By Yousef Ramazani
The peaceful demonstrations by merchants, grounded in their economic grievances over currency fluctuations and rising inflation, were hijacked by foreign agencies intent on sowing chaos.
Senior Iranian political leadership, including Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, President Masoud Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, were quick to differentiate between lawful public assembly and the actions of foreign-directed rioters.
This assessment was confirmed by the arrest of many Mossad and CIA operatives across the country, the judicial unveiling of fabricated casualty reports, and forensic analyses exposing a coordinated digital disinformation campaign fueled by AI-generated content and manipulated audio recordings.
The pattern closely mirrors the foreign interference meticulously documented during the 2022 unrest, when intelligence revealed the involvement of more than 20 Western intelligence agencies.
Domestic genesis: Economic grievances as a reality
The protests that erupted in late December 2025 stemmed from genuine economic pressures.
Shopkeepers and bazaar merchants, whom Ayatollah Khamenei has described as “among the most loyal segments of the country to the Islamic Revolution,” initiated closures in response to a sharp and destabilizing decline in the national currency’s value.
President Pezeshkian, Speaker Qalibaf, and the Leader himself publicly acknowledged the legitimacy of these economic grievances and vowed to address the concerns of merchants.
Ayatollah Khamenei affirmed that a merchant who says, “I cannot do business” under such volatile conditions is speaking the truth, as they bear the burden of market uncertainty.
From the outset, the government’s consistent stance had been to uphold the right to peaceful assembly while instructing officials to engage in dialogue to resolve these economic challenges.
Reports from some cities described thousands of peaceful marchers rallying around economic slogans, accompanied by police, with clashes erupting only after a splinter group resorted to vandalism.
The protests initially were fundamentally domestic and socio-economic in origin before being exploited by external forces, who found the time opportune to push their "regime change" project.
Blueprint from the past: 2022 playbook of multi-agency interference
The Iranian security apparatus interprets current events through the explicit lens of recent history, specifically the widespread riots following the tragic death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.
In June 2023, Brigadier General Mohammad Kazemi, head of the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), provided a comprehensive public account of that period.
The investigation revealed that as many as 20 foreign intelligence agencies played an ‘active’ role in the 2022 riots that gripped the country. The list of countries included the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, some Arab countries, and the Israeli regime.
The exposed activities formed a detailed blueprint: European diplomats gathered real-time field intelligence on security responses; the CIA and Mossad collaborated on creating and managing cyberspace platforms to disseminate protest news and even revived joint projects to assassinate Iranian scientists; and periodic meetings between the intelligence services of the Israeli regime and the United Arab Emirates coordinated support for the riots.
This 2022 framework establishes the precedent of multi-faceted, state-sponsored hybrid warfare aimed at internal destabilization in Iran.
Immediate and escalatory US political endorsement
A critical component of the interference pattern, consistent between 2022 and 2026, is the immediate and politically-charged endorsement from senior American government officials.
In the recent episode, statements from the US emerged almost concurrently with the first protest footage. US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz declared on December 29, 2025:
"The people of Iran want freedom... We stand with Iranians in the streets," a framing that deliberately shifted the narrative from economic grievance to political revolution.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed the Iranian government for the economic collapse.
The most escalatory rhetoric came from President Donald Trump, who issued a series of inflammatory statements through his social media handles that the US would intervene if "protesters" were killed, culminating in a statement that the country was "locked and loaded."
More recently, on Tuesday, he called on Iranians to "take control" of the government institutions and said that "help is on its way," which drew strong reactions from Iranian officials.
In response, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) rejected threats by Trump, describing him as one of the main killers of Iranians.
“We declare the names of the main killers of the people of Iran: 1- Trump, 2- Netanyahu,” Larijani said in a post on X on Tuesday.
Defense Minister Brigadier General Aziz Nasirzadeh warned that the Islamic Republic will respond more decisively to any new act of aggression from the US or the Israeli regime.
“If these threats are turned into action, we will defend the country with full force and until the last drop of blood, and our defense would be painful to them,” he said.
Leader's senior political adviser and former top security official Ali Shamkhani, identified this as a "red line" and filed formal complaints with the United Nations.
The speed and nature of these statements constituted a pre-scripted element of pressure, designed to internationalize the issue, embolden violent actors on the ground, and provide a diplomatic veneer for subversion, mirroring the US House's 2022 resolution that endorsed the rioters of that year.
Digital propaganda factory
The online arena has served as the primary battlefield for narrative control over Iran, with tactics that have grown more sophisticated since the 2022 unrest.
A widespread disinformation operation involved the case of Saghar Etemadi, who was falsely presented across social media as a "martyr" killed by state forces during the riots.
The Iranian judiciary issued formal denials, confirming she was injured, hospitalized, and in stable condition. Her mother and brother made public pleas, with her mother stating, "My daughter is alive. Don't bother us with your lies."
Forensic analysis confirmed that images of Etemadi were generated or manipulated using artificial intelligence, part of the creation of "false martyrs" to generate emotional fuel for their narrative.
This tactic was directly compared to similar fabrications during the 2022 unrest. Beyond this, digital forensics exposed the systematic recycling of old video footage.
Clips from the 2022 protests, and even from unrelated events in countries like Greece, France and the United States, were repackaged as current Iranian unrest.
A more advanced technique involved dubbing fake audio onto protest scenes, inserting chants in praise of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the dictator overthrown by the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The digital campaign was traced to networks of Israeli bots and anti-Iranian propagandists, to artificially construct a monarchist-led revolution in the global digital perception.
On-the-ground infiltration and paid agitation
Iranian security forces presented physical proof of foreign-directed subversion within the protest crowds. In early January 2026, police publicized the arrest of an operative for the Israeli regime's Mossad agency.
In a televised confession, the detainee detailed a remote recruitment and command process conducted via social media by handlers based in Germany, involving instructions to purchase equipment, attend gatherings, chant specific slogans, and send footage abroad.
Police chief Brigadier General Ahmadreza Radan confirmed security forces had targeted ringleaders who were "receiving dollar payments from outside the country in exchange for provoking the public."
Further raids on safe houses in Tehran uncovered weapons, ammunition, and bomb-making materials, which indicated a plot to escalate unrest into armed violence.
Iran’s intelligence ministry on Wednesday announced that it has managed to identify and arrest terrorist ringleaders in Tehran with the people’s effective cooperation.
Head of the Martyr Foundation Ahmad Mousavi said the martyrs, including civilians as well as security forces, were killed by different kinds of weapons such as fighting and hunting guns, knives, axes, etc.
These actions were surgical strikes against what Parliament Speaker Qalibaf termed "individuals linked to foreign spy services who seek to hijack protests and turn them into riots."
This model of remote recruitment and payment for agitation is a scalable, deniable method of on-the-ground interference, evolving from the broader intelligence activities exposed in 2022.
Geopolitical objective: Undermining the Axis of Resistance
Senior Iranian figures explicitly connect the domestic unrest to broader international confrontations, demonstrating that the ultimate goal of the interference is geopolitical, not humanitarian.
Parliament Speaker Qalibaf, in a public address on Monday, drew a direct line between the treatment of Iran, the Israeli war on Gaza, and the US kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
He demonstrated that the US, perceiving its dominance in decline, has resorted to "hard power" and "the behavior of a madman," abandoning international law for a "law of the jungle."
From this vantage point, the foreign-backed deadly riots in Iran are a pressure point in a wider campaign aimed at weakening the Axis of Resistance.
The objective, as articulated by officials like Armed Forces Chief Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi, is to compensate for the enemy's defeat in direct military confrontations by fostering internal chaos, thereby forcing a change in Iran's regional policies and its support for Palestinian resistance.
The Israeli regime's immediate endorsement of the US operation in Venezuela stands as evidence of a cohesive strategy targeting independent states across different continents.
Evolution of tactics: 2022's emotional catalyst to 2025's economic pretext
A key comparative analysis documents the evolution of the catalyst for interference.
The 2022 unrest was triggered by a social incident, which foreign agencies exploited through an orchestrated campaign to create an "emotional atmosphere," change protests into unrest via calls for strikes, and finally attempt to transform the unrest into an armed movement.
In contrast, the 2025-2026 protests emerged from a purely economic trigger: currency collapse and inflation. The foreign interference playbook remained essentially the same, but the entry point shifted.
The immediate US political endorsement, the digital propaganda barrage, and on-the-ground recruitment and payment followed a nearly identical sequence.
This consistency proves that the goal is to sow the seeds of destabilization itself, with the specific public grievance being interchangeable.
Whether the spark is social or economic, the response from adversarial states and their affiliated networks is a standardized set of subversive tools ready for deployment.
Battle for perception: Media asymmetry and diplomatic offensives
It extends into international diplomacy and a global media network, where Western outlets practice profound asymmetry.
While images of limited unrest are amplified, massive pro-government rallies, such as those commemorating the martyrdom of top anti-terror commander Qasem Soleimani, which drew hundreds of thousands, receive minimal coverage.
The massive countrywide rallies in Iran on Monday, with the participation of millions of Iranians, were overlooked by the Western media because it did not suit their narrative, as per experts.
This selective visibility is a deliberate narrative tool to portray Iran as perpetually on the brink of "revolution," thereby legitimizing further foreign pressure and sanctions.
In response, Iran has launched its own diplomatic measures, filing formal protests at the United Nations against US threats as violations of international law.
Iranian media successfully countered disinformation with facts, highlighting the arrest of foreign agents, debunking disinformation, and showcasing the peaceful resolution of many protests.
The battle is not merely over events on the ground, but over which interpretation of those events dominates the global information space, a struggle against well-funded, politically-motivated foreign media outlets and their online amplification networks.
Technological escalation: AI and the new frontiers of information warfare
A significant development in the 2025-2026 protests is the advanced role of technology in the interference campaign.
Forensic investigations point to the use of AI-generated imagery to create "false martyrs," the deployment of dubbed audio to fabricate protest slogans, and the sophisticated use of bot networks for amplification.
This represents a technical evolution from 2022, where recycled video was more common than procedurally generated content.
This escalation fits within the context of the mid-2025 military aggression by the Israeli regime, during which similar tools of digital deception were deployed at scale.
The protest environment, therefore, became a testing ground and implementation zone for these new tools of perception management.
The lowered barrier to creating convincing fake content presents a new challenge, as falsified narratives achieve viral global spread before traditional verification mechanisms can catch up, permanently shaping perceptions even after debunking.
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