Someone Else’s War: The Geopolitical Alibi in Iran’s 2026 Protests

“From a broken land, green refuses to die. Red tells the truth.” Title and Artwork by Roshi Rouzbehani.

Despite the Islamic Republic’s transformations since 1979, one governing reflex has remained: it rules through the language of external crisis—war and later supplemented by the nuclear file, regional conflict, and sanctions. Among other uses, these arenas provide the script for explaining away domestic dissent. I call this the geopolitical alibi. Over the past two decades of protest, including the recent January 2026, the alibi has operated through a consistent double move. When the state kills, it frames bloodshed as foreign-authored: the US and Israel are blamed for both the conditions of unrest and the violence itself, either as direct perpetrators or as the unseen hand that forced the state to act. When people protest, the same logic flips onto the crowd: protesters are recoded as infiltrators: foreign agents, domestic spies, or manipulated proxies. Either way, uprising and massacre are made legible as someone else’s war.

In late December 2025, as inflation surged and the rial collapsed, shopkeepers in Tehran’s Alaeddin and Charsou centers shuttered their stalls in a strike that spread rapidly from market districts to universities and across Iran, shifting from economic grievance to a crisis of legitimacy. As opposition figures abroad joined in, Reza Pahlavi called for coordinated demonstrations and urged people to occupy state institutions. At the peak in early January, the state enforced a nationwide communications blackout, severing internet and phone networks, sealing the country inside the regime’s broadcast frame as a lethal crackdown unfolded under constrained reporting.

Part I: Manufacturing the Alibi

The geopolitical alibi took shape through four moves. First came renaming; then war-framing; then rationalization, both administrative and sacred; and finally dehumanization. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei distinguished between the protester (mo’tarez) and the rioter (eqteshashgar). Within days, unrest became fetneh—foreign-backed sedition—then was folded into the narrative of the 2025 Israel–US war against Iran. State officials blamed the bloodshed on infiltrators—spies and terrorists—who allegedly hijack peaceful civic protests and commit “ISIS-like” acts. In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Araghchi claimed Israel was engineering “maximum bloodshed” to bait the US into conflict with Iran. He performs a double erasure: he replaces the state’s trigger finger with a phantom foreign hand, then casts Iranian lives as a US “red line” for war even as the Islamic Republic treats those same lives as expendable domestic targets. The state is no longer the aggressor; it is the victim on its own soil. Once blood in the streets is framed as a “strategic trap,” every bullet fired is repackaged as national defense. The alibi keeps its “anti-imperialist” branding precisely as it enables mass killing at home.

Alongside the war frame came a colder logic: administrative rationalization. In a leaked audio file, the son of Iran’s former ambassador to Australia, Ahmad Ghadiri Abyaneh argued that eliminating protesters “on the spot” would have been cheaper than arresting them one by one and building case files that invite international pressure. Violence appears here as efficiency and cost management. Others supplied sacred cover. Former IRGC commander Hassan Abbasi invoked Qur’an—“Fight them until there is no more sedition (fitna)”—to cast protest sites as battlefields and dissenters as divinely sanctioned enemies, while regime-aligned preacher Hesamoddin Haerizadeh called the streets “war zones” and urged forces to kill with “pure intention.” Dehumanization completed the sequence. In Rasht, a security official described protesters as drugged and possessed, wearing “Jewish amulets,” even “zombies,” a trope that stages infiltration while drawing on an older antisemitic repertoire of the hidden agent. The citizen is recoded as a contaminant, so elimination can be narrated as “cleaning up” rather than killing.

Part II: When the Alibi Becomes Critique

A significant body of English-language commentary, regardless of intentions, reproduces the state’s interpretive lens. Instead of treating repression as a deliberate domestic technology of rule, these accounts relocate causality outward—into regional war, sanctions, opposition escalation, or foreign infiltration. Sanctions do brutalize ordinary life—and, in the regime’s own hands, become part of the crisis terrain through which it rules; the problem is when analysis turns “sanctions” into explanatory cover rather than context. In that displacement, state violence loses intentionality and appears as contingency. The geopolitical alibi travels easily in English, where it can acquire critical authority and become the default frame even for critique. What follows are several modes through which this grammar reappears.

1. Infiltration as explanation: recasting street dissent as enemy action

Consider Hamid Dabashi, who mobilizes the language of “anti-imperialism” to validate CIA-adjacent rumor and invert victim and perpetrator. He argues that what is unfolding in Iran is not protest but an “Israel-instigated revolt,” led by “Mossad agents in the streets of Tehran” hiding among demonstrators. As evidence, he cites “Israeli flags”—an analytically implausible detail offered without verification. In a setting where such a display can be fatal, neither covert operatives nor protesters have reason to advertise it. The claim demands evidence; none is provided. The effect is straightforward: protesters are recast as infiltrators and street dissent is reframed as “enemy action,” implicitly legible as something the state may crush by force. Dabashi then extends the move outward, claiming Israel stokes unrest “to distract attention” from Gaza. Yet it is Dabashi’s own framing that performs the displacement: Gaza becomes the screen through which the Islamic Republic’s violence recedes from view, the state’s trigger finger is backgrounded, and the state’s violence in Iranian streets is narrated as someone else’s plot. Most revealing is the epistemic pivot this requires: a scholar known for anti-imperialist critique effectively treats Mike Pompeo, former CIA director, as a key reference point for describing Iran’s streets. This is the geopolitical alibi at its most complete: the state kills, the crowd is renamed the enemy, and responsibility dissolves into geopolitics.

2. Contextual Erasure: Sanctions and War as Causal Cover

A second mode buries the state’s trigger finger under a mountain of sanctions and geopolitical tension until the state’s agency disappears. In an Al Jazeera interview, Narges Bajoghli frames the uprising through a “catch-22”: the economy cannot stabilize without sanctions relief, yet sanctions relief is cast as unattainable without foreign-policy surrender. The frame recodes the state as the trapped manager of an impossible situation, so violence begins to read as byproduct rather than choice—and it takes for granted the state’s premise that its regional posture is nonnegotiable, while the costs are invoiced to ordinary Iranians. Instead of staying with the present violence Iranians are facing, the commentary pivots to the specter of “Iran turning into Syria,” where state violence becomes security and accountability dissolves into catastrophe management. Even her dismissal of Reza Pahlavi as a figure “elevated in the media” folds opposition back into foreign manufacture: dissent is never fully domestic. Similarly, a Washington Post analysis treats the state’s war narrative as explanatory context rather than as propaganda that does political work. “The Iranian state sees these protests as part of the ongoing war,’ Bajoghli said. ‘We got a ceasefire of bombs and missiles flying but there was no real end to that conflict.’” Once that war frame becomes the dominant lens, the line between domestic dissent and foreign attack blurs: the state no longer appears as an initiator of violence, but as a besieged victim responding under siege.

3. Proximity as Proof: Anecdote as Security Claim

The next mode asserts authority through the prestige of proximity. Writing in The Markaz, M. Nateqnuri adopts an evidentiary shortcut: under total blackout, “I heard” and “friends told me” are treated as proof. Yet no single observer inside an information vacuum can plausibly identify anonymous actors’ training and organizational ties across a continental geography, much less watch those claims scale up into nationwide diagnosis. Still, the piece moves from proximity to certainty with remarkable ease: “Friends who work in Tehran hospitals told me that people reported protesters and security personnel with strange accents, giving credence to the presence of foreign boots on the ground.” In a multilingual country like Iran, “accent” is a socially saturated and often classed marker—used to police status and belonging, especially in Tehran. To weaponize it as evidence of foreignness is to convert an existing social prejudice into a security claim. It even presents the internet shutdown as a form of intimacy—“strangely calming,” enabling presence with “ourselves and each other”—a striking aestheticization of enforced isolation during a mass killing operation. What’s happening here is eyewitness laundering: scattered, unverified anecdotes are inflated into a diagnosis of “trained agitators” and “foreign cells” at the very moment when even local events are structurally difficult to verify. The piece shifts causality away from the state’s machinery and onto shadowy outsiders, so massacre reads not as a planned technology of rule but as a tragic response to provocation.

4. Premature Diagnosis: Disqualifying a Movement in Formation

A fourth mode shifts causality away from the state’s machinery and onto protest strategy. It runs on a simple story: the regime is always ready to crush, but the killings supposedly begin only after the movement “changes character”—from civil dissent to violent confrontation, often coded as masculine or militarized. In this frame, massacre becomes the victims’ tactical failure: if protesters had chosen better slogans, better aesthetics, or “less provocative” forms, the state’s bullets might not have followed. The effect is a reversal of cause and consequence. State violence is treated as an outcome, while the crowd’s style is treated as the trigger. Under blackout, thin cultural cues are then read like forensic evidence. A Lori song, “Daya Daya,” despite its layered history—from World War I anti-occupation contexts to 1970s leftist repertoires—is reduced to evidence of “militarized nationalism.” Monarchist imagery and AI-generated Persian grandeur are read as a coherent far-right ideology, not as improvised symbols of a youth under siege, publicly insulted, and reaching for national dignity. By forcing a heterogeneous uprising into a global far-right template, these commentaries pre-disqualify it. They cue the reader to conclude that because the movement’s strategies, slogans, and aesthetics were “wrong,” the state’s violence was inevitable, and solidarity optional.

Part III: Breaking the Alibi

To stage the difference between outside analysis and some of the inside narrations, I use one case: Ali Shakouri-Rad, a reformist politician and former Tehran representative in the Sixth Majles. I single him out because his testimony is unusually comprehensive and aligns with patterns echoed by activists and former reformist officials inside Iran. He was arrested after the testimony circulated—an index of the cost attached to saying plainly what outside analysis so often relocates elsewhere.

Shakouri-Rad argues that the security state opened the uprising and timed its escalation. By using Tehran’s Bazaar as an ignition point and waiting for late December, which is the end of the academic semester in Iran, as students dispersed and universities closed, the regime attempted to stage-manage the crisis—vent pressure in a controlled dose and provoke confrontation on its own terms. In this view, the state is not the victim of a plot; it is the arsonist who lost control of the fire it helped start. “Loss of control,” in his usage, is not a vague description of spread. It names a political miscalculation: participation exceeded what anyone—including the security apparatus—anticipated, especially after Reza Pahlavi’s call widened the field beyond the regime’s expected limits.

He then turns the regime’s “foreign plot” narrative into a rhetorical boomerang. If Mossad or opposition “cells” truly operated across roughly four hundred cities and around nine hundred protest sites, the state is not absolved—it is indicted. A regime that advertises multiple omniscient security bodies cannot plausibly claim ignorance while alleged networks form and weapons circulate nationwide. Either the story is false, or the apparatus is incompetent, or it is compromised from within. His question is blunt: where were the security institutions, and why has no one resigned or been held accountable? From there, he shifts the frame from excess to method. Violence, for him, is not simply a response to unrest; it is a repeatable technology—something injected into protest scenes to manufacture the pretext for repression. He cites a doctrine from a journal connected to Imam Hossein University that recommends “creating killings” among one’s own forces and staging transgressive acts—killing a Basiji or police officer, burning a mosque or shrine, even burning the Qur’an—so that protest can be recoded as “riots” and crushed. On this view, the geopolitical alibi is not only a talking point; it is an operational script that generates the “evidence” repression then claims to answer.

He reads official speech through the same lens. When Masoud Pezeshkian repeated lurid accounts of “ISIS-like” violence on television without asking the only question that matters—where the security institutions were—Shakouri-Rad calls it an insult to the public’s aql, its basic capacity to reason. A state that grounds its legitimacy in the promise of security cannot narrate spectacular violence and simultaneously decline to explain how, by whom, and under whose authority it unfolded.

Shakouri-Rad’s interpretation is echoed in field testimony gathered by Mina Khani, a senior member of Hengaw Organization for Human Rights. In interviews she conducted across multiple cities, she told me many described a recurring pattern: on the first nights of protest, small groups—perceived as unusually coordinated and seemingly trained—set fires and escalated confrontation, then vanished by the second night. Among interviewees, a common interpretation was that these figures were provocateurs linked to state institutions. Even if the security state miscalculated the uprising’s scale, these accounts suggest the crackdown itself was not improvised. Khani reports widespread perceptions of prior preparation: pre-positioned body bags; coordinated laser targeting by one unit as another fired; plainclothes Basiji embedded in crowds before attacking from behind; assaults on wounded protesters inside hospitals; the internet blackout; and the use of the information vacuum to broadcast images of dead protesters in body bags and parents searching morgues. Whatever awaits independent verification, the consistency of these accounts across interviews reinforces Shakouri-Rad’s core claim: the violence bore the marks not of reactive “counterterrorism” against foreign forces, but of rule.

Conclusion

By framing repression as “reactive,” some English-language analysis strips the Islamic Republic of agency. It treats the state not as a political actor choosing violence to keep power, but as an organism responding to external pressures—sanctions, war threats, and regional conflict. It turns the regime’s foreign policy into holy script and geopolitical “tension” into a law of nature. It repackages causal displacement as “context,” and it treats the regime’s war frame—the claim that protests are a continuation of the US–Israel conflict—as explanation even when it is doing propaganda’s work. Once causality is moved outside Iran, responsibility shifts from the security apparatus that organizes the crackdown to distant policymakers, until the crackdown looks like circumstance instead of decision. The result is a second dispossession of Iranian citizens. They are reduced to geopolitical debris, and their protest is cast as an echo of global conflict rather than a struggle that can be understood on its own terms. To accept this alibi is to repeat the regime’s double move at the level of interpretation: it replaces the state’s trigger finger with a phantom foreign hand and rewrites uprising as infiltration, so that even killings in broad daylight become someone else’s war.