By warning of “Syriaization,” authorities shift blame to protesters, normalize unlimited force, and recycle the Syrian playbook: dehumanization, impunity, and violence framed as necessity.
“This is exactly how a country turns into Syria”—this is one of the lines repeated again and again by Iranian authorities and pro-regime commentators these days, in what is often framed as “Syriaization.” With the internet and communications inside Iran cut to near-total darkness, no one can know with certainty how far the killing and repression have gone. But enough is visible to trace the contours of the crackdown and the regime’s plan to protect itself: the dead are many, and the violence is widespread.
In the first days of the uprising, the Islamic Republic relied on the familiar binary of “protester” versus “rioter.” On 19 Dey (January 9, 2026), only hours after the largest anti-government demonstrations erupted across multiple cities, the Supreme Leader escalated the language, calling protesters “harmful elements.” It echoed Bashar al-Assad’s early rhetoric in 2011, when he described Syrian demonstrators as “harmful viruses” and pursued a campaign of “disinfection.”
Hours after Khamenei’s speech, the regime’s security and media machine coined a new label for the protesters: “armed terrorists.”
That same evening, Hossein Yekta—whom Khamenei once held up as one of the regime’s most loyal enforcers—appeared on state television and addressed protesters with a blunt warning: if you and your children come into the streets and get shot, “don’t complain.”
Yekta is a trusted operative in the Supreme Leader’s orbit. From Qom, he rose within Khamenei’s apparatus through organizing repeated attacks on the office and religious center of Hossein-Ali Montazeri in the 1990s, working alongside figures like the Panahian brothers and IRGC networks in Qom. They formed the core of a project meant to destroy Montazeri’s standing so that “the Leader would be consolidated.”
The turning point: when the state decides to kill
Back to the crackdown. The 19th of Dey (January 9, 2026) was likely one of the bloodiest days of repression—when the Islamic Republic decided that killing was acceptable and that preserving “the Leader” justified any cost. That can be traced through scattered testimonies and videos that managed to leave the country via Starlink. One account describes security forces and plainclothes forces firing indiscriminately at protesters with military weapons, shouting “Heydar, Heydar.”
“Heydar” is a devotional name for Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first Imam in Shi’a Islam, often invoked as a symbol of force, loyalty, and righteous battle. In this context, the chant functions as a battle-cry: it frames violence as religiously charged and turns shooting into a performance of allegiance—an assertion that the men with guns are carrying out a sacred duty, not committing a crime.
This chant is tightly bound to Khamenei’s rule. Before his 2023 remarks—when he suggested a direct line to God—Khamenei routinely framed himself through the image of Ali ibn Abi Talib: the warrior with Zulfiqar in hand and the hero of Khaybar, a famous early Islamic battle remembered in Shi’a tradition as a moment of decisive victory attributed to Ali’s strength and authority. The reference is not decorative; it is political. It casts power as divinely sanctioned and violence as rightful.
Khamenei has repeatedly compared himself to Ali. Whenever confronted by protest, he invokes Ali’s example to manufacture a religious foundation for a political program. After the 2009 protests, his cyber-army and repression apparatus were branded “Ammar,” after Ammar Yasir—Ali’s companion presented as unquestioningly obedient. The regime’s narrative factories and historical falsification hubs were named “Ammar Headquarters.” Hossein Yekta himself is among the IRGC commanders tied to that structure.
In this mythology, Khamenei is even portrayed as surpassing the “original” Ali. The difference, as the story goes, is that this Ali overcame the succession “plot” of Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman—something the first Imam supposedly could not do. In other words, what Ali ibn Abi Talib could not accomplish, Ali Khamenei achieved by removing Montazeri—Khomeini’s former designated successor and, later, the most prominent internal clerical critic of state violence and executions.
The organized attack on Montazeri’s house in Qom was carried out to the same chant: “Heydar, Heydar.” Ansar-e Hezbollah—hardline pro-regime vigilante groups closely aligned with state security bodies and long associated with street violence against dissidents, students, and women—used it too when enforcing compulsory veiling and crushing student movements, both to energize themselves and to intimidate the public.
For Khamenei’s followers, “Heydar, Heydar” is a performance of allegiance and a vow of loyalty “to the point of death.” After the 12-day war, and during Khamenei’s rare appearances in his own Hosseiniyeh (religious hall), the chant rises the moment he enters. Inside that hall, its purpose is not to frighten the public; it is to reassure Khamenei: don’t worry—we won’t let them kill you.
The logic of impunity: kill “no matter what”
Back to the repression. Despite a wave of rumors and comparisons about dictators fleeing, there is no real sign of such an ending. A man who cast himself first as equal to the first Imam and later as akin to prophets is more likely to pursue a melodramatic finale—of the kind his favorite filmmaker, Ebrahim Hatamikia, builds on screen. For him, it does not matter that the people are hostages. He is “right,” and that right must be delivered.
In the delivery of that “right,” the killing of protesters—“even if it goes as far as it must”—becomes collateral. Ali Shamkhani used that phrase during the November 2019 massacre, when a fuel price shock triggered another mass uprising. Its meaning was simple: the argument is settled; to preserve the regime, we will kill. How many? As many as necessary.
This is the same pattern Bashar al-Assad used in Syria. Pro–Axis of Resistance propaganda warns that protesting the regime leads straight to “Syriaization”—to the emergence of ISIS and jihadist factions. It is a staggering inversion. In this story, the political system and its repression machine simply do what they “naturally” do: kill, destroy the economy, and ruin lives. If anyone protests that “natural functioning,” then protesters must bear the consequences.
This is exactly what Hossein Yekta tried to hammer home on 19 Dey (January 9, 2026): we will shoot regardless; your duty is to stay home and shut up so you don’t stand in the path of our bullets.
In the “Syriaization” narrative, the bullet-struck body is guilty, not the hand on the trigger. The plundered and beaten are guilty, not the plunderer. Every voice that disturbs the plunderer must be silenced. And if people’s resistance to plunder reaches a breaking point, the one who resisted is blamed.
Whether a protest “turns into Syria” has far less to do with protesters’ behavior than with the rulers’ brutality. It is the degree of criminality at the top that shapes what comes next.
Syria’s lesson: catastrophe is a decision from above
Iran will not become Syria—not because its rulers are kinder, but because its society is more intertwined and more political. But if Syria became hell, it was not because people protested; it was because the ruler decided to drown the country in blood so he could survive.
In 2011, Atef Najib—Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and the security chief of Daraa—was in charge as the Arab Spring reached Syria. A group of schoolchildren in Daraa wrote a slogan on their school wall: “It’s your turn now, doctor.”
Najib proved his loyalty to the dictator in the most brutal way. The children were arrested and tortured. Their fingernails were pulled out; some were killed. When local elders pleaded for the children’s release, they heard the same message later echoed by Shamkhani in 2019 and by the regime’s enforcers in Dey 1404: “Forget that you ever had children.”
No two countries share an identical fate. The social fabric and demographic and identity makeup of each country shapes its trajectory. Iran will not become Syria. But Syria’s experience shows that what drives a country into catastrophe is not people’s protests; it is the state’s decision to unleash unlimited violence on society. If pro–Axis of Resistance commentators want to know why Syria became Syria, they should climb down from their paper towers of geopolitics and imperialism analysis—and listen to Syrians themselves.
