Protests spread to more than 100 cities and begin to deepen across social classes

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. It is Friday, 12 Dey 1404, 2 January 2026. Although the regime shut down universities and schools, moved shops to non-in-person operation, and declared a five- or six-day holiday, which it apparently intends to extend again, and although it has also started making payoffs to shopkeepers and others in the hope of calming people down, the protests have spread to various cities over the past days. Today, Friday, is the sixth day of the protests, and so far they have reached more than 100 cities in 20 provinces of the country.

1:00 Also today, at the funeral in Kuhdasht of Amir Hessam Khodayari, the 21-year-old protester who was killed yesterday, there was a large turnout of people. His father explicitly declared that his son was not a Basiji. Fars News Agency had made that claim and was forced to retract it, and it did retract its claim that he was a Basiji. When people arrived in Kuhdasht and saw that agents had surrounded the cemetery, they charged at them and the agents fled. In Marvdasht, in Fars province, at the funeral of

1:55 Khodadad Shirvani, who was killed yesterday, people pulled down a security camera and, in effect, "blinded the eye of the devil." This is a worthy action and tactic. During the Mahsa revolution, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, it was one of the things on activists' agenda: under the name "blinding the eye of the devil," they disabled face-recognition and security cameras. It is very necessary and important that activists, especially those on the ground, whose presence is essential for driving the struggle forward, are able to avoid being identified. By

2:55 disabling the cameras, or very simply by wearing a mask or other means, every possible effort must be made so that the active organizers and the activists on the ground are not identified, because the regime's method is to use these identifications later to go and arrest them. In Fuladshahr in Isfahan, Dariush Ansari Bakhtiarvand, who was killed by direct gunfire on the night before last, 10 Dey, was buried today. All of these ceremonies are accompanied by people's sharp and fierce slogans against Khamenei, against the dictator, and calling for the overthrow of the regime. It is estimated that so far the regime has killed more than

3:56 8 people, and in this way it is trying to create an atmosphere of security crackdown and repression. In all the demonstrations in more than 100 cities of the country, what is interesting is that although economic slogans are among the people's slogans, an issue that everyone shares, the common pain of all the people, so that even the police officer standing there suffers from inflation, poverty and high prices, the people's slogans have not stopped there and have quickly taken on a political direction: "Death to the dictator," "Death to Khamenei," "No to Gaza, no to Lebanon," "Pahlavi

4:58 will return," "Death to Khamenei," slogans that all carry the tone of rejecting the Islamic Republic system and express the general public's demand for an end to the system of the Guardianship of the Jurist. In Shiraz tonight, by honking car horns and chanting slogans, people added another tactic: making sounds and doing things in which the general public can easily take part. In Latin American countries, for example, besides honking horns, people banged on pots and pans, while at the same time showing that they were empty,

5:58 and with these actions they also showed that they were making shared sounds and rhythms together with whistles and car horns. Tactics of this kind, in which participation is very simple and young and old alike can easily take part, create the possibility for people's presence to expand, so that we reach large numbers. Whenever we reach 3.5 percent of the country's adult population, which in Iran comes to one million 800 thousand people, then, as civil resistance studies show, the number quickly rises to two or three million, which is then enough to bring down any regime.

6:55 In Bandar Abbas we saw another initiative: some people came with their families, wives and children, to be present. This in fact makes repression very difficult and increases the size of the crowd, and beyond that it practically raises the level of participation once again. So it can be said that the point raised when these protests began in Tehran, namely geographic and territorial expansion across the country, especially going to small towns in the far corners of the country, is being carried out, and the use of

7:53 creative tactics that make participation easy can play a role in the horizontal expansion of the protests. But the second expansion is expansion in depth. That is, the protests that began with shopkeepers and the bazaar were immediately supported by students through their statements and gatherings. They need to spread to other strata of the people, to different social groups such as teachers, lawyers, journalists, healthcare and medical staff, retirees, university professors and various sectors of society, drivers, and those working in the energy and banking sectors, and so on,

8:49 and this can begin with statements. Because when the movement goes deeper into different social groups and they declare their support and join the protests, these groups become prepared to stop working. In fact, as has been said many times, protest alone has never brought down a regime. What forms the second pillar, which empowers the movement and truly forces the regime to surrender and retreat, is paralyzing the regime, whose best-known tactics are strikes and widespread boycotts of the regime. These are tactics in which people's participation

9:48 is also simpler and carries no danger, and this second pillar can practically give the upper hand against the regime. Especially when strikes become widespread and reach sectors such as transportation, energy and banking, which exist all over the country, they bring everything to a halt. So far, teachers' trade associations in some provinces, such as Bushehr, Fars and others, have issued statements supporting this movement. In Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, members of the bar association protested the association's inaction and resigned, and 17 well-known civil activists also

10:43 issued a statement in which they called for the removal of the illegitimate Islamic Republic system and warned the security and police forces that they must not repress the people. The names of well-known figures such as Jafar Panahi, Narges Mohammadi, Sedigheh Vasmaghi, Mostafa Tajzadeh, Abolfazl Ghadyani, Mostafa Malekian, Mohammad Rasoulof and others can be seen among these 17 people. In other parts of Iran's civil society, one can mention today's remarks by Molavi Abdolhamid, of the Sunni clergy, at the Friday prayer in Zahedan, where he said explicitly that people have the right to hold peaceful protests, and

11:42 after the prayer, the people of Zahedan, with slogans of "Death to Khamenei," "Death to the dictator" and the like, in effect answered the call for peaceful protest that Molavi Abdolhamid had raised. So reaching out to different social groups and not remaining only with the tactic of protest is an important matter, and what it requires is for different social groups and various civil institutions to enter the arena, because their joining lays the groundwork for turning this solidarity, after the statements, into stopping work. But the other important event today was Mr. Trump, the President

12:39 of the United States, who wrote on his social network Truth Social that if the Iranian regime shoots peaceful protesters and violently kills them, which is their custom, the United States will come to the rescue of the people. It is a message that, how should I put it, was drafted fairly precisely and in a calculated way. This message, which is in fact meant to reassure the Iranian people, met with reactions from various regime officials, from the Foreign Ministry spokesman to Larijani, Ghalibaf, Araghchi, Shamkhani and others, who very anxiously both threatened America and said that this is foreign interference

13:34 in our country, and the like. The regime's problem in this movement is that while it has always had the repression of the people on its agenda, it now also fears war. That is, if a war like the 12-day war, in which they felt a heavy blow, were to happen during popular protests, and senior regime leaders were killed again, then it could very quickly push the movement to higher stages. For this reason, severe disputes have also broken out inside the regime. In just these three or four days they have held many meetings, because part of the regime's people firmly believe that it was Khamenei's wrong policies that brought the country to this point, and

14:30 they in fact want either these policies to change or Khamenei himself to be replaced. These disputes can benefit the people, and rest assured that the people's stormy movement will deepen the rift within the regime. Meanwhile, the Iranian people's movement has also been reflected in the world's media. Outlets such as Euronews, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and many other media, plus dozens of others whose names would take too long to mention, have followed Iran's issues closely, carrying news and sometimes analyses and commentary. In hope of victory for Iran and Iranians.