Three-minute read
As the ceasefire settles over the Persian Gulf, Iranian state media is working overtime to broadcast images of triumph. PressTV and Tasnim News Agency loop footage of launches from the so-called “missile cities”—vast underground complexes that supposedly enabled the regime to strike across the region and take the world economy hostage. Yet these very facilities were not thrown up in a rush. They were steadily expanded and publicly unveiled in the years when Tehran was dangling the prospect of nuclear restraint before the West, all while insisting it had no intention of building a weapon.
The message is unmistakable: the clerical dictatorship uses bravado to claim it emerged intact and emboldened. The subtext, aimed at capitals eager to return to familiar patterns, is that it is time for business as usual—fresh talks, eased pressure, renewed deals. But this is the same playbook the regime has run for decades, and the same illusion it peddles every time it survives a crisis. The reality is a rotting structure held together by deception, one that has repeatedly been propped up precisely because the world chose to look away from its decay.
#Khamenei Rejects U.S. Talks, Fears Concessions Will Crumble His Regime in #Iranhttps://t.co/Ev7k87roJS
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) March 8, 2025
A Leadership Exposed
In both the intense 12-day exchange with Israel and the broader conflict that started on February 28, precision strikes reached deep into the regime’s senior ranks. IRGC commanders, aerospace force leaders, Quds Force figures, and members of the inner circle around Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were hit in the opening phases. This was not random luck. The scale of infiltration, corruption, and institutional rot that made such targeting possible cannot be airbrushed away, no matter how loudly state television celebrates “victory.” Behind closed doors in Tehran and among the clerical elite, the whispers are already circulating: the system is hollowed out from within.
The regime’s own officials, not its opponents, spent the war desperately calling on their base to keep the streets occupied. Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, Police Chief Ahmad-Reza Radan and other senior figures appeared on state television and at staged rallies, urging supporters to don’t leave the streets. “All of our guys are ready with their fingers on the triggers,” Radan declared, framing the mobilization as loyalty while warning that any unsanctioned presence of ordinary people would be treated as enmity. These frantic appeals to manufacture a show of control exposes a system fighting for its survival.
The very fact that the terrorist regime in #Iran survives and thrives from war and destruction, has once again been proved by documents that have been leaked among the trove of evidence acquired by Iranian dissidents.
As servers of the Presidential Organization were taken over… pic.twitter.com/eITFzdS7SI
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) June 18, 2023
Weapons for Abroad, Fear at Home
Missiles and underground bases may project power outward, but they offer zero defense against the Iranian people. The Revolutionary Guard’s arsenal—ballistic missiles, drones, nuclear-threshold technology—is built for regional blackmail and setting the Middle East ablaze, not for containing the explosive grievances that have defined Iranian society for years.
The economy remains in free fall: runaway inflation, a collapsed currency, and basic necessities priced out of reach for millions. Billions in sanctions relief flowed into Iran in the wake of the 2015 JCPOA. Two years later, in 2017-2018, the first major nationwide uprising erupted—not because the money reached ordinary citizens, but precisely because it did not. Instead, it fed the Guard’s economic empire and foreign proxies. Crowds filled the streets chanting “Death to Khamenei” and “Death to the dictator,” exposing a restive society whose demands only intensified when the regime’s promises proved hollow.
Even amid the recent war and in the fragile days since the ceasefire, the same fear persists. Officials’ calls for loyalists to remain mobilized have been accompanied by private dread of “Forough 2”— a reference to Operation Forough Javidan, the major 1988 offensive by the National Liberation Army and the MEK, whose forces advanced to near Kermanshah and during which the regime saw the specter of its own overthrow. In this context, “Forough 2” signifies the regime’s fear of a second, more organized challenge: an organized nationwide uprising led by the MEK’s Resistance Units that could overwhelm the system’s decaying foundations. The regime that limped through this round of conflict knows its real battle is not in the skies, but on the ground at home.
The NCRI Secretariat and @Maryam_Rajavi warn: no more appeasement of the clerical regime and block all sanction-evasion routes. A timely reminder of Tehran’s sophisticated playbook to bypass global sanctions: https://t.co/s3mKfqRB9R”
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 28, 2025
The Recurring Pattern
This is not a new story. It is the familiar cycle the clerical regime has mastered: project defiance, survive pressure through deception and repression, then leverage the appearance of resilience to lure the West back to the table. Each time, the rotten core is papered over. Each time, the cost is borne first by the Iranian people—trapped between a theocracy that steals their future and a world that mistakes endurance for strength—then by the region set alight by proxies and missiles, and finally by the wider world whose economy and security become hostages to the regime’s survival tactics.
The propaganda machine is running at full throttle because the regime understands how close it stands to the edge. Its missile cities, its targeted leadership, its staged street mobilizations—all are props in a desperate performance designed to convince outsiders that nothing fundamental has changed. But the decay is real, the infiltration is deep, the people’s anger has never subsided, and, above all, there exists a nationwide organized resistance capable of turning protests into uprisings, and uprisings into an organized revolution for the overthrow of the regime.
The regime has been allowed to weather every storm before. The question now is whether the world will once again enable a failing system—or finally recognize that its weakness is not a negotiating asset but a warning the Iranian people and Resistance have been sounding for years.