2026-01-31

Efforts to secure the conditions for overthrowing the Islamic Republic must continue.

After the powerful wave of the nationwide uprising in Iran, which the criminal Islamic Republic regime drowned in blood on January 8 and 9 by using as pretexts calls from Reza Pahlavi, orders from Trump, and claims of interference by Israel’s security agencies and by declaring martial conditions with unprecedented brutality, the people have not yet recovered from grief, shock, and trauma caused by this crime against humanity. Yet even before this pain has subsided, the threat of another war has cast its shadow over Iran and the region. Since the time Donald Trump urged protesters in Iran to “keep protesting, attack government centers, help is on the way,” he has deployed at least ten warships, including aircraft carriers with support vessels, to the Middle East and adopted a war posture. After militarizing the region, the U.S. secretary of defense announced that “the military stands ready to carry out any decision Donald Trump makes regarding Iran.” At the same time, while the European Union expresses concern about the consequences of war, especially for the vital oil and gas transit routes, it has effectively moved toward laying the groundwork to legitimize a U.S. military attack by placing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on its list of terrorist organizations.

The U.S. government, with its finger on the trigger, has again stressed its conditions for negotiations with the Islamic Republic. These include ending uranium enrichment on Iranian soil, transferring highly enriched uranium, restricting long range missiles, and cutting support for so called proxy forces. After the genocide in Gaza, developments in Lebanon and the start of Hezbollah’s disarmament, the installation of the Islamic al-Sharaa government in Syria, and the weakening of the Houthis in Yemen, imposing these conditions to contain the Islamic Republic aligns precisely with the imperial order that the United States and Israel seek in the Middle East. Under the slogan “help is on the way,” the U.S. government has militarized the region and now aims, with the help of hired journalism and a propaganda campaign, to present its military intervention to public opinion as a humanitarian intervention and support for protesters.

However, igniting such a war, for which sections of Iran’s bourgeois opposition such as monarchists, the Mojahedin Organization of Iran, and some Kurdish nationalist parties grouped in the Dialogue Center eagerly wait, would entirely harm the interests of the working class, the people of Iran, and their protest movement. A military attack, as the wars in Libya and Syria and the twelve day war showed, pushes protest movements to the margins. It makes securing safety against the threat of bombardment, destruction, killing, and displacement the public’s main concern, and it gives the regime’s repressive forces the opportunity, under the pretext of wartime conditions, to intensify security measures and repression and to plan the pursuit and assassination of activists in social movements.

Over the past eight years, under the blade of repression by the criminal Islamic Republic regime and under the pressure of poverty, economic misery, and U.S. led international sanctions whose effects have fallen directly on the people, Iranian society has witnessed thousands of labor strikes and protests, four mass uprisings, and continuous protest movements by the most deprived social layers. In this process, the working class and freedom seeking people of Iran have shattered the political and ideological legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, deepened its governing crisis, and advanced the process of overthrowing the regime to this stage by relying on their own militant power. Throughout this entire period, U.S. interventionist policies have not helped the movement to overthrow the Islamic Republic. Instead, they have stood in opposition to its interests. For example, alongside the Islamic Republic’s relentless repression, structural poverty has remained one of the main obstacles to the advance and development of social and protest movements in Iran, and U.S. economic sanctions have intensified this condition. The U.S. use of Reza Pahlavi and monarchists as leverage against the Islamic Republic for behind the scenes bargaining, as became clear again during the Zhina revolutionary movement and the recent nationwide uprising, has directly conflicted with the interests of the people’s struggle in Iran. The twelve day war, while giving the Islamic Republic the chance to mobilize Iranian chauvinist nationalism behind itself, also securitized society, led to the arrest and imprisonment of thousands, and temporarily disrupted protest movements. If U.S. war threats lead to war, they will not help protesters. Instead, they will aid the survival of the Islamic Republic in another form. A U.S. military attack could destroy all the gains won through the struggles of workers and oppressed masses in Iran, gains achieved through trench by trench battles and at the cost of blood spilled on the streets.

The body of evidence shows that, in the absence of its preferred alternative, the U.S. government still lacks a clear project to overthrow the Islamic Republic and continues to look toward change and transformation within the regime itself. The United States wants a faction within the Islamic government to gain the upper hand, one that can both compromise and meet U.S. demands and also suppress mass protests. Even if potential U.S. military attacks target predetermined objectives such as military and nuclear sites, ballistic missile bases, and certain centers of power and regime figures, the disorder caused by these attacks could lead to the formal takeover of the main levers of power by a fascistic military government led by the command cadre of the Revolutionary Guards. Such a military regime could accept U.S. conditions, declare a ceasefire and an end to the war, remove the clergy from power, and continue the bloody repression of the ongoing revolutionary movement in Iran to secure its own political position.

For this reason, as we have repeatedly stressed, the war and confrontation between the Islamic Republic regime and the United States and Israel over the nuclear program, long range ballistic missiles, and support for so called proxy forces have nothing to do with the interests of the working class or the people of Iran and the region. Just as the United States has militarized the region in line with its desired Middle East order and placed its finger on the trigger of war, the Islamic Republic regime, in pursuit of its own survival strategy, has spent hundreds of billions of dollars from society’s wealth and from the labor and exploitation of Iranian workers and toilers on nuclear projects, ballistic missile production, and the arming and equipping of the forces of the so called resistance axis. The consequences have fallen directly on the people of Iran. The war and confrontation between the Islamic Republic regime and the United States and Israel continue existing policies and, on both sides, represent a reactionary and capitalist conflict. To escape the danger of this war’s expansion, the working class, the toilers, and freedom loving people of Iran have no path other than to expand and intensify the struggle against the Islamic Republic, to make more determined efforts to organize their ranks, and to form nationwide leadership for a mass uprising and the revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic regime. Only by advancing organization and creating councils, committees, and mass institutions in workplaces and living areas can these bodies assume the administration and management of society when signs of a power vacuum emerge.

The Communist Party of Iran, while condemning U.S. war threats and this reactionary conflict, calls on all workers, toilers, and freedom loving people of Iran to protest against the war threats and to expand and intensify the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic. It also urges activists and leading forces in the labor movement and other progressive social movements to step up efforts to organize and to form a coordinated, nationwide leadership. Only by accelerating and intensifying the struggle to prepare the conditions for the revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic can the people of Iran and the region free themselves from this criminal regime, thwart attempts by bourgeois and right wing opposition forces to impose an alternative from above and over the heads of the people, and open a clear horizon for workers and oppressed people across the Middle East in opposition to the imperialist and reactionary regional order of the United States and Israel.

The Communist Party of Iran also calls on all freedom loving and equality seeking people around the world, in support of and in solidarity with the freedom struggles of the people of Iran, to condemn the mass killings, mass arrests, and executions of protesters by the Islamic Republic and to raise their voices more forcefully against U.S. militarism and war threats.

No to reactionary war
Down with the Islamic Republic regime
Long live freedom, equality, and workers’ rule

Central Committee of the Communist Party of Iran

30 January 2026