Behind Closed Doors by Nuha Faiz
If you think criticism of the Iranian regime's massacre of its own people makes me a Zionist mouthpiece, you've fallen into the exact trap both Washington and Tehran want you in. You've accepted the poisonous lie that Iranians can only be murdered by one side or the other. That their blood only matters when it serves someone else's war.
I reject that entirely. The thousands of Iranians being shot, beaten, blinded, and disappeared in the streets right now are not geopolitical pawns. They are human beings whose government is slaughtering them for demanding survival. And if you cannot hold that truth without immediately pivoting to "but what about Western imperialism," then you've already chosen to let them die quietly. So, let me say what needs to be said, without the cowardice of false balance: The Islamic Republic is conducting a massacre. Netanyahu's government is waiting like a vulture for Iran to collapse so Israel can expand its dominance. The United States is salivating at the prospect of regime change it can exploit. And the Iranian people are being crushed between all of them.
Every single one of these things is true. And none of them cancel each other out.
The Massacre Is Not a Western Fabrication
The facts are not ambiguous. Between late December 2025 and now, Iranian security forces have killed anywhere from 2,000 to potentially 20,000 protesters. The range exists because Tehran shut down the internet specifically to hide the body count. When a government blacks out communications during a crackdown, it's not because the real numbers would vindicate them. Amnesty International documented security forces using live ammunition, metal pellet shotguns aimed at protesters' eyes, systematic beatings, mass arbitrary arrests, and night raids. Human Rights Watch confirmed the same. These are not CIA press releases. These are exhaustive investigations by organizations that have also documented Israeli war crimes in Gaza, American torture in Iraq, and Saudi atrocities in Yemen. The protests started in Tehran's Grand Bazaar on December 28 over economic collapse, specifically, the rial losing over 40% of its value since the June 2025 war with Israel, on top of a decade of sanctions-induced devastation. They spread to more than 180 cities. This was not coordinated by Langley or Tel Aviv. This was hunger, humiliation, and rage finally exceeding fear. And Tehran's response? Industrial-scale violence. Deliberate maiming. Executions framed as "warnings." The full machinery of authoritarian terror.
If your first instinct when reading this is to question whether it's real, ask yourself: would you demand the same proof if these were Palestinian protesters being shot by the IDF? If the answer is no, then your politics aren't anti-imperialist. They're just tribalist.
Let's Talk About the Vultures Circling
What the Western media will not tell you or will bury in paragraph seventeen is that the economic catastrophe that sparked these protests was not created by the Islamic Republic alone. It was engineered through decades of US sanctions designed specifically to immiserate the Iranian population. Since Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the rial has lost nearly 90% of its value. Not because of mismanagement alone, though there is plenty, but because the United States weaponized the global financial system to strangle Iran's economy.
The people starving in Iranian streets right now are victims of both their own government's kleptocracy AND American economic warfare that treats their suffering as acceptable collateral damage. The stated goal of sanctions is always the same: make life so unbearable that people rise up and overthrow their government. It is regime change by starvation. And the cruelty is the point, because if sanctions actually worked to change regimes, we would have run out of dictatorships decades ago. What they actually do is weaken civil society, enrich regime insiders who control black markets, and create the exact conditions for mass protests that then get violently crushed. Washington knows this. They simply do not care.
And now, as Iranians pour into the streets, Trump has threatened to "knock the hell out of Iran" if the regime responds with violence. This is not solidarity. This is a predator smelling blood. Trump doesn't give a damn about Iranian protesters, his administration has a Muslim ban, for God's sake. What he wants is a justification to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, which Netanyahu has been begging him to do. Netanyahu is currently pushing Trump for "round two" strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities, arguing that Iran is rebuilding after the June bombardment. The Israeli prime minister is not concerned about Iranian democracy. He is concerned about Iranian power. And if the Islamic Republic collapses from internal revolt, Israel gets everything it wanted without spending a single bomb. This is why Israel has been conspicuously silent during the protests. They are watching. Waiting. Calculating whether the Iranian people will do Israel's work for them.
My concern is, do Iranian lives only matter when their deaths can be blamed on the West? What about when Iranians are killed by their own government, should we look away?
The 12-Day War You Didn't Hear About
Let's rewind to June 2025, because this context matters. Israel and the United States launched a 12-day military campaign against Iran, bombing nuclear facilities, military sites, and infrastructure across 27 provinces. This was 360 separate attacks. It devastated Iran's air defences, exposed the weakness of its military, and humiliated a regime that had built its legitimacy on resistance to the West. The war also killed Iranian civilians, though the exact number remains unknown because both sides have reasons to lie. What we do know is that the economic shockwave was immediate; the rial plummeted, imports collapsed, and shortages intensified. This war was an act of aggression. It was illegal under international law. It was designed to cripple Iran and force capitulation. And it was cheered on by Western governments that claim to care about human rights. And yet, this does not mean the protests are fake. The Iranian regime wants you to believe that every act of dissent is a CIA plot, because it allows them to frame mass murder as self-defence. Meanwhile, the US and Israel want you to believe the protesters are freedom fighters yearning for Western-style democracy, because it allows them to frame potential invasion as liberation. Both narratives are instrumentalizing real suffering for strategic ends.
The truth is simpler and uglier. Iranians are protesting because they cannot afford food. Because they have been beaten down by both internal repression and external siege. Because the promise of the 1979 Revolution has curdled into theocratic kleptocracy. Because they are tired of being told their misery is noble resistance when their leaders live in wealth while they queue for bread. They are not protesting because they want to be bombed by America. They are protesting because they want to live.
What Genuine Solidarity Actually Looks Like
1. Oppose the Iranian regime's massacre unconditionally. No "but." No "context" that justifies shooting people in the eyes. No false equivalence between a rock and a rifle. The Islamic Republic is murdering its own population to preserve power. This is intolerable.
2. Oppose any Western military intervention in Iran. Trump's threats are not solidarity. They are opportunism. Bombing Iran will kill the same people the regime is already killing. It will not liberate anyone. It will destroy what remains of Iranian civil society and create another Iraq or Libya, a permanently destabilized state where imperial powers fight proxy wars over the rubble.
3. Demand the immediate lifting of sanctions that collectively punish Iranian civilians. Economic warfare is violence. It does not weaken the regime; it strengthens them by making the population dependent on state-controlled resources. If you actually want the Iranian government to fall, stop starving the people who would have to overthrow it.
4. Recognize that Iranians do not need saving, they need space. The Iranian people have agency. They have been fighting for freedom for over a century. What they need is not American bombs or Israeli air strikes or Western lectures about democracy. They need their government to stop killing them. They need sanctions lifted so they can rebuild their economy. They need the international community to stop treating their country as a chessboard.
5. Hold the same standard everywhere. If you care about state violence in Iran, you must care about it in Gaza. In Yemen. In Kashmir. In Myanmar. Selective outrage is not morality, it is tribalism. And if you only notice massacres when they can be blamed on governments you already oppose, you do not actually oppose massacres. You just oppose certain governments.
The Geopolitical Trap
The Islamic Republic and the Western imperial axis want you to believe that you must choose between them. That criticism of one is support for the other. That there is no third position. This is a lie. It is possible, necessary, even to oppose both theocratic authoritarianism and imperial domination. To stand with protesters in Tehran while condemning airstrikes on Iranian soil. To recognize that the same Western governments expressing concern for Iranian human rights are arming the massacre in Gaza. The Iranian government wants to delegitimize the protests by calling them foreign plots. The US and Israel want to weaponize the protests to justify military aggression. Both are using Iranian blood as currency. And if you let either of them set the terms of debate, you have already chosen a side, just not the side of the people actually dying.
Why This Should Matter to Us
As a Sri Lankan, I recognize this pattern. We know what it means to be caught between authoritarianism at home and geopolitical manipulation abroad. We know how economic collapse turns political. We know how governments blame external enemies for internal failures. We know the script. But we also know what happens when the international community treats your crisis as someone else's opportunity. When foreign powers claim to support your democracy while engineering your dependence. When solidarity becomes exploitation.
Sri Lankans took to the streets in 2022 because we could not survive the kleptocracy and mismanagement of our own leaders. Not because we wanted IMF diktat or foreign intervention. We wanted accountability from those who claimed to represent us. Iranians are doing the same. And they deserve better than being reduced to propaganda for any side.
A Final Warning
If the Iranian regime survives this uprising and it might, through sheer brutality, it will be more paranoid, more repressive, and more isolated than ever. It will use the spectre of foreign conspiracy to justify permanent emergency rule. The people will have bled for nothing. If the regime falls and Western powers sweep in to "stabilize" the aftermath, Iran will become another resource to be extracted, another market to be opened, another staging ground for regional dominance. The people will have bled for someone else's profit. The only outcome that honours their sacrifice is one where Iranians determine their own future. Not Tehran's mullahs. Not Washington's strategists. Not Tel Aviv's war planners. Just Iranians. And if you cannot hold that position without flinching, if you feel the need to qualify it or redirect it or diminish it, then ask yourself: whose side are you really on? Because it should be the side of people who just want to stop dying.
No empire. No theocracy. No massacre. No invasion. Just freedom. Just dignity. Just the right to live without terror.
That is not a Zionist position. That is not a Western position. That is not even a political position. It is the only human position left.
History does not ask who issued the best statement or who performed the most sophisticated geopolitical analysis. It asks who saw people being killed and said it was wrong. Every single time. Without exception. Without qualification.
