Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s latest appointments to Iran’s top security and paramilitary institutions are not routine personnel changes but a reflection of his priorities for tighter control over the institutions directing war and domestic repression.
The defining struggle in Tehran is not between moderates and hardliners. It is a contest within the hardline establishment and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) over power, patronage, and coercion.
The transition has occurred during a very turbulent time for the Islamic Republic, in the midst of a war with both the U.S. and Israel and only months after the largest anti-regime uprising. Mojtaba has also remained largely out of public view for months, fueling uncertainty over his status and capacity to lead. This vacuum gave rival security networks room to advance their own interests, but Washington should not mistake competition within the regime for a pragmatic opening.
The SNSC is the body that coordinates defense, intelligence, and foreign-policy decisions and its resolutions take effect only after approval by the supreme leader. The secretary therefore operates at the intersection of war, diplomacy, and internal security. Rezaei commanded the IRGC from 1981 to 1997, founded its intelligence unit, and served as Mojtaba’s military adviser since March. Mojtaba first named him his representative on the council and Pezeshkian then formally appointed him secretary.
The removal of Rezaei’s predecessor, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, is equally revealing. He held the secretary position for less than five months, an extraordinarily short tenure for a post usually held for years. Pezeshkian had reportedly asked him to remain and later acknowledged unspecified “differences,” exposing the friction between the presidency and Mojtaba’s emerging power center.
Zolghadr was a close ally of Ahmad Vahidi, the IRGC commander who played a central role in running the country during the war, while Rezaei has shown he is fully aligned with Mojtaba. Replacing one hardline IRGC veteran with another, therefore, reflects a shift in networks rather than ideology, placing the regime’s most important security forum under Mojtaba’s orbit.
The dispute over the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Washington and Tehran deepened that divide. Zolghadr voted in favor of it, while Rezaei had publicly questioned the agreement and later argued that Mojtaba had favored a different path. Zolghadr’s support for the memorandum made him less compatible with a leader determined to impose his own authority on the security establishment.
Taeb’s appointment is equally significant. He and Mojtaba both served in the Habib battalion during the Iran-Iraq War, beginning an alliance that later extended into years of behind-the-scenes schemes to influence Iranian politics. Taeb was sidelined late in Ali Khamenei’s rule after his removal as head of the IRGC Intelligence Organization in 2022, but Mojtaba has now restored him to lead the Basij once again.
The Basij paramilitary embeds itself across various sectors of Iranian society and mobilizes regime loyalists to surveil and repress dissidents. Taeb sharpened that coercive machinery during his tenure, a record that later drew sanctions from the United States, Canada, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. Mojtaba now has a trusted loyalist at the center of the institution most crucial for suppressing another nationwide uprising.
Taeb’s appointment decree instructed him to strengthen the Basij’s ‘intelligence network,’ expand its use of technology and improve coordination with other regime bodies. The priority is unmistakable: consolidation at the top and more effective control of the streets.
Ali Khamenei’s death was bound to trigger a struggle for power. For decades, access to political office, economic privilege, and security authority depended on proximity to him and his office. His death disrupted that system of patronage.
Mojtaba’s task is threefold. He must strengthen his own network, balance the influence of officials tied to rival centers of power, and sideline networks that flourished under his father and were opposed to Mojtaba. Rezaei’s elevation and Taeb’s return serve that purpose.
Washington should treat this reshuffle as a warning that Mojtaba is placing loyalists at the helm of the institutions that shape external and internal national security doctrines. This should put an end to Washington’s hope that pragmatists inside the regime can lead the country toward a different path.
The United States should reject bargains that strengthen the regime without verified changes in Tehran’s conduct. It should work with Israel and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf to deter Iranian aggression and constrain Tehran’s military partnership with Russia and China. It should also deny the regime’s repressive organs the finance and technology they need while expanding support for the Iranian people confronting the regime’s apparatus of oppression.
The accounts and materials focus on January 8 and 9, when anti-government protests were taking place across Iran and large crowds took to the streets in several cities in Alborz, a province bordering the capital. Security forces responded with live fire in several areas, according to witnesses.
Verified footage, eyewitness testimony and information gathered from several cities across the province describe security operations inside medical facilities, bodies left in streets and the removal of corpses in municipal garbage trucks.
Iran International could not independently corroborate every account or casualty figure because of communications restrictions and the lack of unrestricted access. The details in this report are therefore based on testimony and information from local sources.
Cultural sites turned into firing posts
In Fardis, a city west of the capital, a public library was converted into an ammunition store and staging point, while schools and mosques were used as gathering places for armed personnel, residents said.
Security forces were deployed at a traffic police building adjacent to the city's main cinema, using tear gas, stun grenades and live ammunition against protesters, according to testimonies.
On the evening of January 9, shooters took positions on the cinema roof and surrounding buildings and opened fire on crowds below, multiple sources said.
Forces began firing in bursts around 10 p.m. without appearing to select individual targets, one resident said, describing elderly men in the streets who had been struck by live ammunition or pellets.
Bodies were kept inside the cinema for two days before being removed, several others said. Security personnel also forced residents to delete footage they had recorded.
Gunfire from government buildings
Similar patterns emerged elsewhere in Alborz, where security forces fired from or near government and police buildings.
In Hashtgerd, a city about 70 kilometers west of the capital, forces used Kalashnikov and G3 rifles as well as DShK heavy machine guns. Some of the shooting came from an area containing the local governor's office and police headquarters, local sources said.
Twelve-year-old Sana Tosangi was killed by direct gunfire on January 9 after two bullets struck her in the back and head near government buildings, people familiar with her death said. Shooters were also positioned on the governor's office and a nearby shopping center.
In Meshkin Dasht, special police units used loudspeakers to tell residents that conditions were calm before opening fire after people emerged from their homes.
In Eshtehard, gunfire was reported near a police station and governor's office. A truck carrying bodies was later taken to a largely abandoned cemetery as the number of dead increased, local sources said.
In another part of Alborz, cranes were used to destroy access points to alleys, making it harder to move between the main road, residential streets and medical facilities.
Clinics raided, bodies found bound
Medical facilities in Fardis also came under security control.
The morgue at one clinic quickly reached capacity, while security forces entered another medical facility and detained staff members and wounded protesters. Witnesses said security forces shot some wounded protesters inside the clinic.
Security personnel also took jewelry and personal belongings from wounded or dead women, several people who described events at the facilities said.
“The basement of the clinic was full of bodies,” one resident told Iran International.
Another clinic refused to admit some wounded people, information gathered by Iran International showed.
Iran International's verification team used visual and audio analysis and matched architectural features across submitted footage to identify the dental section of another clinic as the location where some of the images were recorded.
The footage shows bodies inside the medical facility, including several people whose hands and feet were bound. Three people identified by sources as members of the same family were among the dead visible in the footage.
Bodies removed in garbage trucks
Bodies were also left in streets after the shooting, according to testimony from the area.
Plainclothes personnel traveling in vehicles without license plates left bodies in pairs at alley entrances and forced passing drivers at gunpoint to transport corpses, several residents said.
One said that when people contacted the municipality about bodies in the streets, an employee responded by comparing the corpses to garbage.
The testimony and verified footage reviewed by Iran International describe the use of civilian and government infrastructure across Alborz during the January crackdown, from cultural venues and administrative buildings to medical facilities, while restrictions on independent access continue to hinder a full accounting of the deaths.
The petrol was scheduled to go on sale from early Thursday at 872,000 rials ($0.47) per liter, Ahmad Salarifar, the manager of the National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company in Kerman, said.
The suspension, he said, followed a conversation between the provincial governor and national officials and was ordered so that a program on fuel consumption management and anti-smuggling measures could be examined further. Petrol will continue to be sold at existing rates until further notice, Salarifar said.
Monthly salaries for many Iranians are commonly put at around 200 million to 250 million rials ($108 to $134). Filling a typical 50-liter tank at the proposed price of 872,000 rials per litre would have cost 43.6 million rials ($23), a sum equivalent to roughly one-fifth of a monthly wage at the upper end of that range and more than 17 times the cost at the current 50,000-rial ($0.027) station-card rate.
Iran introduced a three-tier petrol pricing system in December 2025. Private cars initially received 60 litres at 15,000 rials ($0.008) and 100 litres at 30,000 rials ($0.016) each month, with any extra volume charged at 50,000 rials on a station card. The second subsidised tranche was later cut, leaving a total national quota of 110 litres while the two lower prices remained unchanged.
Plan halted hours before launch
Provincial authorities have not said how long the review will last or whether the higher price will be introduced later.
The suspension came only hours after Ali Asghar Zakeri-Harandi, the deputy governor of Kerman for civil affairs, announced that 204 filling stations in the province were ready to sell petrol at the “full refinery cost” rate.
The plan, he said, would take effect from early Thursday under national decisions by the country’s fuel headquarters. Neither the Oil Ministry nor the government has published details of the decision or how the 872,000-rial figure was calculated.
Higher rate far exceeds current charges
The Kerman announcement came less than a month after government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said the government had no plan to change petrol prices. She repeated on July 28 that no final decision had been taken on the station-card rate and that any change would be announced officially.
A manager of a filling station in Kerman told Iran International that the provincial oil distribution office called stations on Wednesday evening to say the higher-priced petrol would start from early Thursday at selected sites.
A second call later the same night said the plan had been cancelled following talks with the regional oil company. The manager said the reversal was linked to concern over possible public reaction, adding that security forces normally present in the province had been redeployed elsewhere and that the higher price was still expected to be introduced soon.
Sudden fuel price increases have triggered major unrest in the past. In November 2019, an overnight rise of 50 percent on the subsidized quota and up to 300 percent on volumes above it sparked protests across more than 100 cities. Rights groups documented hundreds of deaths in the subsequent crackdown, and a near-total internet shutdown was imposed for several days.
Provincial officials have not clarified whether the Kerman plan was a local pilot or part of a wider national test. Its abrupt suspension before launch has left unanswered questions about the legal basis, the method used to set the price, and the government’s longer-term approach to reducing fuel subsidies.
The work, underway in District 12, Baharestan Square and 30 Tir Street, is presented by municipal officials as a routine measure to ease congestion, carried out at the request of the traffic police.
Critics in architecture and urban sociology argue it cannot be read as a merely technical decision, and belongs instead to a long historical tradition: the use of urban design as an instrument of control.
When the city takes away the barricade
The link between redrawing a city's body and engineering its security is not new. Its most famous case is the great reconstruction of nineteenth-century Paris, carried out by Baron Haussmann on the orders of Napoleon III.
Until the 1850s, Paris was a city of narrow, winding, organic streets that let protesting citizens pry up the paving stones, throw up barricades and take control of their own neighborhoods, the world Victor Hugo drew so vividly in Les Misérables.
By demolishing the old fabric and driving broad, straight, uniform boulevards through it, Haussmann pursued two entwined goals: to strip the public of the ability to barricade the streets, and to ease the rapid movement of troops and heavy artillery for the suppression of unrest.
Later theorists built the insight into the foundations of urban thought. Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project and David Harvey in his work on the "right to the city" traced how space itself becomes a tool for reproducing ruling power and erasing the protester's presence from it.
Physical disarmament of public space
The replacement of segmented paving blocks with continuous asphalt functions, in effect, as the physical disarmament of the urban environment. Unlike uniform asphalt, cobblestones can be pried loose in a street confrontation, handing demonstrators ready material for barricades or for holding back advancing security forces.
Beyond removing potential projectiles, the smooth surface answers the operational needs of motorized units. Pedestrian infrastructure, with its uneven paving, varying widths, benches and street furniture, slows vehicles down. Coating these zones in asphalt creates uninterrupted corridors for special forces, water cannons and high-speed motorcycle patrols.
Eradicating gathering points
The repaving projects coincide with heightened enforcement against public gathering spaces in central districts, including the sealing of outdoor cafes and the removal of street furniture.
Pedestrian-friendly designs naturally create pause points where citizens congregate, engage in conversation, and form initial nodes of public assembly.
Converting pedestrian hubs into vehicular thoroughfares prioritizes rapid transit over civic presence, reshaping central public areas into channels designed for continuous traffic flow.
The removal of seating and outdoor dining areas reinforces this operational shift by eliminating physical spaces that encourage citizens to linger.
Reclaiming the street
Public thoroughfares have consistently served as primary arenas for civil expression during periods of political tension in Iran.
Highlighting the symbolic and practical weight of public space, prominent Iranian actress Hedieh Tehrani addressed security forces in a public message during the 2022 nationwide protests, writing, "My only way of communicating with the people is the street."
Similarly, exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi emphasized the importance of public thoroughfares during his calls for widespread demonstrations in January 2026, framing the reclamation of street spaces as a central objective for people.
Replacing historical pedestrian infrastructure with asphalt prioritizes security deterrence and vehicular velocity over civic life and urban heritage. By converting public gathering hubs back into high-speed transit corridors, municipal authorities reduce public space from a venue for civic engagement into an infrastructure designed to prevent assembly.
