Relatives of executed protester Alireza Raisi held a 40th-day memorial at his grave in Kashan, a city in central Iran’s Isfahan province, amid a heavy security presence.
Raisi, 21, was arrested during the January protests and later executed at Isfahan Central Prison, also known as Dastgerd Prison.
He was buried in the desert near the village of Eshin in Anarak, Isfahan province.
US forces shot down two drones Iran’s Revolutionary Guards launched toward Bahrain on Friday and nothing was damaged, the US military said, rejecting the Guards’ claim that they had destroyed a US early-warning radar on the island.
“The IRGC launched two one-way attack drones toward Bahrain and both were shot down by US forces. There were no injuries or damage,” US Central Command said on X.
Hours earlier, the Guards had said their aerospace force “targeted and destroyed the American aggressors’ early-warning radar on the island of Bahrain,” in a statement carried by the Guards-affiliated Fars news agency. Bahrain hosts the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
The Guards said the attack was retaliation for what they called “the enemy’s aerial aggression against a telecommunications tower in Sirik,” a coastal town in Hormozgan province, on the Gulf of Oman east of the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state media said Sirik had been struck on Thursday but did not say by whom.
The statement called the attack “a serious warning” to stop what the Guards described as aerial provocations and oil smuggling in the Strait of Hormuz.
“If violations and acts of aggression are repeated, the IRGC Aerospace Force is on full alert for an unrestricted response,” it said. The Guards also threatened harsher measures against companies they accused of being “misled by the United States.”
The Guards’ commander, Ahmad Vahidi, warned on Friday that any attack on Iran would be answered with force.
“The smallest aggression will be answered with horrifying and painful blows,” he said at a funeral in Tehran for 110 unidentified soldiers killed in the 1980s war with Iraq, according to Tasnim. “The enemy should learn from the repeated defeats it has suffered; otherwise, greater lessons lie ahead.”
Vahidi also said revenge for the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “will be achieved.” He gave no details of when or how.
Mohammadreza Naghdi, a senior Guards adviser and former commander of the Basij militia, said revenge for Khamenei’s killing remained a public demand and that the matter would not be closed without it.
“The public demand for revenge is not new,” he said, adding that crowds at pro-government rallies had chanted for revenge every night for the past 257 nights.
The exchange comes as US President Donald Trump holds off on new strikes after appeals from regional states, while keeping the naval blockade of Iranian ports in place.
Iran’s top security official, Mohsen Rezaei, said this week that Iran would strike US bases as far as Europe if attacked again.
The UN nuclear watchdog does not know exactly where Iran’s newest uranium enrichment plant is or whether it holds nuclear material, more than a year after Tehran declared it, according to a report seen by Reuters on Friday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had not let inspectors examine the design of the underground Isfahan Fuel Enrichment Plant, or visit it, since declaring it in June 2025. The finding is in a quarterly report circulated to member states on Friday.
Iran notified the IAEA in June 2025 that it would build the plant at the site of the Nuclear Reactors Fuel Company in Isfahan, in central Iran. The notice named the site but not where the plant sits within it.
Tehran made the announcement right after the IAEA’s Board of Governors found Iran in breach of its safeguards obligations for the first time in almost 20 years. Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said at the time that the plant had already been built and was being fitted with centrifuges.
“The site has been built and is secure,” he told state television, adding that enrichment would start once the equipment was installed.
Iranian state media called it the country’s third enrichment complex. The IAEA counts it as the fourth, after two plants at Natanz and one at Fordow.
Inspectors were due to make their first visit that month. It was canceled when Israel began striking Iran’s nuclear sites the same day.
Apart from the Bushehr nuclear power plant, Iran has given the IAEA no information on the state of its nuclear facilities and material and no access to them, the report said. In July 2025 Iran’s parliament passed a law suspending cooperation with the agency.
The IAEA called the gap in its knowledge of Iran’s enriched uranium a matter of “serious proliferation concern” that must be addressed with the “utmost urgency.” It said it could not conclude that no nuclear material had been diverted from peaceful use.
Director General Rafael Grossi said it was critical for inspectors to resume work in Iran “without further delay.”
Before the June 2025 strikes, the IAEA estimated that Iran held 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, a short step from the roughly 90 percent used in weapons. By the agency’s own yardstick, that is enough, if enriched further, for about 10 nuclear weapons. Inspectors have not been able to check how much remains or where it is.
Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said this week that “not even a particle” of Iran’s enriched uranium would leave the country, and that Tehran had told Russia the same.
A proposal to merge Iran's Intelligence Ministry with the Revolutionary Guards' powerful intelligence organisation is gaining traction, reviving debate over the rivalry between the two agencies and the future of the country's security apparatus.
The issue has drawn renewed attention in the reformist newspaper Etemad, which is close to President Masoud Pezeshkian's administration.
In an article published Thursday, the newspaper examined proposals reportedly discussed in senior state consultations to consolidate the two agencies into a more unified and accountable intelligence structure.
Iran's Intelligence Ministry remains without a permanent chief nearly eight months after Esmail Khatib was killed in an Israeli strike in March, while parliament considers separate legislation to overhaul the ministry's leadership.
The two agencies have long operated alongside one another, with overlapping responsibilities and competing centres of authority.
A history of rivalry
Iran's intelligence apparatus encompasses several organisations, but the Intelligence Ministry and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Intelligence Organisation are its two most prominent institutions.
The ministry operates within the government, with its chief nominated by the president and approved by parliament. The IRGC's intelligence arm belongs to a military organisation operating under the supreme leader's command.
Their competing authority has occasionally produced disagreements over investigations and the treatment of detainees.
During the late 2010s, one prominent dispute involved environmental activists arrested by the IRGC Intelligence Organisation on espionage charges. Another concerned more than 50 people reportedly accused of spying for Israel.
In both cases, the Intelligence Ministry publicly challenged allegations advanced by the IRGC Intelligence Organisation.
Some former detainees subsequently told Iranian and Persian-language media outside the country that the ministry had apologised for their detention and offered compensation.
A sensitive debate
Writing in Etemad, journalist Mehdi Beik-Oghli examined longstanding concerns about overlapping mandates, institutional rivalries and legal accountability within Iran's intelligence system.
His analysis also explored the qualifications required for senior intelligence officials and the difficulties of maintaining separate security institutions with overlapping responsibilities.
Etemad is widely regarded as one of the newspapers closest to Pezeshkian's administration. Its proprietor, Elias Hazrati, serves as a senior government media adviser.
The article does not establish whether a merger has been formally proposed by the government or endorsed by senior decision-makers, but its publication brings a sensitive question about Iran's intelligence establishment into a prominent government-aligned newspaper.
Leadership vacuum
Iran's parliament is preparing to consider separate legislation that could fundamentally change the leadership structure of the Intelligence Ministry.
Parliamentary presidium spokesman Abbas Goudarzi said Tuesday that an urgent bill would remove the longstanding requirement for the intelligence minister to possess ijtihad, an advanced qualification in Islamic jurisprudence.
Since the ministry's establishment in 1984, all its permanent ministers have been clerics.
The proposed legislation would allow a non-cleric to take the position while establishing two new organisations within the ministry, responsible for internal security and ideological affairs.
Their directors would be appointed directly by Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, while the intelligence minister would continue to be nominated by the president and approved by parliament.
Goudarzi said the changes would help resolve the leadership vacancy following Khatib's death. The ministry has been run by an acting minister whose identity has not been publicly disclosed.
The proposed legislation has yet to receive parliamentary approval, and it remains unclear whether the eventual selection of a new minister would favour career intelligence officials or figures associated with the Revolutionary Guards.
While the parliamentary proposal would retain the ministry and alter its leadership arrangements, the merger discussion goes further, raising the possibility of consolidating institutions that have operated as competing centres of security authority for decades.
Neither proposal has been adopted, and no decision to merge the intelligence agencies has been announced.
Americans have repeatedly underestimated foreign efforts to influence their politics and public opinion, leaving the US vulnerable to campaigns by China, Russia and Iran, says Sean Durns, director of the Counter Extremism Research Center at the Capital Research Center.
Speaking at Iran International's Washington studio, Durns argued that influence operations and unconventional warfare are deeply embedded in the strategies of America's adversaries but remain poorly understood by much of the US public and political establishment.
"The American people are great people. They can be a bit naive," he said. Influence operations and hybrid warfare, he added, "have been ingrained into the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party since its founding, but they're very foreign to Americans."
Durns, a former deputy commentary editor at the Washington Examiner, leads a program launched last month by the conservative Capital Research Center to investigate extremist movements and foreign influence in the United States.
"These countries have a common enemy, and that is us," he said. "They do cooperate. They do collaborate, and we've seen that with the recent war, in fact, against Iran, where both China and Russia have given aid to Iran in its war against America."
A Ukrainian intelligence assessment reviewed by Reuters in April found that Russian satellites had carried out dozens of imagery surveys of military and critical sites across the Middle East to help Iran strike US forces and other targets.
In May, the Trump administration sanctioned several China-based firms it said had supplied satellite imagery that enabled Iranian strikes on US forces.
"The Chinese Communist Party views Iran as a foil, a way to tie down the United States,” Durns said, “so that it can continue to amass its power and challenge America for hegemony," he said.
Money and influence
Durns pointed to the network of Neville Roy Singham, an American-born former technology executive living in Shanghai, as an example of what he described as foreign influence reaching Western political movements.
Singham, who is married to Jodie Evans, a co-founder of the antiwar group Code Pink, has funded organisations that have attracted scrutiny over their promotion of Chinese government narratives.
In July, the House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed three Singham-funded nonprofits—BreakThrough News, The People's Forum and Tricontinental—over approximately $40 million in funding linked to him.
Two of the organisations said the subpoenas violated the First Amendment. No charges have been filed.
Durns suggested that some demonstrations in Europe reflected organised influence campaigns rather than entirely spontaneous public mobilisation.
"It's important to understand, when the American public looks across the Atlantic and sees streets burning in Milan, Italy, or in Paris, France, or elsewhere, in Albania, in Spain, that these are not necessarily organic protests," he said.
Durns also accused such groups of exploiting the Gaza conflict to mobilise public anger.
"Gaza has been a very effective one for them, in which, of course, they use lies," he said. "They count on the public not being aware, not being educated."
He argued that social media platforms have made it easier for foreign influence campaigns to reach American audiences.
"There's no fact-checking on TikTok, and the algorithms are distorted to work on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party," he said.
Lessons from the Cold War
Durns said American complacency about foreign influence was not new, pointing to revelations about Soviet intelligence operations that emerged after the Cold War.
Among the examples he cited was the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of notes compiled by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and smuggled to Britain in 1992, which exposed Soviet intelligence operations across the West.
"I have met a number of individuals in the press, or who are policymakers themselves, who have never heard of things like the Mitrokhin Archive," Durns said.
He suggested that a similar failure to understand the motivations of adversaries had shaped Washington's approach to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution.
Successive American administrations, he argued, had repeatedly searched for moderate figures within Iran's leadership, misreading the nature of its political system.
"There are no moderates in the Iranian regime. The moderates have been expelled," he said. "They're in Evin prison, or they're elsewhere."
An enduring challenge
Durns rejected comparisons between the recent US war with Iran and the American experience in Vietnam, arguing that claims of an American defeat were misleading.
"There's been a very popular narrative, which is that America lost the current war against Iran, or that this war against Iran was like Vietnam," he said. "That is profoundly, profoundly false."
He also argued that Iran's economic weakness left Washington with substantial leverage despite Tehran's efforts to prolong the confrontation.
Durns compared the current mood in the United States to the 1970s, when America emerged from Vietnam amid widespread predictions of decline, only to prevail in the Cold War less than two decades later.
"So never count America out," he said. "But at the same time, the hour is getting late, and there are growing threats that have been massing over the course of many years that we need to confront and combat."
Baluch armed group Ansar al-Furqan has merged into the People’s Fighters Front, the coalition’s spokesman said, expanding an alliance that has claimed a series of attacks on Iranian security forces in the southeast in recent months.
Spokesman Mahmoud Baluch said the merger followed mediation by figures in Baluchestan and efforts by both organizations’ leaders to strengthen their campaign against the Islamic Republic.
“We the people of Iran, despite all our differences of thought and ideological disagreements, inhabit one land, share a common destiny and have been taken hostage by a criminal tyrant,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.
Baluch urged Iranians to overcome political divisions and unite to end the system of supreme clerical rule.
The front, known by its Persian initials JMM, was formed in December 2025, bringing together Jaish al-Adl, the PADA Baluch Movement, Harakat-e Nasr Baluchistan, the Mohammad Rasulullah group and independently organized Baluch fighters.
Its charter combines demands for Baluch rights with nationwide political objectives, advocating diplomatic, cultural and media activity alongside armed action.
The United States designated Jundallah a terrorist organization in 2010 and amended the designation in 2019 to include Jaish al-Adl.
Ansar al-Furqan is not designated as a terrorist organization by the United States or the European Union but is blacklisted by Iran, Pakistan and China.
The Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium has reported alleged links between the group and al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Jaish al-Adl.
Ansar al-Furqan took responsibility for several attacks on Iran’s police and military, including a 2018 Chabahar suicide bombing which killed two policemen. However, the attacks have not remained limited to the restive southeast.
In 2017, Ansar Al-Furqan claimed responsibility for bombing an oil pipeline in Ahvaz, a city located in Iran's southwestern Khuzestan province.
Continued JMM attacks
The People’s Fighters Front claimed responsibility for three attacks in Golshan, Konarak and Saravan on November 2–3, targeting what it described as Revolutionary Guards personnel, Afghan Fatemiyoun fighters and a police special unit commander.
Local rights group Haalvsh reported that at least seven members of the IRGC-affiliated Fatemiyoun brigade were killed in the Konarak attack on a school allegedly being used as a military base.
The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency gave a different account, saying militants attacked army personnel and one assailant was killed. It reported no deaths among the targeted personnel.
On November 7, Iran executed Mohammad Aref Shahbakhsh over an attack on a police post in Khash, the judiciary said. It alleged links to Jaish al-Adl but provided no date for the attack or details of his trial.
US-based rights group HRANA previously documented 63 armed incidents across southeastern Iran between March 31 and October 10, leaving at least 94 dead and 33 wounded. Most incidents remained unattributed or could not reliably be linked to a particular group.
Analysts interviewed by Iran International in October said closer coordination had helped militants intensify attacks, but cautioned that broader national support remained uncertain.
The predominantly Sunni Baluch population has long faced economic deprivation, ethnic and religious discrimination, and repression.
