Front Burner - Iran revolt: What’s the endgame?

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

A mass protest movement has gripped Iran and is shaking the foundations of that country’s ruling regime. Thousands of protesters have been detained and rights groups say more than 2,500 people are dead, including one Canadian citizen.With Iranian officials signalling plans for “quick” executions, U.S. President Donald Trump issued threats of his own, hinting at military intervention.Will the U.S. throw its military weight behind Iranian protests? Will Iran’s regime fall, or will it manage to weather the storm like it did in 2018 and 2022? Gregg Carlstrom, a Middle East correspondent for The Economist, answers those questions, and more.

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi everyone, I'm Jamie Poisson. So as spotty internet has returned to Iran in recent days, a somewhat clearer picture is emerging of the absolutely brutal crackdown on widespread demonstrations across the country. Rights groups are saying more than 2,500 people are dead, including one Canadian citizen. And the death toll is likely much, much higher. Thousands of protesters have been detained. Iran had promised to execute some of those demonstrators, which prompted threats from U.S. President Donald Trump.

We will take very strong action if they do such a thing. He had also promised Iranian demonstrators that... Help is on its way. You saw that I put down. Which has been widely interpreted to mean some kind of military strike. Then on Wednesday... We've been told that the killing in Iran is stopping. It's stopped.

It's stopping. And there's no plan for... Executions or an execution or executions. So I've been told that a good authority. We'll find out about it. Or other remarks from the U.S. President, an offering, a strategic psychout. Will Iran's regime be toppled from within, knocked over from outside, some combination of both? Or will it yet again, weather widespread protests like it did in 2022 and 2018? To talk about all of this and more, back with me again is Greg Kohlstrom.

He is the Middle East correspondent for the economy. He's covered the region for more than a decade. And today he's in Riyadh. Greg, hey, it's great to have you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me again. So just before we start, I want to timestamp this conversation because this story is, of course, moving. You and I are talking at 11 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday, I believe it's 7 p.m. where you are in Riyadh.

And I know that the lack of Internet has made it very difficult to ascertain exactly what has been going on. But what do we know at this moment about just how very important. brutal, this crackdown over two weeks of anti-government protests has been. Well, I think what helps is to put it in the broader context of past rounds of unrest or violence in Iran. So you get a sense of just how enormous the scale is here. In 2022, the last big wave of protest, about 550 protesters were killed by the security forces in the span of about two months. Women in Iran set their headscarves on fire. in fury. They are tired of the morality police beating them up,

and the Islamic Republic leaders who police their every move. Their protest is sparked by the death of Mahsa Amin. She was arrested by the morality police in Tehran. A few days later, she's dead. Anger echoes through Tehran's Sharif University and on the streets, where security forces are quick to strike back. When night falls, anger is released from apartment windows. To challenge the regime from the confines of one's home is one of the only options left for protesters.

It's still a punishable offence, but not as risky as gathering in the streets. Compare that to what's happened just over the past two-plus weeks. More than 2,400 protesters have been confirmed, killed. That's not the final death toll. The final death toll will be, I'm sure. or considerably higher, that is just the number that human rights groups have been able to confirm and verify. So we're talking about at least four or five of times more people killed in a much shorter span of time. I think it's likely to go down as the worst act of state violence

committed by the Islamic Republic. Iran's rulers are fighting back at speed. As protests spiraled more quickly than previous waves of unrest, the authorities move faster, more forcefully too. The death toll from this would probably be even higher than the mass executions in 1988 when the regime sent thousands of people to the gallows. Five thousand people, mainly young political activists, were forcibly disappeared or executed in 1988, according to Amnesty. They say the true number could be much higher, for Tehran has never admitted to the killings. I was seeing the BBC, for example,

reporting on videos from a mortuary in Tehran, they say, are too graphic to show. Several videos, believed to have been filmed on Friday, have emerged showing rows and rows of dead bodies in a mortuary in Tehran. We've counted at least 180 bodies from just one mortuary. What appeared to be friends and family members walk through the bodies to identify their loved ones.

And just could you tell me more about the scenes in the account? And this is one morgue in Tehran, and I'm sure similar scenes have played out elsewhere. We just haven't seen the pictures yet. But bodies stacked up in the courtyard, families desperately going from one to the other to try to identify their loved ones in some cases. They find them in other cases they don't. And then sometimes being compelled by authorities to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to secure the release of their bodies.

So on top of having your brother or your son or whomever murdered by the police, you're also then made to pay them to take that body home and to bury your relative. So we've seen that. We've heard stories of hospitals that have been overrun with gunshot victims over the past week since authorities started opening fire with automatic weapons into crowds of protesters. in some cases, snipers on the rooftops were doing that. And so gunshot victims pouring into hospitals. And then in some cases, security forces going into those hospitals and dragging wounded people out and taking them away.

And their fate remains unclear. There are more than 18,000 people so far who have been confirmed to have been detained. And again, the real number might be higher. On those detained, earlier in the week, Iranian officials were signaling, right, that they would be holding these fast trials and executions for protesters. For example, there is this case of this 26-year-old protester, Irfan Soltani. And his family was told that he was going to be executed on Wednesday. But then they were informed that it had been postponed. And just what do we know at this moment about?

whether the regime still plans to go ahead with these executions? I think we don't know anything for certain yet, but I think based on both the comments that regime officials have made in recent days and their history in recent years, I think there's a very well-founded fear that they are going to go forward with executions. I mean, Donald Trump did say yesterday that he has it on good authority that he's heard from someone in the regime, that there won't be executions.

But not long before he made those comments at the White House, the head of the Iranian judiciary was speaking in public in Tehran. Visiting a Tehran prison where arrested protesters are being held, Iran's chief justice said speed in judging and penalizing those who, quote, beheaded or burned people was critical to ensuring such events do not happen again. And then he promised that there would be executions. And that's the head of the judiciary. vowing that. So the regime has made it quite clear that that's what they plan to do at some point. And

again, if you look to history, there is precedent for carrying out executions, not just after waves of protests, but even in the weeks leading up to these protests, given when there weren't protests going on. On January 8th, the internet fell to 1% of its normal levels and stayed there for many days. The government shut it down. And the information that we're getting out of Iran right now, from the people there. Are we able to get it because the regime has allowed the internet to come back on? No, it hasn't switched it back on yet. It's been a full week now that it has been all but impossible to get in touch with people in Iran. What's been coming out over the past week, it's come out through a few ways. One is that landline calls aren't completely cut off. They've been patchy. They've been difficult. It's hard to get through from outside the country.

but I know some Iranians in the diaspora who have been able to reach friends and family occasionally on landlines over the past week. The second route by which people are getting information out is Starlink, the satellite internet system. In the years leading up to this, there's been an effort by, again, by Iranians in the diaspora to send thousands and thousands of Starlink terminals into Iran. They're illegal there. The government bans them, but they're smuggled in. And some people have been able to use those terminals to get information out over the past few days, although it's dangerous when they do that. If you share a video that you filmed somewhere and then you share that with the world over Starlink,

there's a risk that the regime might try to track you down after the fact. And I think that's been happening in some cases. And then the third route is just people who are close to the borders. Either they live near Iran's borders or they've traveled to the borders. and they're close enough that they're able to pick up a mobile phone signal from a neighboring country. That's the other way. They've been able to get information out. But all of this is very fragmentary. We really do not have a comprehensive sense of what's been happening in Iran because this blackout is ongoing. Messages sent to the BBC's Persian service reveal much more.

Tell your audiences there isn't the slightest trace of humanity left. Tell them it doesn't matter if someone is old or a child. In their eyes, everyone is a terrorist. We certainly do know at this point that this crackdown is even more brutal and far more deadly than what we have seen in recent kind of living memory. And I just, what does that tell you? What it tells me is that the regime sees this as a moment of existential danger in a way that it did not see previous rounds of protest. And it's not because the demonstrations are unprecedentedly large. They're not. It's not because we haven't seen big nationwide protests before.

I think it has more to do with the context in which these protests are taking place. They come after a really horrible year of economic collapse in Iran, where the currency has lost about half of its value, where inflation is running above 40%, where people are really struggling now to afford food and other basic essentials. A year of environmental collapse, I mean, things got bad, enough in November that there were real concerns that Tehran would run out of water and the capital would have to be evacuated because there just wouldn't be any water left in the Iranian capital. And then, of course, a year in which Iran fought a war with Israel, a disastrous war with Israel. So you have all of these interlocking crises happening at the same time.

And the regime doesn't have any answer for any of these problems. It can't fix the economic crisis. It can't fix the environmental crisis. it clearly cannot protect Iranians from external threats anymore either, having now been bombed by both Israel and America in the past year. And so the social contract has completely ruptured in Iran. The regime has no answer for any of these problems. And that is what has caused this outpouring of anger that we've seen over the past few weeks.

It feels like everything is broken. And the only thing that the regime can do is resort to this level of horrific violence. to try and scare people into going back home. I want to discuss the potential of a U.S. intervention with you in a moment, but in the absence of some kind of U.S. intervention, do you think that the regime will still be able to survive this latest threat to their existence? In the very short term, it's possible. The protests do seem to have ebbed over the past few days because of the violence of the crackdown,

because people are scared and people are also disconnected from one another. And so the protests have ebbed. But I don't think that means that this wave of protest is over, even if it takes perhaps weeks or months for demonstrations to grow in size again. All of the root causes, all of the grievances that cause these protests in the first place are still there. And again, they're unfixable. The regime cannot fix them. So it's possible that they muddle through the coming weeks,

the coming months. But I think we're likely to look back at this as a really pivotal moment that I think just exposed the regime as having become a husk, a hollow shell. It might still be around for a little while longer, but I do think this is the beginning of the end. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,000, 500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights.

And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.com. Why BDC for my business? The timing's right. Everything's in motion. Economy's changing. It's all about automation, AI. So I said to myself, take the plunge. Yes, I need a loan, but I also need a hand from a problem. partner who's truly working with me, helping me, no matter what comes next. Not later. Now. Get ready for what's next. With BDC, you get financing and advice adapted to your projects. Discover how at bDC.ca.ca slash financing. BDC, financing, advising, no-how. Could you talk to me a little bit about the role of the security forces in this, why they remain

still so loyal, so much so that they're willing to shoot with impunity, their own citizens? on a scale that we haven't seen in this generation? I think it's probably a mix of factors. I mean, there's been a real propaganda effort on the part of the regime to paint these protests as being a foreign conspiracy to smear all of the protesters as being terrorists who are being armed by Israel,

as the Iranian foreign minister said in an interview with Fox News. They came in, they used Daesh-style terrorist, you know, operations. They got police officers, burned them alive, they beheaded them, and they started shooting at police officers and also to the people. So as a result, for three days, we had, in fact, fighting against terrorists and not, you know, with the protesters. Perhaps that propaganda resonates with some people. I think another factor in this for the Security forces, particularly for the Revolutionary Guard, is that if there were to be political change in Iran, they would have a lot to lose if there was positive political change. This is not only a security force. It presides over an enormous economic empire where everything from the oil sector to construction to manufacturing, large parts of that fall under the purview of the Revolutionary Guards. And so it's not about just protecting the regime. It's about protecting their

economic self-interest as well. And then I think maybe a third factor, at least for some people, is a fear of the unknown, a fear of chaos, the concern, which is not entirely unfounded, that as that the regime is heading for some sort of breakdown and that Iran in the process might head for breakdown, civil war, state collapse. I mean, we've watched that happen in numerous other countries across the Middle East over the past two decades. And I think the fear of that is a powerful one. Yeah. You know, I have been thinking about Syria and Bashar al-Assad here.

He seemed to have kind of largely, one, he was being rehabilitated by some of the Gulf states, attending a summit on Gaza, for example. And then all of a sudden, he was fleeing to Moscow. And I just, like, do you see the situation in Iran as fundamentally different than what we saw in Syria? last year. I mean, without sort of overdoing the comparison because they are different countries in different contexts and different times. But I think the similarity, the very strong similarity between the two is, you know, you're right to say that Assad in his final years was being rehabilitated. He was welcomed back into the Arab League. There were efforts to try and rehabilitate him in the West as well with the U.S. and Canada and Europe. That effort didn't go so well,

but that effort was underway. So he was coming out of his diplomatic isolation. But the problems that caused the Syrian uprising in the first place, the corruption, the economic inequality, the feeling that a tiny privileged minority was running the country for their benefit to the exclusion of everyone else, none of these problems had been fixed. In fact, they had gotten much worse during the 15-ish years of uprising and then civil war. And so this government that seemed to be on a rehabilitation tour around the world that actually turned out to be quite hollow. And once it was pushed, it collapsed. And I think that is the similarity here with Iran. Again, going back to this idea that the regime can't fix anything.

And even if it manages to endure for a little while longer, the foundation is rotten. In Syria, there was a pretty organized rebel force, right? And is there a credible Iranian army? opposition in the wings? Not, not really. I mean, this has been the problem for many, many years now, where we see these waves of protests and clearly, you know, a huge number of people in Iran feel the Islamic Republic has failed and would like political change, but there is no viable alternative. We've seen over the past few weeks, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, trying to position himself as the leader of the opposition. He's always been an opposition figure. He's always had

some support inside of Iran, but trying to portray himself as now the leader of a transition. He's given a number of interviews, including to us at The Economist, where he's portraying himself as, you know, ready to come back to Iran and oversee what he says will be a democratic change. I'm not here to advocate for a republic or a monarchy. I'm here to be the honest broker. above the fray in complete neutrality, making sure, however, that we have a fully transparent democratic transition. The problem is, it all sounds great. I mean, he says the right things, and his office sends out PowerPoint slides about how he plans to oversee the transition, and it all looks good. But he doesn't have influence on the ground. He hasn't been able to, for example,

convince members of the regime, members of the security forces to defect and join him. And it's going to be very, very hard for him to come back after half a century away from Iran if he can't find allies on the ground there to work with. He hasn't built any sort of a viable government in waiting or government in exile. So this is the problem. You have a lot of people who talk a good game in the Iranian opposition, but it's very fragmented and their influence inside the country tends to be quite limited. Of course, what the United States may or may not do here is hanging over all of this. Like earlier this week, as I mentioned, Trump sort of talked about how the killings have stopped, which was interpreted as a bit of a step back from his earlier comments that help was on the way.

At the same time, though, we saw reporting in the New York Times and Reuters, for example, laying out that he is still considering a range of options. Reuters was quoting yesterday, so Wednesday, European sources saying that they thought a strike was imminent and that the Israeli assessment is that the U.S. is going to do something. the U.S. moved non-essential personnel from their air base in Qatar. And I, you know, worth mentioning here that right before Trump struck Iran in June, he was saying that he was going to make up his mind in two weeks, right? So like, how are you reading all these signals and bits of information?

I think Trump tweeted himself into a corner here. He spent a couple of weeks making these very strong pronouncements on social media. telling the regime not to kill protesters, saying that if it did, America was ready to swoop in and rescue the protesters and make the regime pay hell and so on and so forth. And very tough language. Look, one death is too much. But I hear much lower numbers and then I hear much higher numbers. But I say save their names because they'll pay a very big price. And now that the regime has killed thousands and thousands of protesters, Trump is under a lot of pressure to,

make good on those threats. And I'm sure there's a part of him that does not want to be compared to Barack Obama in 2013 when he laid down a red line telling the Assad regime in Syria not to use chemical weapons. Assad used them. And then Obama didn't carry out military strikes against the Syrian regime. So Trump doesn't want to do that. He doesn't want to be compared with Obama and that's not acceptable for him. But at the same time, he doesn't really have good military options. And I think what he's been hearing from the Pentagon when he's met with his advisors in recent days is that, yes, there are symbolic things that America can do. It can blow up, you know, bases affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard. It can strike at bits of their economic empire.

It could even try and assassinate key figures in the Iranian government. But none of those things are really going to stop the regime from its crackdown. They're not going to deter the regime from ruthlessly cruelly. crushing protests that are seen as an intolerable existential threat. And so Trump is, he's stuck between Iraq and a hard place here. He feels like he can't do nothing. And I do think he's going to do something militarily in the coming days. But he doesn't really have the sort of Trumpy option that he would like, something that is a one-off, easy, quick, showy win. He just doesn't have that here. Probably, I mean, I'm thinking about Venezuela, right? And so I think what you're saying is that this is a

very different situation. It is. I mean, if you want to, you know, focus on the Supreme Leader, you cannot swoop into Tehran and abduct the Supreme Leader, as you did with Nicholas Maduro in Caracas. He is in hiding. He's been in hiding for months now. Tehran is, you know, inland. It's not near the coast. It's much harder to place assets there. The U.S. probably has far less intelligence. I could go on. It's a much harder military operation to pull off. And I'm sure his advisors have told him that if you want to try something like that, it's likely to end badly, much as it did back in 1980 when America tried to free the hostages from its embassy in Tehran. This administration is particularly close to the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, they are no

friends of Iran. What do these states want to happen here? They're no friends of Iran, but they are more nervous than you might expect about the prospect of American intervention and regime change in Iran, which is interesting, because if this had happened five years ago or 10 years ago, you would think they might have been applauding it at a time when Iran was seen as their main geopolitical threat, when it had this network of proxies across the region. But I think what's happened over the past few years, first, Iran has been greatly diminished by the wars that followed the October 7th massacre. Its proxies have been weakened, and then Iran itself was struck last summer. And so it no longer seems quite the big threat that it once was.

On top of that, the Gulf states are worried about, you know, if the U.S. carries out a strike in Iran, what will Iran's retaliation be? The Gulf will probably be on the front line of that retaliation. Qatar, the American air base in Qatar will probably be a target. The American naval base in Bahrain will be a target. But depending on how big the strike is, Iran could hit even harder. in the Gulf. So they're worried about that. They're worried about the prospect of regime collapse in Iran and having a failed state just 200 kilometers away across the Persian Gulf. So there's, again, there's no love lost here with Iran. Many of the Gulf countries see it as an enemy, but that doesn't mean that they are cheering the prospect of either American intervention or

regime change. What about Israel? What do you think Israel wants to happen here? I think Israel, their messaging has also been a bit interesting over the past couple of weeks where they have been very subdued. You know, we had an interview. We did an interview with Ben Yamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, a little over a week ago. And he said, you know, if Iran attacks Israel, of course, Israel will retaliate, but otherwise we're going to stay out of this. what happens in Iran is in Iranian matter. And it's a real change of tone for Nathaniel, but I think they don't want to fuel this narrative, that this propaganda narrative, that somehow they are involved in the protests there.

I think obviously they would like to see a change in the government. They would like to see an Iranian government that doesn't sponsor proxies around the region, that doesn't try to build a clandestine nuclear program. If that happened, if that sort of change happened, it would be true. transformative for Israel's security position in the region. But I think there's also skepticism that these protests are going to lead to that sort of government. The Israeli view is either that if there is regime change, the revolutionary guard are going to take over, which isn't necessarily a good thing from Israel's perspective, or Iran is likely to tip into chaos and perhaps civil

war and the consequences of that are very, very hard to predict. Okay. Just as this progresses over the coming hours and days. What are you watching most closely? One thing I'm trying to remind myself of is that protests, uprisings, these things are not linear, right? So the fact that the protests do seem to have ebbed over the past few days, again, that doesn't mean that things are over. So there'll be a milestone coming in a few weeks, traditionally for Iranian Shia on the 40th day after someone dies. you hold the memorial service. And those memorials have often been the focal point for protest in Iran, including in the run-up to the Islamic Revolution in 1979. So you will have in the next six weeks, you will have potentially thousands now of these memorial services that might go ahead. Will they be a focal point for renewed protest? We haven't seen the last of this. So even if, for now, things seem to die out, even if there isn't some sort of dramatic American intervention.

I think it's only a matter of time before this flares back up. Okay. Thank you very much for this. Always good to talk to you. Thank you. My pleasure. Happy to do it. All right. That is all for today. Front burner was produced this week by Shannon Higgins, Imogen Burchard, Matthew Amha, Lauren Donnelly, Joytha Shangupta, Matt Mews, and Mackenzie Cameron. Our intern is John Costello. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabbison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chow. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe Locos. I'm J.B Poisson. Thanks so much for listening.