As we approach the end of the third week of the Iranian Revolution that initially began back on Dec 28 in the bazaar section of Tehran as a protest against the Islamic Republic’s catastrophic economic policies, but quickly morphed into an overwhelming call for the abolition of the entire regime, it’s now become evident that the extreme violence unleashed by that regime in the past week (in which at least several thousand have been killed, but potentially as many as 12-20 thousand) has at least temporarily driven the protesters off the streets and back into their homes. The latest assessment from yesterday’s ISW Iran Update:
The Iranian regime’s extreme securitization of society and brutal crackdown on protests appear to have suppressed the protest movement for now. The regime’s widespread mobilization of security forces is unsustainable, however, which makes it possible that protests could resume. The regime has also not addressed and likely will not address the underlying grievances that triggered this protest movement.
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CTP-ISW recorded zero protests on January 15, which marks the second consecutive day that CTP-ISW has not recorded any protest activity in Iran. Various sources in Iran told Western media that protest activity has subsided in recent days in response to the regime’s brutal crackdown.
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Mobilizing security forces for long periods of time risks burning out and exhausting these forces. Senior law enforcement, military, and intelligence officials previously held discussions about security forces’ “exhaustion” during the Mahsa Amini protest movement.[12] The regime is also taking other measures to securitize society, such as sustaining its nationwide internet shutdown, that impose a significant cost on the regime.[13] The regime’s willingness to sustain these securitization measures highlights how the regime still perceives its population as a serious threat. It is unclear, however, how long the regime will be able to sustain these measures.
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Iranian leaders are reportedly moving their US currency reserves abroad, which indicates their lack of faith in Iran’s banking system and may indicate concerns about the future of the regime.
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Iranian leaders’ reported money transfers will reduce the amount of hard currency in Iran, which will in turn likely make Iran’s banking crisis more acute and inhibit the regime’s ability to solve its liquidity crisis. These conditions will likely exacerbate Iranians’ economic grievances that triggered the protest movement in Iran in late 2025.
One of the key points among the panelists being on the question of whether the US should launch military strikes to try and effect regime change — with the consensus apparently being that a failure to launch any sort of strike at this point might be even more disastrous (for the anti-regime Iranians at least) than even a token strike that is seen as ineffectual, as long as it is highly visible to those Iranians.
As Iran remains in a near-total communications blackout, three people in different cities described what they said were the biggest protests since 1979—followed by a crackdown so severe it left many seething with anger and hollowed out by anguish.
The accounts, shared in short voice messages over encrypted apps between 13 and 15 January, come from two people in Tehran—a journalist and a business owner—and an engineer in Isfahan.
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All three said the demonstrations on the evening of 8 January dwarfed any other round of protests they had seen or known of. One described the crowds as numbering in the millions nationwide.
A European diplomat, citing intelligence shared with Iran International, said their information indicates that at least 1.5 million people took to the streets in Tehran on Thursday, 8 January.
He said the number was lower on Friday, 9 January, as security forces were heavily present in the streets and, in many cases, began shooting as people started to assemble, killing people en masse.
However, the European diplomat who spoke to the channel believes as many as half a million people were present in Tehran on Friday despite the mass killing.
The number of people in other cities is unclear due to the lack of foreign diplomatic presence outside Tehran—all embassies are in the capital. However, their intelligence estimate is that at least 5 million people participated in nationwide protests on Thursday and Friday.
And the key to the size of the demonstrations Jan 8-9 appears to be the call put out by Reza Pahlavi:
Protests had already been unfolding for more than a week when exiled prince Reza Pahlavi called for coordinated demonstrations at 8pm on 8 and 9 January. The appeal, they said, did not initiate the unrest but gave it focus—“an amplifying and organizing effect”, as one put it.
Few expected such numbers to turn out, possibly including the authorities themselves. Security forces were present, but initially appeared unprepared for the scale.
That changed rapidly.
By the following evening, after a speech by supreme leader Ali Khamenei on Friday morning framing the protests as the work of foreign-backed agents, the tone shifted decisively. Security forces were deployed in force well before nightfall. Streets that had filled easily a night earlier were saturated with armed personnel.
“It was a massacre,” the engineer said of the violence that followed—an unprecedented massacre in Iran’s modern history. The business owner added: “Everybody you see knows someone who was killed, injured or is missing.”
Iran International reported this week that at least 12,000 people were killed in the crackdown, a figure leaked to us from Iran’s presidential office and the Supreme National Security Council amid the blackout—a sign that the death toll has grown so vast it has shaken the conscience of people inside the system, pushing them to let the number out.
And then there is the Trump factor:
Messages from outside Iran also helped drive turnout. US President Donald Trump urged Iranians to keep taking to the streets, saying “help is on the way”.
The three said the posts—and other public signals of support—spread quickly through private chats and family networks inside Iran, encouraging people to go out despite the risk.
What followed, the three said, was as striking and as sudden as the demonstrations themselves: silence.
“It’s been a cull, not just of bodies, but of souls,” the business owner said. “I can’t see the will to fight right now.” The engineer described an atmosphere of pervasive grief. “The city smells of death,” he said. “As if human ashes have been spread all over Iran.”
None of the three supports foreign military intervention. Yet all said a majority of people they speak to now openly wish for a US attack, seeing no internal path forward. “It’s certainly the prevailing sentiment,” the journalist said.
The engineer described near-universal support for that view among his workers. “It’s sad in every sense of the word,” he said. “Utter and absolute despair.” [emphasis mine]
In trying to assess the degree of public support the Islamic regime still has in Iran, there is this article that appeared in the Jerusalem Post (though considering the source, it could simply be thinly disguised Israeli propaganda):
A leaked internal survey commissioned by Iran’s presidency found that 92% of Iranians “hate the regime,” Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) Iran expert Beni Sabti said this week at The Jerusalem Post Miami Conference, as speakers at the summit focused on the widening gap between the Islamic Republic’s leadership and public sentiment.
Speaking at the conference, held in Miami earlier this week, Sabti said the poll was not aimed at measuring attitudes toward a specific government officeholder, but toward the Islamic Republic’s broader power structure, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
“It was a secret poll which said that 92% of the Iranian people hate their regime,” Sabti said, according to a transcript provided to The Jerusalem Post that was generated using Otter.ai.
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While the claim Sabti cited used the language of “hate,” recent reporting outside Iran has described a similar figure in terms of broad dissatisfaction.
In November 2025, IranWire reported that a poll conducted by the Iranian Student Polling Agency (ISPA) on behalf of the administration found “public dissatisfaction with conditions in Iran has reached 92 per cent,” after details were published by a presidential office communications official.
Iran International reported in November 2025 that a “confidential survey” indicated that more than nine in ten Iranians were unhappy with the country’s direction, describing the poll as prepared for internal decision-makers and not intended for public release.
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Sabti, who was born in Iran and later became a leading Israeli researcher on Iranian society and decision-making, serves as an Iran expert at INSS.
Yet another source offering a reasonably objective look at military options in Iran is the German news site DW:
For most of the last two weeks, Donald Trump has been publicly mulling over what to do in Iran. Amid a brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters in the Islamic Republic, the US president had promised "very strong action" before backing away somewhat on Wednesday having been told by "very important sources on the other side" that "the killing in Iran is stopping."
Such unpredictability is a Trump trademark, but with a US aircraft carrier on its way to the Middle East, US military personnel reportedly being pulled from key bases in the region and the temporary closure of Iranian airspace earlier this week, there are signs that some form of attack could be imminent.
DW asked several experts what the options are for the US in Iran.
Is there a viable military option for the US in Iran?
The answer to this depends largely on what the goals of an attack are, according to former US Marine Corps Colonel Mark Cancian.
"No military attack can stop the Iranian authorities from killing demonstrators. However, the United States could attack security forces, likely the Revolutionary Guards, in order to punish Iran and make a point to the security forces about their vulnerability," said Cancian, who now works at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
Most of the discussion rightly focuses on the potential problems of a military intervention, but one argument doesn’t really pass the sniff test:
What would the potential repercussions be of an attack?
These would, naturally, vary somewhat according to the form any attack takes. But international relations expert Mohammad Eslami from the European University Institute urges caution.
"Any US military action would likely produce minimal strategic gains while dramatically escalating regional instability, exporting insecurity across the Middle East and strengthening Iran's resolve rather than weakening it," he said.
Seeing as the “resolve” of the Islamic regime in Iran is already cranked up to ‘11,’ this is rather specious reasoning. Indeed, I would argue that the only objective worth the risks of an overt military strike in Iran would be actual regime change in which the rule of the mullahs and IRGC is eradicated, as distasteful as most on this site would probably see it. The Islamic regime has far too much blood on its hands to continue existing in any conceivable form, and the sooner the Iranian people can consign it to the ash heap of history, the better for the rest of the world.
