TEHRAN – A well-placed Iranian analyst has outlined how the Iranian authorities dealt with the recent wave of unrest and the plots hatched by the enemy to topple the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The analyst, Mehdi Mohammadi, who is the advisor to the speaker of the Iranian parliament on strategic affairs, wrote an opinion piece for the conservative Vatan Emrooz newspaper in which he posited that the project of toppling the Islamic Republic has come to naught. 

“The story began as such: ‘portraying regime change as possible, quick, and easy for a minority segment of society that was supposed to deem itself a majority in the bubble of network’. The goal was to create chaos with the participation of hundreds of thousands of individuals. The plotting party knew from the start that it was not able to bring the majority to the streets. The goal was to form a minority that, within a complex cognitive war, was supposed to reach the conclusion that the time has come to resort to violence,” the analyst wrote. 
 
To reach this goal, Mohammadi continued, a creative tool was concocted which is to create the impression that the regime can be toppled. 

According to the analyst, a smart, nuanced, and complex plot was hatched to make some segments of Iranian society believe that the game is over and the Islamic Republic is in the process of being overthrown. 

“The fundamental presumption of the project was as such: If a minority segment of society is made to believe that the regime is being toppled, great unrest will take place. A foreign security official had said, ‘Governments get toppled when they seem to get toppled!’,” Mohammadi wrote. 
 
The analyst went on to enumerate a number of events such as Macron calling the unrest a “revolution” and the Berlin rally as signals by foreign parties aimed at creating the impression that foreign powers are willing to see regime change taking place in Iran. 

The end result, Mohammadi averred, was a total failure. 

He said violence and lies on the part of rioters and the regime creating social awareness were reasons why the regime change project failed. 

“As a result, those who initially thought that something was being accomplished withdrew. The inability of those seeking regime change to create a horizon, even a vague one, related to the real grievances of the people and their insistence on lies and violence quickly damaged the credibility of the project and increased its costs,” Mohammadi concluded.

According to Mohammadi, the “illusion” that the political system can be toppled has now faded away and it transpired that the social roots of the system are more robust than the plotters of the project assessed.

Over the last two months, Iran grappled with a nationwide wave of unrest that erupted in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini. The Iranian authorities have said that foreign spy agencies stood behind the unrest with the aim of destabilizing the Islamic Republic. Iran’s Intelligence Ministry and the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) issued a lengthy, joint statement in the midst of the unrest explaining the involvement of foreigners in stoking the unrest. 

Iran’s Intelligence Ministry has stated that the United States and the United Kingdom were "directly" involved in the recent unrest in certain cities in the country.

A senior Iranian general has said that the recent unrest was the produce of 47 spy agencies. General Qolamreza Soleimani, the head of the Basij Organization, said the enemy used a “hybrid warfare” against Iran in the recent unrest, according to Iran’s state news agency IRNA.

General Soleimani said “sedition of riots” was supposed to kick off simultaneously with the start of the academic year in Iran but it took place earlier and “47 spy agencies waged an all-out hybrid war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”