Four-minute read
For anyone trying to identify the vulnerabilities of Iran’s clerical regime, its own security vocabulary is unusually instructive. Officials routinely blame foreign powers for Iran’s crises, but when they describe how unrest might become genuinely dangerous, the same words keep surfacing: network, organization, recruitment, neighborhoods, universities. Increasingly, those warnings intersect with another recurring name—the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).
Ali Aghamohammadi, a member of the Expediency Council, offered one of the clearest examples on September 29, 2026. Speaking about alleged hostile operatives inside Iran, he warned that people trained abroad had entered the country and established themselves in neighborhoods. Then came the revealing sentence: “This network is a large network. If this network is dismantled, all their hope will disappear.” He urged citizens to report suspicious activity and said the alleged networks were planning with the January uprising in mind. However, what is unmistakable is where he located the danger—not simply in public anger, but in its organization.
An unpopular government can survive discontent for years when it remains fragmented. Demonstrations can be dispersed; strikes can remain local; anger can dissipate. The danger changes when grievances acquire connective tissue—people who recruit, communicate, preserve experience between protest waves and turn spontaneous eruptions into sustained political action. Tehran’s own commentary repeatedly shows that this is the scenario occupying its security establishment.
When external diversions faded, Iran saw a marked rise in both grassroots demonstrations and the operational frequency of #MEKResistanceUnits. This dual escalation signals a clear transition in local agency, as the population bypasses past stalemates to assert a homegrown vision…
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) July 12, 2026
The loudest warnings
The clearest evidence may come from Kayhan, the newspaper closest to the ruling establishment. In two recent articles on September 27 and 28, it did something more consequential than repeat the usual denunciations of the PMOI: it mapped the organization’s historical strategy directly onto the January 2026 uprising. Recalling January 8 and 9, Kayhan wrote that when “the likes of the Mojahedin came into the streets” and drew others toward what it called the “overthrow of the system,” the events evoked the PMOI’s confrontation with the regime in 1981.
In the second article, Kayhan spelled out what evidently troubles it about that analogy. It described the old strategy as first “taking control of the streets” and then moving toward “sensitive centers” including parliament and state television—and immediately added that this was “the same thing that was promised to some people in January 2026.” Stripped of the paper’s polemics, the security assessment is striking: the regime’s concern is not protest alone, but the possibility that organized actors could connect street anger to a coordinated challenge for power.
The word Tehran cannot stop using: “Network”
On August 23, IRGC-affiliated Tasnim attacked a message by Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President elect of the NCRI, calling for an “organized uprising” and Resistance Units. But in rebutting her, Tasnim made an important admission of its own: it said the PMOI was planning for “networked presence and direction of domestic movements.” The article was intended as an indictment; analytically, it amounted to an acknowledgment of the organizational model the regime is watching.
NCRI Statement: #MEKResistanceUnits Conduct 150 Daring Activities and Street Gatherings in Tehran and 27 Other Citieshttps://t.co/6HqAnnVmkl pic.twitter.com/XCRUEED2Gy
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 7, 2026
The pattern became still clearer on September 6. Faced with videos presented by the PMOI as parades of Resistance Units or supporters inside Iran, Tasnim devoted an article to disputing their significance. It argued that many participants in one such event had been recruited without knowing its political purpose. Yet in explaining how this supposedly worked, Tasnim wrote that PMOI “bridgeheads” identify young people through social media, establish contact and recruit intermediaries capable of bringing others together. The article opened by asking whether the organization possessed “a broad network of cells and supporters” inside Iran.
Universities as the pressure point
Nowhere is the anxiety over organization more visible than in the universities. On state television in late September, Mahmoud-Reza Aghamiri, president of Shahid Beheshti University, described students as being at “the most sensitive age” and said adversaries understood that they could exert their greatest influence there. In the same discussion, Sharif University President Masoud Tajrishi warned that forces outside Iran would seek universities they could “provoke” into disorder. Aghamiri then reached back to 1979-80 and specifically recalled the PMOI’s ability to mobilize and dominate political debate on campuses.
This concern is not confined to one television discussion. On September 7, Mostafa Rostami, the Supreme Leader’s representative to universities, warned that after failing militarily and in the streets, the enemy was seeking to make universities “the starting point of unrest” and a safe environment from which to regain the streets. He specifically identified student grievances over economic, disciplinary and compulsory-hijab issues as potential points of mobilization.
And during the January 2026 protests, Tasnim explicitly accused a PMOI-linked student channel of concentrating on campuses and seeking “recruitment from among students.” It complained that the channel encouraged participation in demonstrations and circulated instructions intended to reduce the risk of arrest. Tehran repeatedly connects students, recruitment, communications and organized opposition.
The special feature of this era is that regardless of the fact that the regime in #Iran abandons or keeps its nuclear program, it will face an outbreak of uprisings where the PMOI/MEK and its Resistance Units will play their leading role.#MEKResistanceUnits pic.twitter.com/UXOrJWszc4
— Maryam Rajavi (@Maryam_Rajavi) August 5, 2022
The vulnerability behind the rhetoric
The regime’s security apparatus has acted on that perception. In March, the IRGC in Alborz claimed it had arrested about 75 people connected to the PMOI and other “anti-security networks,” alongside seizures of communications equipment and weapons. The figures and affiliations are official claims, not independently verified findings. But again, the operative concept was the same: networks capable of surviving repression and linking local actors to a broader political structure.
Despite its practical obsession with funding and mobilizing its security apparatus while repeatedly warning its loyal base about the PMOI, the regime continues to downplay the organization’s significance. Yet in a country where affiliation can bring severe criminal charges, reliable membership figures are inherently elusive. Size, moreover, is not the only variable that matters in political instability. Organization is a force multiplier. A committed, well-structured network can matter more during a crisis than a much larger, atomized body of dissatisfied citizens.
That is what makes Tehran’s own words worth studying. Its officials rarely sound most alarmed by discontent itself; Iran has lived with discontent for years. They become more specific when discussing the possibility that anger may acquire organization, continuity and leadership—particularly among the young and inside universities. Whatever outside observers conclude about the PMOI, the clerical regime’s threat assessments show that it treats precisely that transformation—from grievance into organized resistance—as a problem of a different order.