The unprecedented brutal crackdown on recent protests in Iran suggests Tehran's rulers are no longer attempting to govern a discontented society but are in open conflict with it.
Iran's foreign minister said the country was prepared to show no restraint in retaliating to any military attack and mocked Europe about its standoff with the United States over President Donald Trump's push to control Greenland.
The thank-you note from US President Donald Trump to Iran’s leadership for halting what he described as planned mass executions reveals much about his politics, but more about the rulers in Tehran who have canonised deception as a political instrument.

Iranians abroad staged at least 168 protests across 30 countries and 73 cities, turning the uprising inside Iran into a global wave of demonstrations that surged after internet shutdowns.

A serving official at Iran’s Interior Ministry has defected from his post and joined the protests, urging US President Donald Trump to intervene against the Islamic Republic, he said in a message to Iran International.
Iran is ramping up its control of domestic cyberspace with a closed new state-run intranet, according to a US-based advocacy group, after a nationwide internet blackout cloaked the deadliest crackdown on protests in nearly half a century.
After returning from Iran to Canada, Mona Bolouri said the unity and size of protests she witnessed firsthand convinced her that the Islamic Republic was doomed after she left the country a day before a deadly crackdown.
Iranians calling Iran International’s phone-in said security forces killed and removed bodies; some reported families pressured into quiet burials and Arabic-speaking forces on the streets, as the crackdown pushed protests to window chants and fueled calls for foreign backing.

I am writing this from Tehran after three days of trying to find a way to send it: things may get a lot worse before they get any better.

There is a cruel ritual in Iranian opposition politics: some voices abroad constantly interrogate the “purity” of activists inside—why they did not speak more sharply or endorse maximalist slogans, why survival itself looks insufficiently heroic.
