עלירזא ג'אפארזדה בריאיון לחדשות אן.טי.די: "המשטר האיראני מנסה להסיח את הדעת מהסלוגן העיקרי של המפגינים - 'מוות לחומייני'"

Next, we take a closer look at what's driving the protests in Iran. Joining us is Ali Reza Jafarzadeh from the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Good to have you with us, Ali Reza. Thank you so much. How would you describe the regime's initial response to the unrest? Well, the regime is very careful about how to handle the situation because they have seen several rounds of protests since at least 2017 when it started in Mashhad, the second most populated city northeast of Iran. It was about the rise of the price of chicken and eggs. And then in 2019, it was about tripling the price of gasoline overnight, and people erupted. In 2022, it was about the death of a Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini. And in each case, they handled it differently, trying to see what actually works in preventing the rise of the protests in the country. But what they have seen, actually, in the case of Iran is that the executions were on the rise. In 2025, there were over 2,200 people killed in Iran by the Iranian regime. The whole goal was to prevent the uprisings, to prevent the resurgence of the protests in the country. None of that has worked. And this happens in 2026, after the highest rate of executions in Iran. The main focus of the Iran regime is obviously on the main opposition, those who are fighting the regime, who have a history of fighting the regime for over four decades. And the Khamenei speech, recent speech that you just showed, the regime supporters were chanting death to the United States, death to the MEK, which is the main force that is acting as engine behind the protests, and the main force that exposed the major nuclear sites of Iran, and they have organized force on the ground. So where do you expect these protests to go from here? We saw footage there of pictures held by protesters of the Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. There are calls for him to come back. What are you expecting? Well, those, you know, one of the tactics the regime has used is to derail the protests, to making it look like as though it's about going back to the dictatorship of the Shah, which, by the way, the people overthrew in a massive revolution, sweeping the Shah's dictatorship out of power, because he had the secret police savak that put intellectuals in jail. He built the notorious Evin prison. He declared a single-party rule. And he was so corrupt. And that's why the nation everywhere, they rose up against the Shah. And too bad, the genuine revolution was stolen by the mullahs. So one of the things the regime is doing is trying to create this perception as though this is about going backwards. But in reality, that's not the case. The people want freedom and democracy in all of the cities. You can see here the chants of death to Khamenei, death to the dictator, and chanting for freedom. They're chanting death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the supreme leader. They have, in many of these cases, manufactured clips with voiceover to pretend as though that there is call for the return of the dictatorship of the Shah, or praising the dictatorship of the Shah, or even having their own elements on the ground, throwing these slogans in order to deviate attention from the main slogan of the protest, which is death to Khamenei. Every time there is this chant, you see some plainclothes people show up and chant other slogans to deviate attention. We shouldn't believe none of that.