The Islamist regime in Iran is notorious for staging false-flag operations, blaming its opponents in order to present itself as the victim and deceive the public. Although this terrorist and totalitarian theocracy has suffered numerous losses in battles, and has repeatedly shown that it is not a formidable military power, it has wielded one highly effective weapon for 47 years: psychological warfare and propaganda.
This is a cult-like regime that feeds on grievance, fear, and deception. It is, in essence, a death cult, one that glorifies death and martyrdom while devaluing life itself. In such a system, dying for the regime is sanctified, and martyrdom is elevated as an ideal.
This comes naturally for a regime like this, which uses psychological operations and false-flag attacks to manufacture fear, invent enemies, and rally people around itself. It is motivated to target Iranian civilians in schools and hospitals in false-flag operations to create fear and blame its opponents.
When propaganda turns against its creators
But after 47 years, as with all cult regimes and theocracies, the facade has cracked. Its methods have been exposed, its manipulations have become transparent, and people have begun to see the regime for what it truly is. That is when they turned against it and began to dismantle it from within its own ranks.
We recently saw a revealing example in remarks attributed to former IRGC commander-in-chief Hossein Salami, who confessed in an interview with the regime’s state TV that the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was not merely human error by the regime, but something deliberate; framed, in effect, as a necessary act to avert a supposed US-Israel attack.
That is the definition of a false-flag operation. They killed innocent people on the flight, including children, just to deceive the public. If that implication is taken seriously, it amounts to a chilling admission: that innocent lives were sacrificed by the regime under the logic of a so-called “greater good,” which was implied by IRGC’s Salami in his satanic remarks.
The bombing of schools and hospitals is exactly the kind of atrocities that serve the interests of the Islamist regime in Iran, not those of its opponents, and not those of America and Israel.
This is the same regime that attacked hospitals during recent nationwide protests in January, and shot at, arrested, raped, and terrorized wounded protesters inside medical centers. That is a fact based on the testimonies of the medical staff in Iran. Eyewitness videos of those abuses became viral and spread widely on social media.
At the same time, the regime’s drones and missiles have repeatedly proven to be imprecise, unreliable, and prone to misfire, often striking civilian areas inside Iran itself. These incidents, too, are well documented.
The regime has tried to deflect from these humiliating failures by accusing Israel of deliberately targeting civilians in Iran. But that claim collapses under basic logic: Israel has no strategic incentive to turn the Iranian public against it when it knows that a large majority of Iranians are anti-regime and supportive of actions that weaken or remove the Islamic Republic. The overwhelming majority of the Iranian people do not stand with this regime and are against it and want its downfall.
Across Iran, millions of Iranians rose up once again in January against the Islamist regime. In response, the terror regime massacred tens of thousands during these anti-regime protests that followed a call to action by Iran’s exiled Reza Shah Pahlavi II.
From city to city, protesters chanted “Javid Shah” (Long Live the Shah), and “This is the final battle, and Pahlavi will return,” a thunderous reminder that the Iranian nation has not been broken, and that the movement to liberate Iran from this tyrannical theocratic regime is not fading, but rather is gathering strength and will soon prevail.
Western media, especially left-leaning outlets with a long record of appeasing Islamism and Islamist regimes, remain highly susceptible to the false flags, psychological operations, and propaganda campaigns of the Islamist regime in Iran.
Far too often, these false propaganda narratives are repeated without rigorous fact-checking or serious scrutiny. We saw this pattern again with outlets like CNN and the BBC, particularly during the war against Hamas in Gaza, when parts of the Western media amplified the same propaganda lines and psyops pushed by the Islamist regime and its terrorist proxies.
That said, this is not a failure exclusive to the Left. Even non-leftist circles can be blindsided by the regime’s manipulation, responding with naivety or strategic confusion. And among some of the newer strains of the “woke Right,” the deception runs even deeper: they end up falling for the Islamist regime’s propaganda while imagining themselves immune to it.
The writer is an Iranian advocate for the dissolution of the theocratic regime and the creation of a constitutional monarchy under Reza Pahlavi. Follow him on X: @realRayanAmiri.