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Tehran’s leaders have spent the past weeks broadcasting defiance abroad—refusing to bend after the snapback of UN sanctions and a bruising 12-day confrontation—yet their own words point elsewhere for the true danger. Senior officials and regime media keep naming an “enemy within,” an organized resistance with nationwide reach that, in their telling, can flip any protest into a challenge to power. The contradiction is not a slip; it is a window into the hierarchy of threats that the clerical state actually fears.
The enemy they name
On September 27, 2025, at the sixth ceremony honoring the regime’s war veterans in Tehran, Judiciary Chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei framed the early post-1979 period not just as a war with Iraq but as “an internal war,” openly acknowledging a two-front struggle. For decades the regime has tried to cast the PMOI as an Iraqi extension, but Mohseni-Ejei’s words concede something different: a real battle was fought inside Iran. That acknowledgment is historically accurate, but his purpose in voicing it now is political—reminding a shaken base that the system once survived an internal war and urging them not to lose faith amid today’s crises.
Former IRGC field commander Ahmad Gholampour was even more explicit. In a broadcast dated September 21, 2025, he said the PMOI “turned Tehran into a battlefield,” locating the regime’s key risk in the capital rather than along foreign fronts. His account of the closing phase of the 1980s war—culminating in Ruhollah Khomeini’s admission that he had “drunk the poison chalice”—is presented as a tale of pressure that forced strategic retreat.
Iran: The Nationwide Uprising and the Role of MEK Resistance Unitshttps://t.co/3E0d9NG8pQ
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) April 28, 2023
Meanwhile, IRGC commander-turned-MP Esmail Kowsari used the war’s anniversary to remind the regime’s demoralized base how narrowly the clerics escaped a dangerous fate. Speaking on state TV on September 22, he recalled the PMOI’s summer 1988 offensive: “they reached Islamabad… they were advancing through the Chahar-Zabar defile” — a push that, he said, forced him to scramble for weapons and coordinate emergency defenses with fellow commanders. His rhetorical question, “We accepted Resolution 598—so why did they attack afterward?,” carried the same warning: the organized resistance did not fold when the regime thought the war was over. In Kowsari’s telling, the enemy’s persistence turned supposed de-escalation into another moment of existential peril.
On September 30, Mashregh News claimed that PMOI-linked media and accounts abroad were pushing narratives around Zahedan’s “Bloody Friday” anniversary to inflame sectarian tension, alleging orchestration from Albania and France. The aim is to discredit dissent as foreign-made. Yet the effect is double-edged: by repeatedly tying protests to the PMOI, the regime itself acknowledges the movement’s influence inside Iran—and at the same time seizes on such occasions to pressure host countries, portraying them as enablers of unrest.
The regime’s nuclear predicament also traces back to a disclosure it could never erase. As Hamshahri Online noted on September 28, “what brought Iran’s nuclear case to the level of international contention was the summer 2002 disclosure: the [PMOI] revealed the Natanz enrichment plant and the Arak heavy water project, and from then on the issue fell under IAEA oversight.” That single moment, the paper admits, pulled a clandestine program into global view and set in motion the chain of investigations, reports, and ultimately sanctions that followed.
Khamenei’s Friday Leaders Reveal Deepening Fear of the @Mojahedineng https://t.co/AbATaTeBED
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) July 20, 2025
Defiance abroad, alarm at home
Khamenei’s defiance in the face of sanctions, military strikes, and international isolation is not a show of indifference to pressure; it is a calculation rooted in the regime’s real threat perception. He knows that sanctions can cripple the economy, but not by themselves bring the clerical state down. He knows, too, that after the costly experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, no foreign power is prepared to launch a ground invasion of Iran. Without such a move, regime change from above remains impossible.
The risk that keeps him awake is different. It lies in the streets of Iran: an explosive society where grievances pile up daily, and where resistance networks—the PMOI-led Resistance Units—are positioned to channel spontaneous anger into organized confrontation. The regime’s own officials give away this fear when they invoke phrases like “internal war” and “battlefield Tehran.” These are not ornamental metaphors; they are admissions that the danger comes from within.
Every flare-up reinforces the point. When anniversaries of massacres such as Zahedan’s “Bloody Friday” approach, state media scramble to brand online agitation as foreign-made, even while conceding that hashtags and narratives have traction inside the country. When commanders recall the summer of 1988, their language is less about glorifying past victory than about reminding a disheartened base that survival once hung by a thread against domestic adversaries who refused to fold even after a ceasefire.
Oct 7- Mehdi Rahimabadi, Khamenei’s rep in Birjand: “Parents have a very serious responsibility to make sure their children don’t end up in the traps set by the infiltrators and the #MEK.”
9/10https://t.co/o8bkPV0mXk pic.twitter.com/gYK7s7hcul— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) October 9, 2022
The regime’s Supreme Leader treats outside pressure as manageable precisely because the decisive front is inside. Sanctions can be endured, missiles can be replaced, but a society that ignites under the direction of an organized opposition could sweep away the system itself.
That is why the regime narrates history as an “internal war,” why it casts Tehran itself as the battlefield, and why it invests in repression, surveillance, and narrative control above all. The contradiction between defiance abroad and alarm at home is not accidental. It is the clerical state’s survival strategy: deny vulnerability to outsiders, while conditioning its base to fear and mobilize against the enemy within.
The result is a politics of permanent siege. The more Khamenei insists that foreign pressure cannot break Iran, the more clearly he signals that only one force could—the combination of a restless society and an organized resistance able to turn sparks into fire.