Rising risk of war and a major rift within the regime

What he says

An English translation of the talk, which is in Persian. It was made with AI from YouTube's automatic captions and may contain errors; the Persian transcript is authoritative. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

0:01 Hello. Monday, 10 Azar 1404, December 1, 2025. Ayatollah Sistani's fatwa has set off an earthquake in the pillars of the regime. In a written statement, he said: "I advise the faithful not to pray behind anyone who receives a government salary." He went on to say that his aim is to protect the position of the prayer leader from any government interference, now and in the future. Some have said that because this fatwa is in Arabic, it was issued for the Persian Gulf or for Iraq, or that Iran is not what he meant. But in fact, most

0:59 of Mr. Sistani's followers are in Iran. He holds a kind of comprehensive religious authority and can really be said to be ahead of the others, especially Khamenei and his cronies. In Iran we have more than 30,000 congregational prayer leaders, at least 850 of whom are Friday prayer leaders alone. There are 31 representatives of the Supreme Leader in the country's 31 provinces, and by one account there are 180,000 offices of the Supreme Leader's representation across the country. There is a huge army of state clerics, or court mullahs, who take money from the regime:

1:57 cars, drivers, bodyguards, and various projects on which billions of tomans are showered: in the seminaries, and in all sorts of institutions that have been set up in Qom, in Tehran and elsewhere under the names of various projects. All of these are in fact resources that the current clergy feeds on. Under Mr. Khamenei in particular, the takeover of mosque prayer leaders, and even mosque preachers and others, became more intense. You could say that the Shia clergy, which once took pride in being

2:54 separate from the state, and for that very reason could criticize and serve as a kind of traditional civil society standing between the people and the state, became completely tainted with government money and government posts under the Islamic Republic, especially under Mr. Khamenei. In practice, there was a period when you could say the regime was entirely clerical. Even now, the most important posts are held by people who wear clerical robes, even though some of them are thieves and accomplices of the gun-toting killers of the IRGC, the Intelligence Ministry and the like. In any case, this fatwa of Mr. Sistani's,

3:51 this recommendation he has made, effectively means that those who are believers, at least his followers, should no longer perform prayer, the most important act of worship in Islam, whose congregational performance is strongly recommended and emphasized, behind these court and state mullahs. This matter will not end here. In fact, any cleric who holds a government post and receives a salary or stipend has, in a sense, lost his standing of probity, or his probity is in doubt. Therefore one should not pray behind him. In the Islamic Republic, that hierarchy goes all the way up

4:46 to the Guardianship of the Jurist itself. In fact, you could say this fatwa of Sistani's has taken aim at the very heart of the Guardianship of the Jurist. Basically, the theory of the Guardianship of the Jurist, or better said, the heretical innovation of the Guardianship of the Jurist, in the form of a jurist with such sweeping and unaccountable powers, was Mr. Khomeini's dangerous innovation. Among the sources of emulation, from Sheikh Morteza Ansari to the present day, the absolute majority of proper jurists did not hold such a view. This evil tree of the Guardianship of the Jurist, planted by Mr. Khomeini, has borne bitter and poisonous religious fruit for our nation and

5:44 our country. It must be said that it is in the interest not only of the country and the people, but even of that very religion and its believers, for this evil tree to wither and be uprooted. But once again, the danger of war hangs over our country. In the past two or three days, on the one hand, the Saudi deputy foreign minister for political affairs hurriedly traveled to Iran; the Turkish foreign minister traveled there; and the Japanese foreign minister spoke by phone with Mr. Araghchi, the Islamic Republic's foreign minister. It is said that all of them carried the same message: that the Islamic Republic

6:43 should sit down at the negotiating table with America and prevent the looming crisis and the danger of war. On the other hand, Mr. Netanyahu, in a letter to his country's president asking for a pardon in the cases against him, gave as his reason that events lie ahead that these cases would weaken his position in. Once again Mr. Netanyahu is going to Washington and will meet Mr. Trump in person. The last time he went, the war began afterward, the 12-day war. It is also said that Netanyahu has ordered both the army and the intelligence agencies to nip in the bud

7:41 any move against Israel's security and not allow it to happen: any move in Yemen, in Syria, in Lebanon and in Iran. Mr. Netanyahu has also claimed that by the end of December Israel's highly advanced laser air defense system will be ready, and that major advances will take place in Israel's air defense. In Washington, too, discussion has heated up in political circles that the likelihood of war is high and that another attack may take place either before or after the turn of the Christian year. But on the side of the Iranian regime, the news we are receiving

8:37 is that a major rift has opened up within the regime. It is not only that, for example, a few days ago Mr. Rouhani, at a gathering of the ministers and deputies of his administration, took various jabs at Mr. Khamenei without naming him, including saying that exaggerating the country's military power amounts to treason. He actually said things that completely contradicted Mr. Khamenei's statements. And these are only people who can be said to be on the sidelines of the regime now. But, for example, Mr. Zolnour, the hardline representative of Qom in the Majlis and a member of the National Security Committee, despite Khamenei having said that the claim of

9:37 giving a letter to bin Salman and asking a third country to mediate negotiations with America was a pure lie, has in fact exposed Khamenei. He said that in response to the invitation to negotiate from Iran, America repeated its three conditions: completely abandoning enrichment, completely abandoning the proxy forces, and reducing missile range to under 500 kilometers. In fact, these three conditions of Mr. Trump's, which amount to demanding unconditional surrender from Khamenei, have come up again. Apparently, either Mr. bin Salman raised the idea that he was ready to mediate, or Iran, in writing or orally, did, and

10:32 Iran asked him to mediate, and Trump said this in response. In any case, this situation and the renewed escalation of talk of war have created a sharp split within the regime, even in its hardest core. One group believes that we must talk, compromise, back down, that we do not have the capacity for war; and another group, quite the opposite, strongly opposes this and is beating the drum of war hard. And Khamenei, in the middle of it all, is a frightened man incapable of making decisions. In fact, this trend since the 12-day war and Khamenei's defeat — he is a pillar that has broken, and the apparatus behind him has run into trouble —

11:35 the process that took place, for example, in Argentina, Serbia, or Tsarist Russia and elsewhere, has now come about in Iran too. This fading and disintegration of the regime and the state has caused these rifts to deepen. In any case, it is said that if a new war breaks out, this time the Israelis will target not only Khamenei and some regime figures, but probably the country's infrastructure and government centers will also come under attack. The dollar has reached the threshold of 120,000 tomans, and a collapsing regime that cannot solve water, or electricity, or gas, or air pollution, or land subsidence, or the problems of fires in

12:38 the forests, and so on and so forth, that cannot solve any problem and cannot help the people in any way against the monster of inflation, recession and unemployment, is effectively displaying a trend that in our contemporary history was perhaps seen at the end of Ahmad Shah's reign and the Qajar era, or in other countries, for example, at the end of communist rule in the Soviet Union. Hoping for the victory of Iran and Iranians.