The January 2026 Iranian Riots: A Failed Israeli-American “Regime Change” Attempt

A “protester” firing a gun during the January 2026 Iranian riots (PressTV)

How the US and Israel tried to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran – but failed.

Published: March 2026

In January 2026, nationwide protests and riots took place in Iran, triggered initially by economic and monetary problems that had been caused primarily – and deliberately – by comprehensive US sanctions. Western media subsequently claimed that Iranian security forces had “slaughtered 30,000 protestors”, but this widespread and rarely questioned claim was a threefold deception.

First, the number of victims was exaggerated by about a factor of ten: the confirmed figure is about 3,000 deaths. Second, the victims included not just peaceful protestors, but also armed and violent rioters as well as Iranian security forces. Third and most significantly, the available video evidence shows that most peaceful protestors and bystanders were killed not by Iranian security forces, but by armed and violent rioters and insurgents, including snipers.

Intriguingly, Western media showed hardly any video footage of the actual riots and killings, and instead provided unverifiable claims by anonymous sources and monarchist Iranian expats, as well as decontextualized images of scores of bodies, insinuating that these must have been “peaceful protesters” killed by Iranian security forces. There was also little mention that the riots destroyed hundreds of ambulances, stores, banks, private homes, police stations, mosques and schools.

In a typical example, the British BBC titled one of its articles about the riots “Iran supreme leader admits thousands killed during recent protests” (later changed to “acknowledges”). What the Iranian supreme leader actually “admitted” in a speech was that “the rioters have harmed civilians, they killed several thousand people” – the exact opposite of what the BBC insinuated.

The strategy of inflating and misattributing civilian casualties during Western regime change operations has a long history: examples include the made-up “Tiananmen Square massacre” in China and the staged “Timisoara massacre” in Romania in 1989, the inverted “Srebrenica massacre” in Bosnia in 1995, the staged “Racak massacre” in Kosovo in 1999, several false-flag sniper massacres during the “Arab Spring” protests in 2011, and the false-flag “Euromaidan massacre” in Kiev in 2014.

Two of the most widely used sources in Western media coverage of the January 2026 Iranian riots were the US-based “Human Rights Activists in Iran” (HRAI) and the UK-based media outlet “Iran International”. HRAI received funding from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a known CIA front specializing in “color revolutions” and regime changes, while “Iran International” was originally funded by Iranian arch-rival Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Gulf monarchy.

Both Israeli and US sources, including former CIA director Mike Pompeo, stated that the Iranian protestors and rioters were supported, equipped and coordinated by US and Israeli agencies. The diplomatic correspondent of Israel’s Channel 14 even reported that “foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed. Everyone is free to guess who is behind it.”

The US NED director later stated that NED had “deployed” hundreds of SpaceX Starlink satellite communication terminals to Iran. During the riots, SpaceX and Twitter/X CEO Elon Musk – a major US military and intelligence contractor who previously faced an ad boycott led by Israeli intelligence front ADL – activated free Starlink service in Iran, boosted regime change content on Twitter/X, and had the national flag of the Iranian Republic on Twitter/X replaced with the monarchist flag.

Meanwhile, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Iranian monarch installed by the US and UK during the 1953 coup, announced his intention to return to Iran. Although Pahlavi appears to have rather little support within Iran, he is actively supported by Israel, including through online operations. Pahlavi visited Jerusalem and the Western Wall in 2023 and the Israeli-American Council (IAC) National Summit in 2024, while his daughter married an American-Jewish businessman in 2025.

Among the many prominent Western figures who supported the Iranian protests and regime change attempt was British author and women’s rights activist J.K. Rowling. During the Syrian war, Rowling already promoted the story of “Aleppo girl” Bana Alabed, which later turned out to have been a British-Turkish psychological operation. In Syria, reformist but anti-Zionist leader Bashar al-Assad was ultimately ousted and replaced with Islamist and former al-Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.

To manufacture consent for an Iranian regime change, Western progressive audiences were targeted mainly with “feminist” narratives, despite the fact that women’s education in Iran is as good or better than in many Western countries (their political representation remains low but still higher than in some US-allied Arab countries), while Western conservative audiences were targeted mainly with “terrorism” narratives, despite the fact that Iran doesn’t support any internationally recognized terrorist group – to the contrary, Iranian-supported Shia militias have been fighting terrorist groups Al Qaeda and ISIS, which in turn have been backed by the US and Israel.

It has also been argued that Middle Eastern “religious fanatics” shouldn’t have nuclear weapons and long-range missiles – overlooking the fact that there already is a Middle Eastern country run in part by “religious fanatics” that possesses not only nuclear weapons but also intercontinental ballistic missiles reaching almost any country on Earth: Israel. Moreover, it is Israel – not Iran – that appears to have engineered the 1963 assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, precisely because of his determination to prevent an Israeli nuclear bomb.

As during most regime change operations and wars, Western media used several so-called “thought-terminating clichés” – loaded language intended to end an argument and reinforce cognitive dissonance. In the case of Iran, this included terms such as “islamo-fascists” and “mullah regime” – a “mullah” simply being a religious scholar and leader, a term also used in Sephardic Judaism.

Despite all efforts, the January 2026 Iranian riots ultimately failed to overthrow the Iranian government or to trigger an immediate “humanitarian” US military intervention, and the counter-protests in support of the Iranian government, though rarely shown in Western media, turned out to be far larger than the original protests against the government.

Two months later, during the Israeli-American war against Iran, Western media reported that Iranian authorities had hanged three Iranian men “for protesting the regime” during the January riots. But the three men weren’t hanged for “protesting the regime”: they were hanged because they were found to have killed two police officers with machetes.

Finally, it is worth remembering that the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was supported and facilitated by none other than the United States itself – to prevent a Communist revolution.

⁎⁎⁎
You have been reading: 
The January 2026 Iranian Riots: A Failed
Israeli-American “Regime Change” Attempt.
An analysis by Swiss Policy Research
⁎⁎⁎

Video (18+): Iranian Riots – “Operation Day 13”

Articles

Documentaries

Read more

WordPress.com.

Up ↑