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Iran Protests & Demonstrations

Iran Regime’s Leaders Speak Like Men Expecting the Next Uprising

Written by Mehdi Oghbai
iran burned ambulance january 2026
A burned ambulance in Iran, torched amid unrest after protesters accused the regime of using emergency vehicles to detain and transport arrested demonstrators— January 2026

Four-minutes read 

In early February 2026—barely weeks after the January uprising—senior officials of the Islamic Republic delivered a coordinated message that betrayed panic more than power: soothing words for a furious society, “coup” language to criminalize dissent, and repeated references to “catastrophe” and system survival. When a regime talks this obsessively about internal “sedition,” it is not governing—it is bracing for what it believes is coming next.  

Ghalibaf’s sudden concern for “the people” 

Parliament speaker Mohammad-Baqer Ghalibaf tried to strike an appeasing note—because he can read the street. At Khomeini’s tomb on February 3, 2026, he warned that “negligence, mistakes, miscalculation, or fear and surrender can have enormous costs,” adding that the damage would hit “the faith and worldly life of the people and even future generations.”  

That phrasing—“the people,” “future generations”—is not compassion; it is fear management. Ghalibaf knows the January uprising was not a one-off event. It was an eruption from accumulated poverty, corruption, humiliation, and unpunished killing. So he reached for a “national interest” tone, as if the same system that shoots citizens can now present itself as guardian of their future. 

His metaphor made the anxiety even clearer. He claimed that “stone-throwing from outside” is manageable, but “the destruction of the rails” and “weakening of the engine” are the real danger—an implicit admission that the bigger threat is internal fracture, erosion inside the ruling structure, and a society that no longer obeys.  

Ejei’s reassurance campaign—and his accidental confession 

Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei took a different assignment: reassure a demoralized base that “we’ve survived before.” On February 2, 2026, he asked rhetorically whether “internal wars,” “unrest,” “riots,” and “terror” are “something new,” insisting this conflict “is not for today” and has existed “since the beginning.”  

This is propaganda therapy for a shaken apparatus: the message is, calm down, we have always drowned crises in blood and carried on. But Ejei could not hide the truth inside his own sentence. Referring to January, he said the leadership called it a “great sedition,” even “a coup,” and then added: if “God” and “the people” had not “neutralized” it, “we would not have today.”  

That is not reassurance. That is an admission that the regime itself saw the uprising as existential—something that nearly broke through. 

“Catastrophe” talk from Shamkhani 

Ali Shamkhani, a senior security insider and adviser to Khamenei, used the word the regime tries hardest to avoid: disaster. On February 3, 2026, he said the armed forces must regard war as “inevitable,” but immediately pivoted to pleading language: “there is still time,” “complex problems” must be solved, and “one aspect of the right path is diplomacy and dialogue.”  

He went further, effectively begging for an off-ramp: if proposals are “free of threats,” “logical,” and “without arrogance,” he said, “there is hope to prevent a catastrophe.”  

Even when Shamkhani is speaking outward, the subtext is internal. A regime confident at home does not talk like this. It talks like this when it knows another domestic explosion—on top of any external shock—could push it into a survival crisis. 

Criminalizing dissent, rewriting the dead 

As the leadership braces, it also lays the narrative groundwork for the next round of mass arrests and executions. Judiciary spokesman Ali-Asghar Jahangir dismissed criticism as “baseless human-rights accusations,” and then offered an absurd inversion of reality: he claimed “rioters” killed “innocent women and children” in the street “to stage deaths” and “prepare the conditions” for enemies to enter.  

He then made the threat explicit: anyone branded a “leader” of the unrest—those the regime claims “came in an organized manner” and carried out arson and damage, including “religious centers like mosques”—will face “legal pursuit and criminal prosecution.” Beyond prison terms, he said they “must” pay compensation; and if, after serving their sentences, they cannot “compensate the damage,” the law allows them to remain jailed “until their insolvency is proven or they compensate the damage.”

In other words: punishment without end—economic hostage-taking dressed up as law. It is designed not only to terrorize society into silence, but to monetize repression: turning arrests into “compensation” revenue and forcing detainees and their families to bankroll the state’s security apparatus at a time the regime is drowning in fiscal crisis.

Even IRGC-linked media hints at organized resistance 

Even the regime’s own security-adjacent media is now forced to say the quiet part out loud: it fears the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran’s Resistance Units because they turn public anger into coordinated action. Bulletin News—affiliated with the IRGC intelligence apparatus—insisted that “the footprint” of the PMOI in the latest unrest is “not analysis or accusation,” then pointed to one example: “Naeem Abdollahi was a field operative and commander of the Resistance Units,” which, it claimed, means they “clearly” played a role in the “armed overthrow.”  

The regime does not amplify this language because it is confident; it does it to scare its base—and in the process it confesses what it dreads most: an organized resistance that survives raids, regenerates, and returns more prepared than before.  

January’s causes remain, and the regime cannot fix them 

Nothing that produced the January uprising has been resolved—because the regime is structurally incapable of resolving it. A system built on repression cannot deliver accountability; a system built on looting cannot deliver livelihoods; a system built on impunity cannot deliver justice. What it can deliver—what it has delivered—is a bloody crackdown. 

And that is the regime’s fatal multiplier. Every killed protester is not just one victim; it is a widening circle of grief and fury: parents, siblings, friends, classmates, neighbors. That makes the country not “calm,” but saturated—millions of mourners carrying memory, anger, and a demand for justice the state cannot satisfy. When officials like Ghalibaf speak of “future generations,” and men like Ejei insist “this is not new,” they are not describing stability. They are admitting they are still fighting the same people—and they know the next round will not be easier to contain.  

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