Since Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s speech in which he described protesters as terrorists, mercenaries, and rioters, the official definition of protesters has shifted across Iran’s state media and in statements by government officials.
In his speech, the Supreme Leader acknowledged the existence of protests inside the bazaar without leveling accusations. However, he drew a sharp distinction between protesters and terrorists: he referred to bazaar merchants as protesters, while describing demonstrators who joined the bazaar protests as terrorists. This distinction was widely seen as a religious authorization to escalate violence on the streets and to initiate deliberate killings.
Khamenei classified protesters into two categories and simultaneously determined how each should be treated. One category consisted of protesters whose demands could be understood and discussed. The other comprised “rioters” with whom dialogue was deemed useless and who could only be confronted through repression. He stated: “We talk to protesters… but there is no point in talking to rioters.” In other words, there are those we negotiate with and those we kill.
This separation between rioters and protesters, and the way demonstrators were placed into these two categories, turned street confrontations into a stage for naked violence. Regime institutions, foremost among them the intelligence services of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, did not hesitate to carry out Khamenei’s “orders.” Their forces began firing live ammunition at protesters as if on a hunting expedition, as described by one survivor of their gunfire. On the night of January 8 alone, more than a thousand people were killed, and the eyes of over two thousand others were gouged out, in addition to thousands arrested, according to opposition media and local human rights organizations.
Accordingly, immediately after the speech, massacres spread across Iran, especially in Tehran, where hundreds of protesters were killed by live fire, in what human rights organizations described as crimes against humanity.
Despite this, protests continued and expanded. By the time they entered their third week, there was scarcely a place in Iran that had not witnessed massive crowds, whether in major cities, rural areas, or peripheral regions. In all demonstrations, the chant was heard: “Death to the dictator, death to Khamenei.”
Following Khamenei’s escalation, Judiciary Chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i told protesters via the media that the time for leniency was over and that seriousness had begun. He ordered prosecutors across the country to show no sympathy or mercy toward them. Ahmad Reza Radan, commander of police and riot-control forces, who has a dark history of violent repression dating back to the Green Movement protests, threatened to confront rioters until the last one. Hussein Yekta, a commander in the Basij forces, called on families to prevent their children from going into the streets, saying: “If security forces kill them, do not complain later.” Yekta had previously blamed the families of protesters during earlier protests, including the Green Movement, for any harm that befell their children. Notably, Fars News Agency, close to the Revolutionary Guard, outdid itself and others by using the term “zombies” to describe protesters.
On the traditional opposition front, reformist President Massoud Pezeshkian, in his first official position, described protesters as “rioters” and “terrorists,” calling on security forces to take decisive and immediate action against them. He claimed they were receiving orders directly from the United States and Israel, alleging that the two countries had previously trained some of them and then sent them into Iran to carry out terrorist operations. He accused protesters of kidnapping security personnel and beheading them, as ISIS had done, aligning himself with narratives circulated by Revolutionary Guard–affiliated media.
In previous waves of protest in Iran, the Supreme Leader, the regime, and security agencies limited themselves to labeling protesters as rioters to justify violent repression. This time, however, they adopted the label of terrorism to justify killing them. At that time, Pezeshkian, who now accepts the term “terrorists”, had refrained even from using the term “riots” to describe protests, as he was preparing to run for president and needed the votes of opponents and the reformist camp, which generally supports protest movements. Even Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of Ruhollah Khomeini, the regime’s founder, whom the system has occasionally relied on to polish its image despite marginalizing him, adopted these descriptions in an interview. Meanwhile, opposition journalists and intellectuals, both reformist and moderate, described the protests as the second phase of Israel’s war against Iran. In apparent confirmation, Tehran’s municipality erected a massive mural in one of the capital’s main squares stating that the current protests were “day thirteen” of the Iranian-Israeli war that had lasted twelve days. According to one opposition journalist, U.S. President Donald Trump was orchestrating the protests from the White House, since when he threatened to intervene in support of protesters, it meant he was “seeking to protect the lives of his agents inside Iran.”
This updating of terminology used to describe or classify protesters coincides with reports of death tolls reaching staggering numbers and with efforts by opposition figures abroad to prepare a legal file accusing the Iranian regime of crimes against humanity or mass killing, whose images have circulated publicly.
Despite ongoing efforts by the regime and its repressive apparatus to justify unprecedented violence against protesters, labeling them alternately as terrorists or zombies, and attributing shootings and beheadings to them, the international community, human rights and humanitarian organizations, and opposition media have succeeded in debunking these claims and documenting the opposite. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, stated that it is unacceptable for government officials to label protesters in Iran as terrorists to justify the use of violence against them, and called for holding the Iranian government accountable for “serious human rights violations” during the suppression of popular protests.
Accordingly, it can be said that the Iranian regime’s use of the word “terrorists” to describe protesters amounts to issuing a license for unlimited violence against them. The deliberate broadcasting by its official and unofficial media of images and videos showing the dead inside black plastic bags is further evidence of its reliance on violence as a last tool to protect its existence. Resorting to violence to ensure survival in power can also be read as a sign of the beginning of its descent toward the abyss of an end, whether imminent or delayed.
One final point concerns the accusation that protesters are engaged in terrorist activities and that some groups have received training outside Iran. This, in itself, condemns the regime more than the protesters. If the accusation were true, it would demonstrate the failure of the regime and its iron security apparatus, including Revolutionary Guard intelligence, to maintain security and protect the country from the growth of enemy-backed terrorist groups internally, despite their claims of strength and cunning.
