Iran International
The Iranian general who has threatened Persian-language journalists abroad as potential military targets has a history of incendiary attacks on critics and was among officials who initially dismissed reports that Iran had shot down Flight PS752.
Abolfazl Shekarchi, a brigadier general and senior spokesman for Iran’s armed forces, said on Wednesday journalists working for Persian-language media abroad could be placed on a list of military targets.
“Media outlets such as Iran International, BBC Persian and Radio Farda are directly connected to Mossad, the US Central Intelligence Agency and other foreign intelligence services and receive support from them,” he said.
He called the employees of the Persian-language outlets “soldiers of Israel and the United States,” adding: “They can be included in the bank of military targets because, from our perspective, these are not media outlets.”
He provided no evidence for the accusations.
The remarks extend years of military and ideological rhetoric from Shekarchi against people and organizations Iranian authorities consider hostile, from protesters and opponents of compulsory hijab to foreign officials and media organizations.
PS752 reports called ‘absolute lies’
Iran's Revolutionary Guards shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 shortly after takeoff on January 8, 2020, killing all 176 people aboard.
Reports that an Iranian surface-to-air missile had brought down the Boeing 737 were “absolute lies” and “ridiculous,” Shekarchi said as evidence pointing to a missile strike emerged.
Shekarchi portrayed the reports as psychological warfare against Iran, while Iranian authorities initially attributed the crash to a technical problem.
Iran's armed forces acknowledged three days after the disaster that its air defenses had shot down the passenger plane, saying it had been mistakenly identified as a hostile target during a period of heightened confrontation with the United States.
The admission triggered protests in Iran and abroad and accusations that authorities had sought to conceal responsibility for the disaster.
Shekarchi's categorical denial became one of the most prominent official responses to early reporting on PS752 before the armed forces acknowledged that an Iranian missile had brought down the aircraft.
His latest accusations against foreign-based Persian-language media employ a similar framework, casting journalism and information as components of an enemy operation.
Protesters and hijab opponents
Shekarchi has also directed security and military rhetoric at domestic dissent.
During nationwide protests in 2022, Shekarchi described demonstrators as deceived and accused the United States of seeking to manufacture deaths to sustain the unrest.
The protests spread across Iran following the death in morality-police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman detained over compulsory hijab rules.
His rhetoric had already extended to opponents of compulsory hijab.
Participants in a campaign encouraging women to appear in public without mandatory head coverings, along with artists supporting them, were “forces of Satan,” Shekarchi said.
Thousands detained over coronavirus information
Shekarchi also played a public role in the authorities' response to information circulating during the coronavirus pandemic.
Around 3,600 people had been detained by police and the Basij over what authorities characterized as rumors or false information about the outbreak, with more than 1,100 judicial cases opened, Shekarchi said in April 2020.
The figures showed the scale of the authorities' effort to police information about the pandemic as questions mounted over infection and death figures.
Shekarchi also drew criticism after minimizing coronavirus deaths among military personnel and healthcare workers.
The deaths of four doctors, nurses and paramedics were “not a number” of significance, Shekarchi said during the early months of the pandemic.
The coronavirus outbreak became another period in which Iranian authorities treated the dissemination of information as a security matter, with people detained or prosecuted over online material about the disease.
Threats beyond Iran
Shekarchi's rhetoric has also targeted Israeli and US officials and personnel abroad.
Israel's destruction was Iran's “greatest aspiration,” Shekarchi said in 2021, presenting it as an objective from which the Islamic Republic would not retreat.
Even tourist and recreational locations around the world would not necessarily provide safety for American and Israeli officials targeted by Iran, Shekarchi warned in March.
“From now on, based on the information we have on you, tourist destinations, resorts, and recreational and leisure venues around the world will no longer be safe for you.”
Earlier, responding to threats by US President Donald Trump against Iran's leadership, Shekarchi said an attack on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would prompt Iran to “set their world on fire” and leave its adversaries without a safe haven.
“Trump knows that if a hand is raised against our leader, not only will we decisively and courageously cut off that hand, but we will set their world on fire, give them no respite and leave them no safe haven.”
His latest remarks extend such language explicitly to journalists working outside Iran.
For nearly half a century the Islamic Republic has reproduced the image of its leaders everywhere: on the walls of schools and government offices, in theatres, cinemas and concert halls, behind officials at podiums, on television screens. Visibility was not vanity. In a system built on the authority of one man, the leader had to be seen for the state to demonstrate that it existed.
Before the war with the United States and Israel, that was the rule. Now the same system publishes messages from its new leader without being able, or perhaps without wanting, to show him.
In the first weeks after his appointment by the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that selects Iran's supreme leader, intelligence services and media inside and outside the country waited for one thing: his Nowruz address. The Persian new year, which falls around March 20, brings the leader's most closely watched speech of the year, and a video would have answered the essential questions at once. He would have been demonstrably alive, apparently well, and visibly in charge.
No video came. The absence stopped looking like a security precaution and started looking like a condition.
The record since has only deepened the ambiguity. There is no photograph, no audio, no film.
Written statements have appeared, attributed to his office rather than demonstrably from his hand. The absence of anything verifiable, no image, no voice, no signature, has weakened the official account of his health and strengthened the theory that he was gravely wounded.
The effect on the state has been visible. Officials who held together in the first days of the war have since split over what comes next, and the fault line runs through the war-or-negotiation question: the state broadcaster has censored the government's own negotiators, while hardline outlets have claimed the leader opposed the process that produced the Islamabad agreement. Both camps invoke him. Neither can produce him.
So the question is whether any of this can work in the system's favor.
Absence as possibility
Consider what visibility would cost. If Mojtaba Khamenei appears and the marks of injury or incapacity are apparent, the Islamic Republic must concede that its leader is diminished. If his death is confirmed, the succession fight begins. If he turns out to be healthy and active, he must accept responsibility for the decisions of the past six months, including a war.
Absence suspends all three. He can be alive, wounded, incapacitated or dead, and the machinery of the state can go on issuing orders in his name.
Uncertainty, which ought to be the government's problem, becomes its instrument.
While the leader's status remains unresolved, no faction can settle the succession, and no official has the standing either to accept defeat or to wind the system up. Commanders and institutions can continue to say they take their orders from the center, a center that may exist but cannot be seen.
That has a second edge, and it cuts the other way. The same fog that prevents anyone from declaring the system finished also prevents anyone from commanding it. An absent leader cannot arbitrate between the men arguing over war and diplomacy, which is very likely why they began arguing in the first place. Ambiguity buys the system time by denying it direction.
Still, on this reading, even the collapse of the state's outer structure would not necessarily be the end. A network of the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, the intelligence services, financial channels and allied forces across the region could carry on in the name of an absent leader. What would survive, in that case, would no longer be a government. It would be an underground organization.
From state to network
The comparison that follows is about mechanics, not equivalence. The question is narrow: how does a network continue after it loses its territory or its leader disappears? On that specific question, two cases are instructive, and neither is offered as a moral parallel to a state that has governed 90 million people for nearly five decades.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the Islamic State's caliphate from a mosque in Mosul in July 2014 and did not appear on camera again for almost five years, though audio messages attributed to him continued to circulate. In that period the group lost nearly all its territory and became a network of clandestine cells. After he was killed in 2019, a US Defense Department inspector general assessment found his death had produced no immediate decisive effect on the group's operations.
Osama bin Laden spent almost a decade in hiding while releasing video and audio messages. His evasion of capture became, for his followers, evidence of invulnerability. Killing him destroyed that impression but did not destroy a network that had already devolved into regional branches.
The Islamic Republic is far better equipped for that kind of afterlife than either. It has governed for close to half a century. It has trained personnel, security intelligence, economic resources, religious institutions and cross-border networks. Driven underground, it would not be starting from nothing.
A familiar pattern of absence
Absence also carries a particular charge in Shia religious culture, and this is where the Islamic Republic has a vocabulary ready to hand.
Twelver Shia Muslims believe the twelfth imam, who vanished in the ninth century, is alive but hidden and will one day return. During the period known as the Lesser Occultation, roughly 874 to 941, his instructions are said to have reached his followers through four successive deputies who spoke on his behalf. The Greater Occultation, in which he remains hidden and has no named deputy, has continued ever since.
This is not a claim about religious rank. Mojtaba Khamenei holds no such standing for Shia believers, and the comparison is not about status. It is about the function of absence: a person who cannot be seen can still be treated as present. Intermediaries speak in his name, and waiting takes the place of proof.
The Islamic Republic itself was built on a theology of absence. Its constitution justifies the rule of a jurist explicitly as an arrangement for the era of the hidden imam, which means the state has spent 47 years governing on behalf of a leader nobody can see. Its propaganda apparatus therefore has both the language and the precedent to convert the absence of Mojtaba Khamenei into a kind of hidden presence.
That possibility is not indefinite. The longer the absence lasts, the harder it becomes to distinguish a genuine order from a manufactured one, the sharper the competition among those claiming to speak for the leader, and the more insistent the question: who is actually giving the orders in Tehran?
Mojtaba Khamenei's absence will probably not save the Islamic Republic from military defeat, economic collapse or social unrest. It may, however, allow it to go on existing after such a collapse.
As long as the fate of the absent leader remains unclear, the system's followers can treat the fall as temporary, the defeat as unfinished and the return as possible. Because sometimes governments continue not because they are still standing, but because their death has not yet been proven.
