What’s Next in Iran?

The Iranian regime likes to kill in darkness. And that’s what they did this past week.

When the Iranian people heeded the call of exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to “make noise” at 8 PM last Thursday and Friday (Jan. 8-9), the regime unplugged the Internet, jammed satellite television, and sent in the goons.

It took several days for word to get out, but by Tuesday, the 13th, it was clear the regime had massacred huge numbers of protesters, perhaps as many as 20,000, in cities all across the country.

One of my sources provided video of groups of Iraqi militiamen summoned by the regime to kill Iranians. It is believed that 800 of them answered the call.

Video later emerged of them stalking protesters with shotguns, opening fire at chest level into the crowds. It takes a special kind of evil to do that.

The regime set up makeshift morgues all across the country with the dead lined up in body bags. One courtyard in Tehran held an estimated 800 bodies, as bereaved loved ones wandered through the corpses, identifying their own.

Despite these horrific scenes, President Trump on Tuesday continued to encourage the protesters. “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS,” he wrote on Truth Social.

“Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.”

The President has said that his warnings to the regime got them to cancel the planned execution on Wednesday of 650 protesters.

If so, that is a significant achievement. Regime officials, trotted out before the international media and the United Nations in New York are pretending that the killings were just a parenthesis and that everything has returned to normal.

That is far from the truth.

So what happens next?

The regime believes it has broken the back of the protest movement and has imposed a nation-wide curfew at 8 PM, when most of the protests began.

It has massively deployed security forces across the country to deter peaceful gatherings, but the Institute for the Study of War calls that mobilization “unsustainable,” and that sooner or later the security forces will crack. When that happens, the protests will begin anew.

People tend to forget that the revolution of 1978-1979 took nearly a full year to topple the regime of the Shah. When massacres such as this recent one took place, Ayatollah Khomeini, speaking from the Paris suburbs, would decree a forty-day mourning period.

I suspect something similar will occur now. There will be a lull in public protests as people mourn the dead. And during that lull, the protestors will organize.

They will also be playing cat and mouse with the security services, who will attempt to identify them and arrest them as they have during previous waves of protest.

A word of caution to those analysts and nay-sayers who believe that the arrests will cripple the movement — or who bemoan the lack of a single unified organization behind which the protestors can rally.

First, you do not have nation-wide protests – in hundreds of cities – without organization, even if that organization is primarily at the local level. Second, protesters do have a single unifying figure to lead the movement: the son of the former Shah.

I have known Reza Pahlavi for well over thirty years. My latest book, The Iran House, takes its title from a unpublicized meeting at my home in Kensington, Maryland, in 1995, between Reza Pahlavi and Uri Lubrani, the Israeli official in charge of Iran policy for decades.

For many years, he demurred from playing a leadership role, trying to encourage others to step up to the plate. Instead, they squabbled and fought for the crumbs beneath the table.

More recently, the Crown Prince has understand that only he has the legitimacy and the heft to mobilize a nation-wide movement, and he is finally claiming the mantle of leadership. This is a huge shift.

At the peak of the protests, he unveiled his program for transitioning from dictatorship to freedom, which he calls the Iran Prosperity Project. It includes teams of Iranian experts with specific plans for running each sector of government and the economy as a transitional government prepares the country for elections.

It’s very much like a presidential campaign platform.

So what will President Trump do?

His own statements have led most people to believe he would order a military strike on Iran. But I suspect he has hesitated because, until now, none of his military commanders has come up with a plan where US force would decisively end the clerical regime.

Earlier this week, the President ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) and its carrier battle group to depart the South China Sea and steam for the region, a journey that normally takes between ten to fourteen days. I suspect that in the meantime, the president will be exploring his options.

This much I know for certain: Trump’s action will ultimately turn out to be something that none of the pundits, including me, could predict.

So stay tuned.

I discuss this, as well as China’s moves to launch the belt and roads initiative into orbit, and the United Nations’s dreadful attempt to impose a world-wide censorship regime on anyone who doesn’t accept its climate change hokum, on this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend.

As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday on 104.9 FM or 550 AM in the Jacksonville, Florida, area. You can listen later to the podcast here.

Yours in freedom.

©2026 Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.

Website: kentimmerman.com

Ken Timmerman’s 14th book of non-fiction, THE IRAN HOUSE: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, can be ordered by clicking here or by viewing my author’s page, here. 

Raising Olives in Provence, can be ordered by clicking here.