Iran International
Donald Trump’s renewed call for Iranians to rise up against the Islamic Republic has revived a question among some of those he is urging into the streets: after months of shifting US policy, can they trust Washington to stand by them if they do?
The question came as the United States renewed strikes on Iranian military targets and Trump rejected Tehran’s call for a return to the Islamabad Memorandum, saying an agreement with the Islamic Republic was not “worth the paper it’s written on.”
But responses sent by a number of Iran International viewers raised a different question: if Iranians return to the streets, can they be certain that Washington will continue supporting them?
Some pointed to the experience of the past eight months, during which Trump has moved between encouraging Iranians to challenge the Islamic Republic, launching a war against it, reaching an agreement with Tehran and again escalating military pressure.
That history began with the nationwide anti-government protests in December and January.
Trump repeatedly encouraged Iranians to stay in the streets. On January 13, as the crackdown intensified, he told protesters to “take over your institutions” and declared that “help is on its way.”
The repression that followed was on an extraordinary scale. More than 36,500 people were killed by security forces during the January 8-9 crackdown, according to classified government documents and other evidence, including field reports and accounts from medical staff, witnesses and victims’ families, reviewed by Iran International.
Trump also warned Tehran against executing detained protesters, saying the United States would take “very strong action” if executions went ahead.
Days later, he said he had been informed that more than 800 planned executions had been canceled and suggested that his intervention had helped stop them. Iran’s prosecutor general later denied that such a mass execution plan existed.
Then, on February 28, the United States and Israel launched their war against the Islamic Republic.
Trump again addressed the Iranian public directly. He urged people to stay sheltered while the bombing continued but said that once military operations were over, Iranians should “take over your government.”
For opponents of the Islamic Republic who interpreted his remarks as a commitment to support political change, the months that followed produced a more complicated picture.
The war eventually gave way to negotiations and the Islamabad Memorandum. The agreement dealt primarily with security and geopolitical issues, including the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s nuclear activities and sanctions. The political rights of Iranians and the government’s repression of protesters were not central elements of the framework.
That did not make Washington an ally of Tehran. The United States has continued imposing severe economic and military pressure on the Islamic Republic, and the agreement itself later unraveled.
But it demonstrated an important limitation to Trump’s earlier rhetoric: Washington’s immediate priorities could shift from political change inside Iran to reaching an arrangement with the government Iranians had been encouraged to confront.
Executions also continued.
Trump has not been completely silent about them. In July, he reacted to the execution of one protester by writing “Savages!!!” and shared material about another case. But those interventions were far more limited than his earlier warnings that executions could trigger strong US action.
This is the context in which Trump is now once again asking Iranians to rise up.
He himself acknowledged on Wednesday why doing so is difficult. Asked about the absence of another uprising, Trump said protesters “get shot,” while arguing that the Islamic Republic was growing weaker and would eventually become less capable of suppressing them.
The scale of the January crackdown makes that explanation difficult to dispute. Taking to the streets against the Islamic Republic can carry an immediate risk of imprisonment, execution or death at the hands of security forces.
But the responses received by Iran International suggest another calculation is also at work for at least some Iranians: what happens if they act on Trump's encouragement and US priorities subsequently change?
There is precedent for Washington placing limits on how far it is prepared to go. During the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June 2025, Reuters reported, citing two US officials, that Trump rejected an Israeli plan to kill then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
That episode does not establish that Trump prevented the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, as some of his critics have argued. But it reinforces the distinction between Trump's rhetoric about regime change and the limits Washington may impose when making military and diplomatic decisions.
Trump’s messages to Iranians over the past eight months have therefore contained two different signals.
He has repeatedly encouraged them to challenge the Islamic Republic and, at moments, suggested that American power would help create an opportunity for them to change their government. At other moments, Washington has prioritized a ceasefire, negotiations and specific US security interests.
For people being asked to risk their lives in another confrontation with the Islamic Republic, that distinction is not theoretical.
Trump is asking when Iranians will rise up and fight. The experience of the past several months helps explain why some of them are responding with a question of their own: if they do, how long can they count on his support?
While two of those players are building new lives in Australia, thousands of kilometers from their families, having received citizenship there, the Islamic Republic's football federation has summoned their former teammates to record the state's account of the same events.
Farideh Shojaei, the federation's vice-president for women's football, has confirmed that a documentary about Iran's participation in the AFC Women's Asian Cup will be filmed at the camp. She described the purpose as completing the tournament archive and setting down part of the history of Iranian women's football.
The outlet Football 360 had reported earlier that the project belongs to a body outside football, and that most of the players who returned from Australia have no wish to sit in front of the federation's camera and recount what happened on that trip.
A camp that does not add up
The camp has pushed back the start of Iran's women's premier league by a week, and the federation's explanations for holding it have not been consistent.
According to Iranian media, when club coaches objected to the timing, Shojaei assured them the players would not be put under any football training load, because the point of the camp was to film the documentary. Later, explaining why a camp was being held outside a FIFA international window with no fixture ahead of the national team, she said it had been convened at the request of Marzieh Jafari, the national coach, to prepare the players.
Jafari does not currently hold an active contract with the federation. She is head coach of Khatoon Bam, the club that supplies the core of the national squad, which has just come through Asian Champions League qualifying and now needs to prepare for a new league season.
So a camp that has forced clubs to rearrange their calendars is attributed to a coach with no active federation contract, and was described to the objecting coaches as not being about training at all.
The version the state told first
The documentary is being made several months after Iranian officials gave their own account of what happened in Australia.
In the team's final days there, federation president Mehdi Taj claimed Australian police had separated the women from the men in the delegation and pressured the players into staying and claiming asylum. Esmail Baghaei, the foreign ministry spokesman, went further on television, accusing the Australian government of "taking members of the team hostage."
While those claims were being made in public, according to one club executive, money was being raised inside Iranian football to encourage the players to come home.
Alireza Babaei, chief executive of Chadormalou Ardakan, told a Football 360 live program that while the federation was working to bring the whole delegation back, its general secretary Hedayat Mombeini asked Chadormalou to pay 30 billion rials, about $15,000, for the women's national team. Chadormalou does not have a women's team.
According to Babaei, Mombeini also mentioned a payment of 50 billion rials, roughly $25,000, from the Gol Gohar club, and named Sepahan of Isfahan, a club that at that moment was weighing whether to continue fielding teams at all because of war damage to the steel industry.
In Iranian women's football, 50 billion rials from a single club is not a sum to be waved away. Afsaneh Chatrenoor, the national team forward who plays for Gol Gohar, was the premier league's leading scorer last season. She is also the player who sat across from Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei a few months ago and asked the head of the judiciary to help her find work for when her football career ends. At the top level of the Iranian women's game, the contracts of prominent players are still measured in a few billion rials.
What the tournament was always about
For the Islamic Republic's officials, the Women's Asian Cup in Australia was never only a football tournament.
Several members of the delegation applied for humanitarian protection from the Australian government during the war and after the killing of Ali Khamenei. Some later abandoned their asylum applications and returned to Iran under pressure from security forces on their families.
In those same days, Iranian officials were assembling their own version of events. They spoke of hostage-taking and of players being deceived, while simultaneously turning to threats, intimidation and financial inducements to get the asylum seekers back.
Now some of the same players who returned after that pressure are to sit in front of a camera, in a project belonging to a body outside football, and describe those days again.
It looks less like archiving history than like producing a state edition of it.
This time the Islamic Republic is not only constructing its own account of Australia. It wants the players inside the rewriting.
Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei has threatened an even harsher crackdown on another uprising. Leaked Basij audio has exposed anxiety inside the security establishment, while authorities have identified gasoline, unemployment and livelihoods as potential triggers.
Security forces have already opened fire on people protesting over jobs in southwestern Iran this week.
“The economic crisis in itself is turning Iran into a powder keg,” Khosro Isfahani, research director at the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI), told Iran International.
Fixing the conditions driving the anger would require the state to change into “something that is fundamentally not the Islamic Republic,” he said, adding that Iran’s rulers are willing to “kill as many as it takes to stay in power.”
At least 950 people have been executed since the beginning of the year. Not all were political prisoners, but the accelerating use of capital punishment has added to a wider climate of fear.
The same pattern can be seen in a renewed crackdown on compulsory hijab, cafe closures, pressure on workers and pensioners and the deployment of police onto the streets.
‘Damaged fruit’
And there is little economic relief in sight, with fewer and fewer families able to afford meat, fruit or even dairy products.
Economist Ali Dadpay points to damaged fruit, once sold cheaply to the poorest or left for the homeless, as an increasingly common measure of what many families can afford.
For decades, the Islamic Republic has sought to blame economic hardship on sanctions, foreign powers, merchants or individual officials. But Dadpay says it is becoming harder to separate what Iranians experience in the supermarket from the decisions made by the state.
Inflation, he said, has become “the perfect indirect taxation.”
Instead of openly raising the money needed to finance its policies, Tehran prints it. The rial loses value and ordinary Iranians pay the difference every time they buy food, medicine or other necessities.
They have been made “poorer and poorer and poorer,” Dadpay said, and are now in danger of being “permanently impoverished.”
Middle class no more
The deterioration is reaching people who once considered themselves middle class. Pensioners are protesting. Even some government-linked companies are struggling to pay wages that barely cover basic living costs.
“Even the middle class cannot afford,” Dadpay said.
And winter threatens to tighten the squeeze.
Gasoline is already in short supply. Mahdi Ghodsi, senior economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, estimates Iran has lost 15% to 30% of its energy-production capacity through war damage and depreciation.
As temperatures fall, factories may have to shut down so scarce gas can be redirected to households.
Transport workers would be among those hit by worsening fuel shortages, with disruptions potentially spreading quickly through the wider economy.
‘Fragile calm’
Miad Maleki, a former senior US Treasury sanctions strategist and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), says the regime is looking at the same deteriorating numbers as everyone else.
“To keep paying salaries and pensions to roughly eight million state payees, including its own security forces, the regime has been printing rials and borrowing directly from the central bank,” Maleki said.
“Ejei’s threat tells you they know how fragile that is.”
Dadpay points to Venezuela and Zimbabwe as reminders that governments can survive extraordinary economic deterioration. Money can be printed, salaries can be deposited and the machinery of the state can continue operating even as the population becomes dramatically poorer.
“Yes, it works,” Dadpay said. But what it produces is “a miserable impoverished situation.”
Iran’s rulers learned in November 2019, however, how quickly the calculation can change. A sudden gasoline price increase led to spontaneous protests that Tehran crushed with lethal force.
‘Revolutions are not advertised’
Inflation is easier to disperse. It quietly takes purchasing power from millions of people without creating a single moment around which they can mobilize.
The danger for Tehran comes when that diffuse suffering suddenly becomes concrete: an empty gas station, a bread shortage, a missed salary, a delayed pension or another sudden price decree.
That is when, Maleki said, scattered grievances can acquire “a single address and a single date.”
But there is another calculation now: fear.
Iranians have seen what happens when they confront the state. Ghodsi said the expected cost of taking to the streets has become enormous because people know they could be shot or killed.
And yet, he said, “society is boiling.”
What changes that calculation may ultimately be impossible to forecast. Ghodsi believes it could take an unpredictable shock. Isfahani looks for something even less measurable: the image, death or act of defiance that suddenly turns private anger into a collective cause.
Mahsa Amini became such a moment in 2022. Isfahani said he has not seen an equivalent tipping point yet. “It’s never about number,” he said.
He quoted his late father: “Revolutions don’t advertise their time of arrival. They arrive.”
The Islamic Republic may not know when, or whether, scattered economic grievances will converge into another uprising. But its threats, preparations and response to smaller protests are already showing how it intends to confront one.
“This time you fight. Help from the people is on its way,” one Iran International audience told the US president, turning back on Trump a phrase he used during earlier anti-government protests.
Trump asked the question on Truth Social on Tuesday night while rejecting an ABC News report that he was seeking to bring Iran into negotiations.
“I’m not trying to force Iran to the bargaining table... I couldn’t care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement,” Trump wrote.
“I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing. They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?” Trump added.
Thousands of responses sent to Iran International pointed to a common argument: Iranians have repeatedly confronted the Islamic Republic, but many are reluctant to return to the streets without greater confidence that its forces can no longer suppress them and that outside powers will not change course.
‘People have been fighting for 47 years’
Several respondents pointed to successive waves of anti-government protests in Iran and the heavy costs borne by demonstrators.
“The people of Iran fought and rose up a thousand times beyond their capacity. Now it is time for other countries to help them,” one wrote.
“The people of Iran have been fighting for 47 years,” another told Trump.
Others pointed to protesters who took to the streets on January 8 and 9, asking when people who confronted government forces without weapons would receive meaningful assistance.
Some respondents said further negotiations between Washington and the Islamic Republic would undermine Iranians seeking political change.
“This government does not represent the people. Negotiating with the killers of the people is a mistake. Help so that the people themselves can finish the job,” one respondent wrote.
Fear of another crackdown
The prospect of another crackdown featured prominently in the messages, with people arguing that the capacity of security forces would have to be weakened before another uprising could succeed.
One described reducing the strength of forces used against demonstrators as the most important condition for renewed street protests.
“No matter how brave you are, if you know you will be killed by snipers, it is foolish to fight empty-handed,” another respondent wrote, referring to Trump’s previous calls for Iranians to protest.
On March 15, Trump said: “The protesters have no guns. And I know you’re a brave person, but I don’t think you’d be protesting. And so I think it’s very hard for them to protest. I fully understand it.”
Another person said ordinary people could not be treated as “cannon fodder,” adding that an uprising without a plan would be a mistake.
Several respondents said people would return to the streets when they believed the authorities’ ability to suppress demonstrations had been sufficiently weakened. Others pointed to disabling checkpoints and disrupting security structures as steps that could change the balance.
“Mr. Trump, continue the naval blockade and add a land blockade. Give [Benjamin] Netanyahu a free hand to destroy the system of repression, and then the people of Iran are ready to overthrow the Islamic Republic,” another one wrote.
Some also called for increased pressure on the Islamic Republic and clearer international backing for exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi during a potential transition.
Trump’s ‘help is on its way’ message returns
A separate strand of responses focused on mistrust of Washington and concern that Trump could encourage another uprising only to resume negotiations with the Islamic Republic.
“We are afraid that we will come out and you will negotiate with the mullahs’ regime again,” read a message.
“The people of Iran will rise when you do not negotiate with this murderous regime,” another wrote.
Trump had urged Iranians to continue protesting during demonstrations in January and told them that “help is on its way,” a message several respondents invoked in answering his latest question.
“When you said help was on its way, people came into the streets, but you sat down and made a deal with the government.”
The respondent added that if Iranians returned to the streets, they would do so “to fight and regain their own freedom,” rather than to advance US strategy.
Saeed Golsorkhi, an athlete and powerlifter, was shot in the knee during protests on January 9 and taken to hospital, the sources said. Concerned he could be arrested there, Golsorkhi discharged himself and returned home to continue treatment.
Security forces and Revolutionary Guards intelligence agents raided the family home on January 11, assaulted relatives and used pepper spray against Golsorkhi’s mother, according to the sources.
The forces bound Golsorkhi’s hands while his wounded knee was still bleeding and took him outside, the sources said. They blocked both ends of the alley before shooting him at close range in the head and abdomen.
Golsorkhi’s mother and his young niece witnessed the shooting, and he died in his mother’s arms, according to the sources.
Iran International previously reported on January 28 that Revolutionary Guards intelligence agents raided Golsorkhi’s home and shot him dead in front of his mother after he chanted “Death to Khamenei.”
Killings in Shahroud
Golsorkhi’s death forms part of a broader picture of the January crackdown in Shahroud documented by Iran International.
Eyewitnesses previously told that security forces killed at least 200 people in the city on January 8 and 9. The deaths of 22 women were recorded at Bahar Hospital alone, according to those accounts.
Other accounts from Shahroud have described security forces firing directly at protesters and authorities imposing restrictions on the families of those killed.
Iran International previously reported that Hossein Gharib, a 32-year-old athlete from Shahroud, was shot dead by security forces on January 9. His body was released only after his family agreed not to publicize his death and to hold a burial attended by no more than 10 people.
Brother detained, family barred from public mourning
Golsorkhi’s brother, Navid Golsorkhi, was arrested after the killing and held in temporary detention for about a month.
The family was able to retrieve Golsorkhi’s body several days later after agreeing to hold his burial without a gathering or public ceremony. Golsorkhi was buried on January 15 under tight security.
Security forces also blocked both ends of the street outside his mother’s home to prevent people from visiting the family to offer condolences, sources close to the family said. The family was not permitted to hold a public memorial.
The restrictions were not limited to Golsorkhi’s relatives. Iran International documented similar measures following the January crackdown, including bodies being returned at night, families being required to hold restricted burials and authorities preventing public mourning ceremonies.
Golsorkhi was a powerlifter and owned a clothing store in Shahroud.
People close to him said he admired the Pahlavi family and had an image of Reza Shah Pahlavi tattooed on his arm.
