After nearly three weeks of the largest protests against the Iranian theocracy since the 1979 revolution, the authorities have succeeded in restoring some semblance of order to the streets.
At what cost remains a question for history. The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), the press office for Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA), says 2,677 people have been killed, including 163 police and other security members. Other outlets claim that as many as 12,000 protesters were gunned down, and hundreds of security personnel were killed.
"The regime’s pervasive securitization measures and violent crackdown on protests appear to have suppressed protest activity for now," reports the Critical Threats Program of the Institute for the Study of War (CT-ISW). The group reported "zero protests on January 15, which marks the second consecutive day that CTP-ISW has not recorded any protest activity in Iran." However, CT-ISW points out that with the internet down, there's a good chance that smaller protests in outlying cities and towns took place.
Iranian security forces have achieved this uneasy quiet by "flooding the zone" with tens of thousands of police, Basij, and Revolutionary Guard units following the shocking slaughter of thousands of protesters in the streets.
However, the Iranian government has an enormous problem with these huge deployments of security personnel; they aren't sustainable.
"Senior law enforcement, military, and intelligence officials previously held discussions about security forces’ exhaustion during the Mahsa Amini protest movement," ISW reports. "The regime is also taking other measures to securitize society, such as sustaining its nationwide internet shutdown, that impose a significant cost on the regime."
This genie is not going back in the bottle. With the Iranian rial trading at 1.5 million to the dollar, and 40% of the economy being underground and dollar-based, economic activity of any kind is going to come to a standstill before long.
Iranian authorities have described the unrest as the most violent yet, accusing foreign enemies of fomenting it and armed people they have identified as terrorists of targeting security forces and carrying out other attacks.
The state-affiliated Tasnim news outlet reported what it described as the arrest of a large number of leaders of recent riots in the western province of Kermanshah.
Tasnim also reported the arrest of five people accused of vandalising a gas station and a base belonging to the Basij - a branch of the security forces often used to quell unrest - in the southeastern city of Kerman.
Also on Friday, state television broadcast the funerals of members of the security forces in Semnan, northern Iran, and Semirom, central Iran.
As I reported on Thursday, Iranian elites are wiring tens of millions of dollars out of the country. The BBC is reporting that about $5 billion from top leadership has left Iran, including Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has moved $328 million of that total to Dubai.
While one reason for the elites moving this money is almost certainly the dicey political situation, there's also the fact that Iranian banks are teetering on the edge of failure.
Iranian officials’ transfer of money out of Iran reflects their lack of confidence in Iran’s fragile banking system. Regime-affiliated Bank Ayandeh dissolved in October 2025 after suffering nearly $5 billion USD in losses. The Iranian Central Bank folded Bank Ayandeh into regime-controlled Bank Melli and attempted to cover up the economic shock of Bank Ayandeh’s dissolution by printing more money, which in turn worsened the inflation cycle, weakened the value of the rial against the US dollar, and increased prices.
This is another indication that the end is near for the Iranian theocracy.
