Will Trump keep his promise? Araghchi seeks talks with Witkoff

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 Monday, 22 Dey 1404, January 12, 2025. First, I consider it my duty to offer my condolences to the families of all those who have lost their lives on the path of our homeland's freedom, and to ask everyone to take part in supporting the struggles of the people of Iran for freedom, justice and the liberation of the country, to stand with them, and, regardless of their own beliefs, regardless of their attachment to any idea, movement or tendency, to do whatever is in their power, as far as they can,

1:02 to support the fighters who have sincerely offered up their lives for the liberation of the country. Sixteen days have passed since the great movement of the people of Iran began. This protest and this movement, which started with protests by shopkeepers and bazaar merchants in Tehran, quickly turned into protests against the regime, and over these more than two weeks it spread to more than 500 cities across the country, including every provincial capital and every major city. In total, it is said that more than four and a half million or 5 million people have come out into the streets, which

1:59 is itself a record in the history of recent struggles. Of course, these are general estimates, and their accuracy will have to wait until the internet is reopened. Without a doubt, the leadership of these protests, at least since the end of the first week, has been in the hands of Mr. Reza Pahlavi and the team around him. I have no particular information, because I actually have no connection with this team or with Mr. Reza Pahlavi, but as an observer, when I look at the scene, it seems to me that his main strategy

2:50 is to bring people into the streets, into the main squares and city centers, and to seize government centers. In his latest message he also said that attacks on the regime's propaganda centers, presumably such as the state broadcaster IRIB, government news agencies, state newspapers and so on, and on the centers that cut off people's communications and the internet, are legitimate targets. When we look as observers, another part of the strategy involves speeding up events and finishing off the regime in the short term.

3:46 In fact, another kind of strategy could be to sustain the movement, advancing and pulling back, and keeping it going. But Mr. Pahlavi constantly emphasizes in his messages, he states explicitly, that everyone should come out and try to finish off the regime in the shortest possible time. His supporters have also pursued confrontation and clashes with the security agents, and the tactic in the first days, when Mr. Pahlavi issued his calls, was: come and take over the streets, block the routes the repressive forces use to move around. These recommendations and tactics were more like the chapter in Gene Sharp's book

4:42 From Dictatorship to Democracy on confronting a coup in the midst of civil struggle, such as blocking transportation routes and so on. Gene Sharp, of course, wrote this book in 1993, and since then struggles have advanced a great deal, many other things have happened and new theories have emerged, but his model was mostly Poland, where millions of people were present and a coup took place, and how one can actually confront that. The other tactics I have seen as an observer are mostly of the kind involving seizure and confrontation, which

5:38 are carried out against the regime. On the other side, however, the regime, based on the so-called strategy it had previously drawn up, which I have also explained before, has defined four stages for confronting popular protests, and on Thursday it made the decision to take the crackdown to stage 4, that is, the highest stage. These decisions are of course made by the Supreme National Security Council, chaired by the president, that is, Mr. Pezeshkian; the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, that is, Mr. Larijani, communicates them; and of course, under the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, all resolutions of the Supreme

6:35 National Security Council become enforceable after the Leader's approval. And of course, in many cases it is actually the other way around: Khamenei says this must be done, and then the Supreme National Security Council only carries out the administrative process, approves it and communicates it. In any case, the main elements of the regime's methods and instructions in stage four are these: the field activists, the activists they identified in the first few days, are arrested in the first raid; they detain them and take them to prisons. Their other measure is cutting off communications. They cut the internet, slow it down, shut it down, and this time they even

7:33 shut down international phone lines. They often cut phone lines between cities. Under normal conditions, they knock out mobile phones in some areas, and they don't keep even the domestic intranet, the national internet that the banks and Snapp and the like run on, open for more than a few hours. In this way they have thrown a complete dark curtain over the country, so that whatever they do, no one can report it, and people cannot even get news to one another, let alone outside Iran. As for Starlink, the Chinese have prepared a plan and given Iran a device and capabilities, which are being tested

8:28 in Iran. The point is that they can detect that a Starlink is, say, in a certain neighborhood, but they cannot say exactly which house it is in. So there are vehicles that go out and create jamming within, for example, a 5-kilometer radius. They create interference with the signal waves, so that in practice the Starlink signal either becomes very weak or simply cannot reach the satellite and connect. They have tried to use this tool they obtained from China to disable even the 40,000 or 50,000 Starlinks that are said to be in Iran. Another thing they do in this so-called stage 4 is give permission to shoot to kill, which

9:29 they also did with pellet guns in stage three, but in stage 4 they are authorized to massacre people with live ammunition as well. This is done under the command of the IRGC, which takes over command of the crackdown from stage three. There are other measures too, but these are the regime's main actions on the other side, which we are witnessing these days. Media outlets have reported anywhere from 500 deaths, as CNN has said, to 300 deaths so far, as Euronews has said, and some put the number even higher than this. And, as usual, the regime puts pressure on families, saying, for example, that they cannot hold burials or memorial ceremonies, and they even want to collect the cost

10:27 of the bullets that killed our children from the families themselves. They are carrying out these inhumane and savage acts, which have precedents, these days as well. In Aban 1398 [November 2019], when they likewise took it to stage 4 and fired directly with live ammunition, later, when the so-called investigations were carried out and the Aban tribunal was formed, the talk was of several thousand, even 4,000 deaths. Of course, this is my own impression, my observation of what is happening on the ground; naturally, further details require more

11:20 information. At this stage, in my view, what can help and secure victory is, on the one hand, defections from the repressive forces and their joining the people. Mr. Pahlavi had said that, through the QR code announced on Iran International television, 60,000 people are ready to cooperate with him. I think they should presumably put this force to use now: if they have recruited 60,000 people from the repressive forces, those people should come forward and defend the nation, and in effect a major rift should be created in the apparatus of repression. Another thing that can push the regime far back is nationwide strikes, especially in the energy sector, electricity, oil,

12:20 gasoline, as well as in road transport, trucks, buses, the metro and so on, both intercity and within cities. That would bring the whole country to a standstill, provided the strike continues. Because right now, under these conditions, the country is basically shut down everywhere and is like a war-torn country, but the regime will try, after the massacre, to reopen the country and get it moving. Here, a strike, if it continues for one or two months, will force the regime to surrender. Another point, which many Iranians raise, and which Mr. Pahlavi also said at the end of his latest statement, that help is on the way and victory is near, and so on, is Mr. Trump's words, who so

13:19 far has said four times that if the Islamic Republic resorts to killing, America will stop it. A statement that it would deal with it, a statement on the strength of which people also felt less at risk, and more of them came out into the streets. Now the question before Mr. Trump is: why have you done nothing so far? Seven Iranian activists, from Ms. Ebadi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf to Ms. Nazanin Ansari and Mr. Pashaei, Mr. Mohtadi, Mr. Yazdan Shohdaei and Javad Akbarein, have written a letter addressed to Mr. Trump. These seven people represent a broad spectrum, and they told him exactly this: you must

14:13 react; you must keep the promise you made to the people. The New York Times had written that the Pentagon has prepared several options and put them on Mr. Trump's table. We don't know what they contain, but it is said that at least one of the options includes striking Khamenei, the IRGC leadership and IRGC centers across the country, which in my view is a solution that would actually break open the regime and its command structure, scatter it, and could help the people achieve victory. But on the other hand, Mr. Araghchi announced today that he is ready to talk with Mr. Witkoff, and various messages are coming out of the White House,

15:08 including from its spokesperson, who said that Trump is also considering the option of negotiations. In any case, we still don't know what Mr. Trump will do about the moral responsibility he bears because of the promise he made to the people of Iran. The European countries, of course, have condemned it, most of them, all of them, and the President of the European Parliament, Ms. Metsola, has also announced that representatives and diplomats of the Islamic Republic have been banned from entering all European Parliament buildings. With hope for the victory of Iran and Iranians.