Iran expands police high schools as authorities seek future recruits

“The mere threat out there, just the threat of these, is enough to deter traffic, certainly commercial traffic,” Votel told Eye for Iran podcast. .

“It has a huge deterrent effect and it puts the burden on us to keep really, really close watch on this area.”

That creates a paradox in the latest battle over Hormuz: Iran may be turning to rocket-launched mines because more powerful options have been degraded, yet Washington must still behave as though the threat could get through.

The latest US-Iran flare-up began after the US military said it detected Iranian forces on Larak Island preparing to launch rockets carrying sea mines into the Strait. US forces struck the launchers before they could fire.

Iran has traditionally been able to deploy naval mines using small boats, submarines or aircraft. Firing them from rockets would allow Iranian forces to place mines at a distance without exposing boats and crews to US forces watching the waterway.

Why Iran may be turning to rockets

Iranian state television reported on the Fajr-5 multiple-launch rocket system as a weapon for mining Hormuz as early as January 2025, and military analysts have said Iran had been testing the concept.

What has changed is the battlefield around it.

Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and an expert on Iran’s military and asymmetric warfare, told Eye for Iran that Iran’s conventional military capabilities were significantly degraded during the war, followed by attacks on important IRGC Navy infrastructure.

Nadimi said Iran has lost much of its ability to deploy the larger and more dangerous sea mines it could once put into the water through more traditional means.

“They have little choice but using these smaller, less capable rocket-launched mines,” he said, adding that Iran has also repeatedly tried to strike shipping with anti-ship cruise missiles and one-way attack drones, many of which have been intercepted or jammed.

Iran’s apparent new weapon can therefore be read not simply as evidence of innovation, but as adaptation after military losses.

Less destructive does not mean less disruptive

Rocket-launched mines come with significant compromises. Naval mines capable of badly damaging large ships are heavy. Fitting one into a rocket requires a smaller weapon, limiting its destructive power.

Nadimi said Iran’s rocket-delivered versions are significantly smaller than some older naval mines in its arsenal and consequently less capable of inflicting major damage on large tankers.

But a mine’s effectiveness is psychological as much as it is physical: once mines are believed to be in the water, uncertainty over their location can deter ships from entering.

Votel pointed to the history of mine warfare in the Persian Gulf, including US Navy encounters with Iranian mines during the Tanker War of the 1980s.

Commercial vessels and their insurers therefore do not necessarily need evidence that a mine will hit a ship before taking the threat seriously.

Washington’s burden

That uncertainty shifts part of the burden from Iran to the United States.

The US does not simply have to destroy mines once they enter the water. It has to watch the Strait, Iranian coastal positions and potential launch sites closely enough to prevent Tehran from putting them there in the first place.

“It puts a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we have constant surveillance, not only of the waterways themselves and the main transit routes, but really of the locations where these mines or these weapons can come from,” Votel said.

The latest US strike suggests Washington currently has the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to do that. American forces identified the Iranian launchers and struck them before the mines could be fired.

But Iran does not necessarily have to defeat that surveillance system to impose a cost. Simply retaining the capability forces the US to keep watching and commercial operators to trust that nothing has slipped through.

For Tehran, that creates an asymmetric advantage even after significant military losses: the US must repeatedly demonstrate that Hormuz is safe, while Iran only has to preserve doubt that it might not be.

Degradation or restraint?

There is an important caveat. The smaller scale of Iran’s recent attacks does not necessarily mean Tehran is incapable of doing more.

Nadimi said there are signs Iran is deliberately exercising restraint with some weapons, particularly ballistic missiles, to avoid triggering a larger escalation involving both the United States and Israel.

The rocket-launched mine claim itself also remains contested. Some maritime specialists have questioned whether Iran has operationalized the system as the US describes, while others consider it technically plausible.

Even if the system is operational, however, Iran would not need to mine the Strait extensively for it to have an effect. All Tehran needs is for military planners, ship operators and insurers to believe there is a credible possibility that it could get some mines into the water.

Votel sees that as part of a broader Iranian strategy: “Their intention is to make this painful for us and for those that are supporting the United States.”

Iran may now have fewer options for mining Hormuz than it once did. But if the threat of a mine is enough to make a ship hesitate—and enough to make the US military watch Iran’s coastline around the clock—Tehran can still impose a cost without a mine ever hitting a vessel.

The format barely varies. A person holds up what they bought and names what it cost. Four eggs and a single sausage, 5 million rials, about $2.30. A soda and a packet of crisps, 3.5 million rials. Three small bags of shopping, 75 million rials, roughly $34, which is close to half a month at Iran's minimum wage of about $75. Then the line, in one version or another: I am very happy, because if I were not, they would execute me. And then they dance.

One man films his phone showing a bank balance of 2 million rials, under a dollar, and dances through the list of what it will not cover: the bounced cheques, the unpaid shop rent, the apartment rent, his wife's clothes.

A veiled woman holds up a few tomatoes, onions and potatoes and explains that she can no longer buy by the kilo, only a handful at a time, "but I am happy, because otherwise they call me a rioter or a traitor." She thanks the authorities and signs off warmly. Another woman does the same with six eggs and a tin of tuna.

Another man dances while captions scroll over him: the dollar at 200,000 tomans, no electricity, deep in debt, and a signed undertaking to the authorities not to engage in politics. The threat varies with the week's official vocabulary: some dancers say they would otherwise be branded a mercenary, a traitor, or a Mossad agent.

It reads, at first, as one more instance of a familiar thing, humor as a pressure valve under repression. That reading is not wrong, but it is not what is new here, and it misses what the videos are actually doing.

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Painting things white

The Islamic Republic has a specific charge for describing the country's problems: siah-namai, "painting things black." It is used against journalists, economists and ordinary complainers to mean the deliberate darkening of a reality that is, officials insist, fine. The dance videos answer it precisely. They paint things white, so luridly that the whiteness itself becomes the accusation.

A man delighted by four eggs is not praising the government. He is holding its own demand up to the light.

To see why this is a break rather than a joke, it helps to recall Vaclav Havel's greengrocer, the shopkeeper in communist Czechoslovakia who puts the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" in his window. He does not believe it. What the sign really says, Havel wrote, is: I am obedient and therefore have the right to be left in peace. The system did not need people to believe. It needed each of them to see everyone else pretending, so that pretending felt like the only choice. Its one requirement was silence about what the pretending was for.

The Iranian dancer is Havel's greengrocer saying the quiet part aloud while still holding up the sign. The compliance is performed, the smile is wide, the gratitude is offered. And in the same breath the coercion behind it is named: I am doing this because the alternative is a noose.

Coerced performance works only while the coercion stays deniable. Havel's greengrocer kept the system standing by leaving the reason unsaid. The dancer says the reason into the camera, and the sign in the window stops working.

A state that can no longer read its own people

Follow that to its end and the videos are doing something sharper than mockery. They are exposing a problem the state has made for itself.

When a government criminalizes complaint, it also empties praise of meaning. If unhappiness can be prosecuted, a happy citizen and a frightened one become impossible to tell apart.

The dancers are demonstrating this to the state's face: you can no longer know whether we are content, because you have made discontent a crime, and so our contentment tells you nothing.

This is the deeper significance of a format built entirely from the state's own words. Every accusation the dancers voice, siah-namai, rioter, mercenary, Mossad agent, traitor, is lifted from official language. The videos are assembled from nothing but the vocabulary the government uses to police speech, and turned into an instrument of it.

Linguists distinguish the message from the metamessage: what a statement says, and what it conveys about the relationship between the people speaking. Every one of these videos carries the same metamessage. I cannot tell you the truth, you know I cannot, and I know that you know.

The gap between "I am delighted" and "I am forbidden to say otherwise" is the entire content. Iranians read it without effort. The state pretends to read only the surface.

From refusing the frame to hollowing the words

The videos are the latest move in a shift that has been accelerating, and each stage has done something different to the relationship between a sign and its meaning.

During the January protests, demonstrators in the western town of Abdanan scattered rice into the air, pouring away a staple that had grown scarce and dear. The gesture refused the frame the state wanted to impose on the unrest.

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By throwing away the very thing they could barely afford, protesters were saying the anger was never really about the price of rice. The economy had triggered something larger: a rejection of the whole arrangement.

Then came the funerals. After the January massacre, families burying the dead replaced the state's mourning language, the Quranic recitation, the lamentation, the word shahid, "martyr," with another vocabulary entirely: wedding music, folk dance, verses from the Shahnameh, and a new word for their dead, javid-nam, "whose name will endure."

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That was an act of authorship. The grief was real, and out of it people built a rival ritual language, deliberately cleansed of the religious symbolism the state relies on.

The price videos are the third move, and they are not the same as the funeral dances, even though both use the body and both use music. The funeral dance builds; it replaces the state's grammar with a sincere one of its own. The price video hollows; it takes the state's grammar and performs it as a corpse. One is about the dead and constructs a new language. The other is about the living and empties an existing one. A society that first refused the state's frame, and then authored its own, is now wearing the state's words as a mask.

It is worth remembering how far this has travelled. Dance is not merely frowned upon in Iran; it is effectively illegal, and the word itself is so freighted that the state, when staging its own approved versions, avoids it and reaches instead for the bloodless euphemism harakat-e mozoun, "rhythmic movements," a coinage that was itself widely mocked when it appeared.

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During the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, teenage girls were detained and pushed into filmed confessions for dancing in a Tehran neighborhood. The same act now circulates in its hundreds, filmed openly by people using their own names and faces, among them veiled women from households where dancing would once have been unthinkable on its own terms, never mind the law's. That is its own measure of how fast the ground is moving.

The trigger, as ever, is money. The rial has been setting records, passing 2,200,000 to the dollar, and on August 31 the judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei called protesters "mercenaries" and promised a firmer hand. But the videos are not really about eggs, any more than the rice was about rice.

They are about a population that has run out of permitted ways to say no, and has started saying yes in a way that unmistakably means it.

The phenomenon has acquired a name, taken from the line the dancers keep repeating: "If I'm not happy, they'll execute me." It is a joke a foreign viewer can laugh at and an Iranian cannot, quite. The Islamic Republic built a machine designed to hear only yes. It is now discovering that yes is what no has learned to sound like.

A video circulating on social media appears to show two women confronting people over hijab in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. The exact date of the footage has not been established, although the Iranian outlet Khabar Online said it was believed to have been recorded recently.

The women’s faces are not clearly visible. One is wearing a medical mask, while another can be seen carrying a radio communication device that is generally unavailable to ordinary citizens in Iran.

Khabar Online said it was not possible to determine from the footage whether she was wearing police insignia, although parts of her clothing resembled police uniform.

Iran’s police have not publicly commented on the incident.

Tehran City Council chairman Mehdi Chamran said any organized activity of this kind in the capital would normally need to be coordinated with municipal authorities, while adding that he had no information about the specific incident at the Bazaar.

Khabar Online also reported that women involved in enforcing Islamic dress rules had appeared in recent days on the sidelines of a nighttime gathering in at least one neighborhood in northeastern Tehran.

The reports come amid broader signs of renewed campaigning over compulsory hijab.

Khabar Online said online activity on the issue has increased in recent weeks, particularly on the Iranian messaging platform Eitaa and on X. Gatherings have also been held in Qom and in the Miankaleh area of Mazandaran demanding action against women who do not observe compulsory hijab.

During a recent visit by Culture Minister Abbas Salehi to Yazd, some participants also chanted in favor of implementing the Islamic Republic’s stalled Hijab and Chastity Law.

At Tehran’s Iran University of Science and Technology, the Student Basij recently protested the presence of unveiled female students at a meeting attended by the head of Iran’s Student Affairs Organization and an adviser to the science minister.

Taken individually, the incidents do not establish that the Islamic Republic has decided to restore the type of morality-police enforcement that became synonymous with compulsory hijab before the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

Together, however, they point to renewed pressure over an issue the authorities have struggled to manage since the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody in September 2022.

Women appearing in public without headscarves have since become commonplace in major Iranian cities, making defiance of compulsory hijab one of the most visible social changes to emerge from the protests.

While compulsory hijab remains legally in force, authorities have stopped short of fully restoring the extensive street patrols that existed before 2022.

Frustrated hardliners

That restraint has increasingly frustrated parts of the Islamic Republic’s ideological base, for whom enforcing Islamic dress is not simply a social policy but one of the defining obligations of a state that presents itself as Islamic.

Pressure has also returned to parliament.

After Mohsen Rezaei was appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in August, hardline lawmaker Mohammad-Taghi Naghd-Ali publicly questioned whether the council would continue blocking implementation of the Hijab and Chastity Law.

The tougher legislation had been due to take effect in December 2024 before its rollout was halted amid concerns that enforcement could provoke renewed unrest.

UN human rights experts said at the time that the law represented “an intensification of state control over women’s bodies in Iran” and a further assault on women’s rights and freedoms.

The dispute leaves the Islamic Republic facing competing political risks.

A return to aggressive street enforcement could create another source of public anger at a time of severe economic pressure and continued political repression. But allowing widespread non-compliance to continue carries its own cost with the loyalist constituency on which the system relies during elections, official rallies and periods of political crisis.

For the Islamic Republic’s most committed supporters, the disappearance of compulsory hijab from much of everyday public life can be interpreted less as tactical restraint than as ideological retreat.

That helps explain why the state has neither fully restored the pre-2022 enforcement system nor abandoned compulsory hijab.

Instead, enforcement has remained fragmented. Authorities have continued to use pressure on businesses, universities and individuals while avoiding, at least so far, an unambiguous nationwide return of the old morality-police model.

The latest incidents therefore leave a question that Iranian authorities have yet to answer: whether they represent scattered pressure from hardline activists and individual institutions, or the first signs of a broader return to street-level hijab enforcement.

Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA), supported by legal group UpRights, submitted the request to Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General on August 31, according to an executive summary released Thursday.

The nearly 100-page submission draws on more than 60 interviews with victims, witnesses and relatives, alongside documentary and digital evidence. It identifies 48 suspected perpetrators and examines their positions and links to specific cases and command structures.

HRA said its evidence provided sufficient indications that Iranian state authorities committed acts potentially amounting to crimes against humanity under Germany’s Code of Crimes against International Law.

Thousands killed, rights group says

The protests began on December 28, 2025, with shopkeepers and merchants closing businesses before spreading to at least 203 cities across all 31 provinces, according to HRA.

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Thousands were killed and arrested or detained during the crackdown, HRA said. Its documented cases include unlawful killings, torture, enforced disappearances, sexual violence, arbitrary detention and forced confessions.

The submission also describes the involvement of the Revolutionary Guards, Basij, Law Enforcement Command, intelligence agencies and the judiciary.

HRA documented what it described as recurring patterns across different parts of Iran, including the use of live ammunition and pellet-firing weapons against protesters and bystanders. It also linked a nationwide communications blackout and the shutdown of street lighting to an escalation in the use of force.

Why Germany

HRA argued Germany is well placed to open a structural investigation because victims and witnesses are already present in Europe and suspected perpetrators could eventually enter or transit German territory.

Iran is not a party to the Rome Statute, leaving the International Criminal Court without jurisdiction over crimes committed inside the country unless jurisdiction is otherwise established, including through a UN Security Council referral.

HRA said a German investigation could therefore provide an avenue for preserving evidence and pursuing accountability over the alleged crimes when jurisdictional opportunities arise.

“We are appalled at the steps by the Government of Iran to subject everyday Iranians to blanket criminalisation for any contact with the outside world when people are already suffering from isolation due to long-standing international sanctions, the Government’s repression of recent protests, the longest ever Internet shutdown, and the US-Israeli airstrikes,” Sara Hossain, chair of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, said.

The draft “Countering Foreign Infiltration” bill would allow cooperation or interaction with designated foreign states, media organizations, academic institutions, human rights defenders and civil society groups to be prosecuted as major security offenses, the mission said.

Broad activities require approval

The legislation would require Iranians to declare and register activities involving foreign agents or nationals and obtain authorization through an online system that prioritizes security considerations from the Ministry of Intelligence and the Intelligence Organization of the Revolutionary Guards.

Publishing books or articles, sharing data and analysis, academic cooperation, interacting with foreign or designated “hostile” media, and operating newspapers or websites could require prior approval.

The requirements would also cover workshops, scientific conferences, artistic festivals and some film, music and visual-arts activities, as well as certain commercial and financial transactions.

“If implemented, this bill would subject all interactions with the outside world to Government control and sanction, the law also would further curtail the rights of citizens, with consequences for commerce, education, freedom of expression and the pursuit of justice among other areas,” mission member Viviana Krsticevic said.

UN contacts could face punishment

The mission warned that the bill could also criminalize communication with its investigators and said punishment for such cooperation would constitute a reprisal.

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“Punishing any interaction by Iranians or persons living in Iran with the Mission under this bill constitutes a reprisal and the threat of criminalising such activity is a form of intimidation and oppression,” mission member Max du Plessis said.

The UN Human Rights Council established the mission in 2022 following protests sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death. Its mandate was extended for another two years in January 2026 to investigate allegations of recent and continuing serious human rights violations in Iran.