A senior Iranian reformist has accused security bodies of deliberately escalating and even staging violence including alleged killings among their own ranks to legitimize a sweeping crackdown on protests, sharply disputing the official narrative blaming foreign actors.
Ali Shakouri-Rad said the protests on January 8 and 9 were a predictable outcome of years of accumulated social discontent, even if the scale of the response surprised political factions and security institutions alike.
Shakouri-Rad rejected remarks promoted by official media that foreign intelligence services or opposition networks orchestrated the violence.
“I do not believe this, and I think many people do not believe it either,” he said, referring to claims that Israel’s Mossad or networks associated with exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi were responsible for the violence.
Protests and unexpected scale
Shakouri-Rad said the breadth of demonstrations across almost 400 cities exceeded expectations across Iran’s political spectrum. “Reformists, conservatives and the security institutions did not think this many people would respond to Reza Pahlavi’s call,” he said.
While protests were foreseeable given sustained grievances among workers, teachers and retirees, he said, the social response exposed a deeper rupture that institutions had failed to anticipate.
‘Injecting violence’ to justify force
The reformist politician argued that violence was introduced by those seeking to suppress protests and then use that violence as justification. “I can more easily believe that those who wanted to suppress what they called unrest carried out these acts,” he said.
This approach, he noted, was not new, arguing that security agencies have historically escalated confrontations to rationalize harsher measures. “From the beginning it has been like this, and it has grown worse over time,” he added.
Shakouri-Rad cited an academic article by a doctoral student at Guards-run Imam Hossein University that described “manufacturing deaths among one’s own forces” as a method for controlling unrest. He said the model included the killing of Basij or police personnel or attacks on symbolic sites, later attributed to protesters to justify coercive action.
Shakouri-Rad described an incident in which protesters who fled into a dead-end alley were shot and killed by a Basij member. The shooter, he said, was not inherently violent but shaped by an environment of polarization that placed weapons in the hands of poorly trained forces.
Criticism of the presidency
Shakouri-Rad criticized President Pezeshkian for publicly relying on security briefings to explain the killings, saying it stripped the president of his standing as a centrist figure. Repeating those assessments on state television, he said, alienated the public, which had witnessed events firsthand.
“People were present and knew what had happened,” he noted, adding that the president should have questioned the security bodies over how such events unfolded.
He also questioned how alleged armed networks could operate across hundreds of cities without the knowledge of Iran’s security agencies, saying the lack of accountability, resignations or formal inquiries underscored the credibility gap.
A leader-backed presidency
Shakouri-Rad said Pezeshkian’s rise to the presidency was a project backed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, rather than the result of open political competition. Reformists, he said, assisted the process without understanding its nature.
Pezeshkian, he said, could have acted as a bridge to defuse crises only if real authority had been delegated.
Shakouri-Rad described the January killings as among the “darkest moments in Iran’s modern history,” saying the wounds left by injustice and the killing of young people – most of them under 30 – would not heal without truth, accountability and a fundamental change in governance.
Referring specifically to the bloodshed on January 8 and 9, Shakouri-Rad said: “It is not something we can erase easily in the coming years, or even in decades to come.”
