there is for the regime, as we just heard from Mehdi, is that a concern that we should have that we could end up with something worse if and when the regime falls?
John Hannah:
Well, I’ve been through enough of this that, yes, it’s probably possible to imagine things could get worse, including getting worse for a lot of our allies in the region. Turkey is worried about a mass refugee flow, a vacuum, a collapse, that there is no opposition, nobody like Reza Pahlavi or somebody else who can pick up the pieces, who can attract the security forces, that it doesn’t lead to a civil war and 100,000s of people dying there and spreading instability to the rest of the neighbors.
So, there are all kinds of nightmare scenarios I suppose you can paint. But they’re pretty extreme. It’s just hard to imagine, especially after this kind of slaughter, that things could get much worse. You can say it’s a very weakened regime now from the perception of the United States, that our main interests are that they don’t have nuclear weapons, that we curtail their missile force, and they’re not spreading terror throughout the region. They have a reduced capacity to do that now.
I am somebody who does think it’s useful to think about the future of Iran and whether or not we can have more of a soft landing than a really, really hard landing that gets 100,000s of people killed inside of Iran and spreads instability.
So, I do think it’s worth thinking about that and building capabilities and assets with the Iranian people, which we should have been doing for the last several decades, in terms of helping the opposition and making sure that they would have fail proof communications and the ability to speak to each other and empowering leaders within the Iranian opposition and trying to lend some kind of coherence and support, as we did with Eastern Europe during the Cold War. And I just have a sense we’ve done a lot less of that.
But after seeing this kind of slaughter, it’s hard to come up with those scenarios where it could be worse. One might be if there was a collapse of this regime, and it was replaced by an IRGC dictatorship that’s also prepared to kill lots of people. That is one scenario where lots of bad things could come out of this.
I think it’s up to the Iranian people ultimately to decide what their future is going to be. I do think this issue of Reza Pahlavi and people who dismissed him for so many years, after seeing what he was able to mobilize, particularly on the eighth and ninth of January and the chants for him that Mehdi has discussed, I think it really is, if we’re thinking about having some kind of coherent opposition with a day after plan to help advance the interests of the Iranian people, the United States and the West, it’s worth our time reevaluating what our assumptions were about Reza Pahlavi and the kind of movement he might be able to create that could be a useful partner for the United States.
Blaise Misztal:
Thanks. Last question for you, Mehdi. What are you going to be watching for next in Iran? What are you keeping an eye on?
Mehdi Parpanchi:
Everyone, really, including me, is wondering whether there will be some sort of intervention. That will be a game-changer. Of course, again, it depends on what sort of intervention, what scale it will have, but I think it can change many things. Because, like I said, I think people will take part in that. People will be the boots on the ground, basically, and that can be a game-changer. It’s not going to be very beautiful. Definitely, it’s going to be ugly, because, again, the IRGC is not going to sit and look. We will have more bloodshed. But at the end of the day, that’s the path that people have chosen.
We see a lot of videos of the people who got killed. Now their families are releasing those video clips that say, “Okay, we are going out. I might get killed, but I want you to understand how much I love you. I’m doing this for my country.” So, when people were going out, they knew that they might get killed. However, they did it. It’s not that they were going out to the protests, and they were thinking that nobody was going to confront them or that there would be no shooting or massacre. People could see it. Despite that, they went out.
Again, regarding the funerals — this morning, I was watching a video clip of a funeral. They were basically laying the body inside the grave. And people were shouting, “Wake up. Let’s continue the fight. Wake up.” This kind of defiance is there. So, I really doubt that if there is some sort of intervention with bombing of IRGC bases, the missile program and other stuff, people will sit inside their homes and watch. It’s not going to be like the 12-Day War.
In the 12-Day war people were shocked. People never saw anything like that before. And there was mixed messaging. You had President Trump saying, “Leave Tehran.” And then people were hearing from Netanyahu that they were expecting people to come out [to the streets]. So, there was that sort of mixed messaging. And then President Trump said to the people of Tehran to evacuate. According to official figures of the Islamic Republic, 6 million people left the city. So, that’s massive. It can tell you that half of the people do listen to the outside message.
I said that the people answered the call of Reza Pahlavi, but in the meantime, no one should forget the impact of President Trump’s messages when he was saying to people to go out, and also, he warned the Islamic Republic that they shouldn’t shoot or they can’t shoot people the way they did previously. So, putting all this together, I really think that if there is some sort of intervention, that can be a game-changer, but we will see.
If that does not happen, I think people right now are grieving. People are in a state of closure, if you like, because many people have been killed. People are still grieving. But this grieving doesn’t mean that people aren’t scared, and this is not my judgment. It is based on hundreds and thousands of video clips that are coming out from these field reports. And knowing the culture of some parts of the country, which I mentioned, specifically the tribal elements, I don’t think that this is going to go anywhere.
And again, looking at the trends that we have had, I mentioned briefly that in the past five years, we had waves of protests. Every time they were crushed, the protests returned even bigger. The ability of a political system to kill stops somewhere. They are not going to continue killing 10,000s or 100,000s. Now they killed 20,000 or 30,000. This cannot continue. I really can’t see that any political system can continue with fear. They need some sort of legitimacy. As they say, you can lean on the dagger, but you can’t sit on it.
Blaise Misztal:
So, just really quickly, Mehdi, on that last point that you were making about defiance, particularly in the provinces, we heard reports of armed resistance, especially in the Kurdish areas of Iran. We also heard reports of some protesters, even in big cities, picking up some sort of weapons and clashing with security forces. What is the prospect for any sort of armed resistance going forward?
Mehdi Parpanchi:
Traditionally, Kurdistan has big potential, without any doubt. There have been organized groups there for many, many years. For the past four decades, they have kept their abilities, and most of those armed groups have continued their operation in Iraqi Kurdistan, but they can always come in. They can’t do it now, but if again there is some sort of intervention, there is potential. I have no information on it. I’m just saying that there is potential.
As I said, in Lorestan, Lurs are traditionally armed, so we can assume or anticipate that there will be resistance, and if the killing continues again, you can safely assume that people are not going to sit and watch. When they resist, then those who have access to arms will use them.
Blaise Misztal:
Mehdi, John, thank you very much for your time today. Mehdi, thank you, in particular, for all the important reporting that Iran International is doing. Developments in Iran are clearly an issue of importance to the region and to the world. It is something we will continue to focus on. We look forward to having you back on a future webinar. Thank you both very much. Thank you to the audience.