Iran International
The Iran-US truce has exposed a deeper battle inside Tehran, where public rifts over censorship, negotiations and the system’s future point to a survival debate that could reshape or further destabilize the regime, experts told the Eye for Iran podcast.
In the days since the fighting subsided, Iran's political establishment has offered an unusually public glimpse into divisions that have long remained largely behind closed doors.
State television abruptly cut short a pre-recorded interview with Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf as he discussed the use of blocked Iranian funds abroad, prompting accusations that politically sensitive remarks had been censored. State broadcaster IRIB insisted the interview had always been scheduled to air in two parts.
Elsewhere, hardliners heckled Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi during a visit to Karbala, chanting "death to the appeaser" and "we don't want pretense" as Tehran pursues negotiations with Washington. Establishment commentators have also begun openly discussing ideas that, until recently, would have been politically difficult to imagine entering the public conversation.
Individually, each episode could be dismissed as another example of factional politics inside the Islamic Republic.
Taken together, however, they point to something more significant.
They suggest the post-war debate inside Tehran is no longer simply about diplomacy, sanctions or military strategy.
It is increasingly about how the Islamic Republic must adapt if it is to preserve power in the wake of one of the greatest shocks in its 47-year history.
"The question isn't whether they're engaging in soul-searching," Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told Eye for Iran. "They have to."
For Vatanka, the significance of this moment is not that the Islamic Republic has suddenly embraced reform.
It is that the war appears to have stripped away old assumptions.
"I think there is a lot more clarity today than there was before the war," he said. "The regime knows the old model failed. The question now is what comes next."
He believes survival—not reform—is driving the conversation.
"If you're in the business of surviving, you don't want this to happen to you again," he said. "Maybe this is the moment you change course."
That should not be mistaken for moderation.
"You don't do it because you love the people of Iran," Vatanka said. "You do it because you want to survive."
The debate itself could prove destabilizing.
"When the knives are out within the regime, they go after each other in vicious ways," Vatanka warned, arguing that competition between rival factions could intensify as different camps attempt to shape the Islamic Republic's post-war future.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argues that understanding those debates first requires understanding the nature of the political system itself.
"It is not straight-up Islamic theocracy," he said.
Instead, he described the Islamic Republic as a political project drawing on multiple ideological traditions.
"A traditional Shia marja has basically taken Karl Marx, the Quran and Plato and put it together and created a political system on top of that."
That, Taleblu argues, is why outsiders should be careful not to confuse adaptation with transformation.
"I think it is a real battle within this regime of how best to preserve the prerogatives and the privileges of power while also sacrificing as little as possible on the ideology."
Even if institutions evolve, he says, the guiding principles may not.
"Real transformation comes with behavior. It comes with substance—not style."
Historian Shahram Kholdi remains skeptical that the current debate represents a genuine break with the past.
"Any difference that has existed between any of these people, in my opinion, has always been one of degree rather than in kind," he said. "Tactics are different. Worldviews, strategies, expectations and demands are all the same."
Rather than seeing reform, Kholdi sees a political elite trying to preserve the system after one of its most serious crises.
But he also believes the post-war period could intensify competition among rival centers of power.
"If Ghalibaf and his ilk manage to get the upper hand... the rest of the gang would feel completely insecure, and that intra-conflict then would materialize into a hot conflict within them," he said.
"And that may very well spell their final doom once and for all."
Whether that prediction proves correct remains to be seen.
What is already clear is that the conversation unfolding inside Tehran has moved beyond the immediate consequences of the war.
It has become a debate about the future of the Islamic Republic itself.
In July 2006, Henry Kissinger argued that Iran's leaders would eventually have to decide whether they were governing "a cause or a nation."
Today, that question is no longer being asked only by foreign observers. Increasingly, it appears to be one the Islamic Republic is asking itself.
The funeral is not simply the burial of a dead ruler. It is an attempt to rebuild the image of a damaged power structure.
The Islamic Republic lost its leader in the first blow of the war, at the heart of its own power network and alongside members of his family.
Now it is trying to use a coffin, flags, religious elegies, organized crowds and the language of sacrifice to change the meaning of that defeat.
Whether Khamenei’s actual body is inside the coffin may matter less than what the coffin is being made to carry.
That uncertainty is itself part of the Islamic Republic’s new condition: a system that hides the truth, manages death and turns opacity into political ritual.
The coffin is therefore more than a funeral object. It is a message. The system wants to show that it can still stage power, mobilize crowds and manufacture a national narrative.
A coffin in place of authority
In life, Khamenei was the final symbol of unaccountable power in the Islamic Republic.
For decades, he oversaw repression, executions, the elimination of opponents, control over women’s bodies, engineered elections and security violence. But the way he died broke the image of invulnerability built around him.
A leader who presented himself as commander of the “resistance” and the center of regional power was not killed on a battlefield. He was targeted in a moment that exposed the vulnerability of the structure he ruled.
That is why the Islamic Republic has to rewrite the scene of his death.
The funeral is meant to replace the image of defeat with another image: a slain leader, a grieving religious community, a foreign enemy and a system that still stands after being struck.
As so often in the Islamic Republic, religious ritual becomes a tool of political survival.
In the Islamic Republic’s political culture, death is rarely allowed to remain death. If it can serve power, it is turned into martyrdom.
The state is now trying to reconstruct Khamenei not as the repressive ruler of the past four decades, but as a sacred and wronged figure killed by an external enemy.
But the problem for the Islamic Republic is that society’s memory has not been erased.
For millions of Iranians, Khamenei’s name is tied to the January 2026 killings, the suppression of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, the bloody crackdown of November 2019, the execution of protesters, mass poverty, forced migration, structural corruption and the reduction of ordinary life to survival.
The government wants the sound of elegies and the image of crowds to cover that memory. But official mourning is not the same as social grief.
A crowd gathered through buses, public holidays, state resources, administrative pressure, round-the-clock propaganda and networks linked to the Basij and other government bodies is not proof of public love.
It is proof of the state’s capacity, and insistence, on organizing the street.
The Islamic Republic wants to turn bodies present in public space into evidence of loyalty, even if many of those bodies are there because of fear, coercion, benefit, habit or indifference.
A ritual for political survival
The timing of the ceremonies during the holy Shiite month of Muharram gives the state a powerful symbolic opportunity.
Since its birth, the Islamic Republic has narrated politics through the language of Ashura: oppression, blood, enemies, sacrifice and martyrdom.
It is now trying to place Khamenei’s death inside the same structure of meaning.
In that narrative, a ruler responsible for many deaths is recast as a victim whose blood must be avenged. This reversal is the core of the propaganda.
The real victims are removed from the scene, while the agent of repression is placed in the position of the wronged.
The mothers of those killed, political prisoners, suppressed women and the families of executed protesters are absent from this stage.
The scene is designed for only one authorized form of mourning: grief for humiliated power.
But the state’s urgent need for religious spectacle also exposes weakness. If political authority were enough, why would the system need so much ritual, spending, closure, security and propaganda to prove that it continues?
The answer is that after Khamenei’s death, the fracture in the image of power has become visible.
His funeral is the first major test of the Islamic Republic after Khamenei.
The system wants to show that his death has not produced collapse, paralysis or a vacuum, and that it can still occupy the street.
The ceremonies are a postwar maneuver by a state that has suffered a military blow, lost much of its social legitimacy and faces a deeply distrustful society.
That is why Khamenei’s funeral is not the end of an era. It is an attempt to control the narrative of how that era ended.
The Islamic Republic knows that the way Khamenei died symbolizes weakness. It is trying to make the way he is buried symbolize power.
But the project contains a central contradiction. A system trying to build authority from Khamenei’s coffin is admitting, without saying so, that authority alone is no longer enough.
If real legitimacy existed, such a vast display would not be necessary. If society were truly grieving, this level of organization would not be needed.
If Khamenei were genuinely loved, the state would not have to rewrite his death with such a volume of propaganda, ritual and security control.
The report, written from Tehran by an anonymous author whose identity is known to WELT’s editors, said officials have drawn up contingency plans for a possible mass-casualty disaster during the processions for the slain former Supreme Leader.
According to WELT, a classified letter from the Iranian Red Crescent and the national crisis management organization to First Vice President Mohammad-Reza Aref projected between 1,500 and 3,000 possible deaths.
The report said a special unit had been set up to handle the dead and missing, while thousands of new graves had been prepared at Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery.
One Tehran municipality employee, identified under a pseudonym for security reasons, told WELT that colleagues in the city’s crisis headquarters had confirmed the preparations.
“The prepared graves really exist,” she was quoted as saying. “Those responsible were told that up to 3,000 dead would be okay. With such a large crowd and this extreme heat, no one knows what will happen.”
The claims have not been independently confirmed.
Khamenei’s funeral ceremonies began in Tehran on Saturday and are expected to continue through Qom, the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, and finally Mashhad, where he is due to be buried on Thursday.
WELT said the authorities were planning a sweeping security and logistical operation in Tehran, including movement restrictions, possible disruption to air travel, thousands of buses, temporary kitchens and the use of schools and mosques to house participants.
The report said officials had spoken of as many as 20 million people attending, a figure that is difficult to verify and is often used by Iranian authorities to portray state ceremonies as displays of mass support.
According to WELT, Tehran Municipality, led by hardline mayor Alireza Zakani, is playing a central role in the preparations, deploying 11,000 buses and keeping metro and bus rapid transit lines free and operating around the clock.
Municipal employees told the newspaper that each Tehran district had been allocated the equivalent of around 500,000 to 650,000 euros for the three days of ceremonies, excluding additional funds for bodies such as the fire department, parks organization, transport authorities and construction units.
Government-linked journalists cited by WELT estimated the budget at about 15 million euros for Tehran alone, with another five million euros each for Qom and Mashhad. With ceremonies also planned in Najaf and Karbala, the report said the funeral could become one of the most expensive state burials in modern history.
The scale of the preparations has raised concern because Iran has a recent history of deadly funeral crushes. At least 56 people were killed and more than 200 injured during the 2020 funeral for IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani in Kerman, while Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 funeral also descended into chaos, leaving at least eight people dead and hundreds injured.
WELT also described deep political tension around the ceremonies, saying radical supporters of the Islamic Republic have used nightly gatherings to denounce the US-Iran memorandum and threaten senior officials involved in negotiations, including Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
Some participants have demanded continued war to avenge Khamenei’s killing, while videos circulating online showed hardline religious speakers making militant speeches, with some attendees carrying rifles.
The funeral is taking place during a fragile ceasefire and amid growing public frustration over the cost of the ceremonies, economic hardship and the government’s mobilization of state resources for political display.
This time, Taghi Changalvaei was one of those who went.
He entered the fire to help save Khayiz, a protected area in the southern Zagros near Behbahan, in Khuzestan province. He did not return.
For Zagros communities, his death was familiar. For years, local residents and environmental volunteers have been losing friends and relatives to fires that return each summer across the mountains.
Iranian media have reported that since 2020, 27 people have died while trying to control fires in the Zagros.
Most were not professional firefighters. They had no specialized training, no protective clothing and little more than improvised tools.
They went because the forests were burning, and because in many parts of the Zagros, people know that if they do not move first, help may arrive too late.
A landscape primed to burn
The Zagros Mountains run for about 1,600 kilometers, from northwestern Iran toward the Persian Gulf. Their oak woodlands cover almost six million hectares, roughly 40 percent of Iran’s forest area, and support millions of rural livelihoods while helping regulate water and prevent soil erosion.
The Persian oak defines this landscape, shaping village economies, water systems and grazing patterns. But the Zagros oak belt has been shrinking for decades under pressure from illegal logging, overgrazing, drought, climate change and poor management.
Each summer, fire turns that decline into an emergency. That pattern was visible again in Khayiz, where a blaze that began on Badil Mountain burned for days through protected forests near Behbahan, exposing shortages of aerial firefighting capacity.
Experts say the fires have become larger, harder to contain and more closely tied to climate stress, fuel buildup and weak management.
Winter and spring rains can cover the slopes with grasses and seasonal plants. By early summer, heat dries that vegetation into fuel load: the combustible layer that lets a spark, a cigarette butt, a campfire or an intentional blaze spread quickly.
One part of the debate concerns grazing. In the past, livestock consumed part of the seasonal vegetation that now dries out in the mountains. From around 2021, authorities pursued efforts to reduce grazing pressure more seriously to help forests and pastures recover from overuse.
The aim was environmental protection: overgrazing has long damaged Zagros forests, limiting natural regeneration and weakening young oak growth. But some experts argue that reducing livestock presence without alternative vegetation management may have left more dry grass and brush by summer.
That does not make grazing restrictions the cause of the fires. Climate change, drought, oak decline, human negligence, arson, weak fire roads, aircraft shortages, poor coordination and lack of equipment all remain central. Unmanaged vegetation, some experts say, may be one piece of a larger puzzle.
In parts of Spain and the western United States, targeted grazing is used to reduce wildfire fuel loads and maintain firebreaks. For the Zagros, the question is whether the state can protect forests without removing one form of vegetation control and failing to replace it with another.
Bigger fires, weaker capacity
The statistics point to a worsening burden. In the Iranian year that began in March 2021, about 21,000 hectares of forests across the country burned, according to figures cited in Iranian media. By the year that began in March 2024, that figure had risen to about 27,000 hectares.
By November 2025, Iran had recorded more than 2,300 fires across national land, forests and rangelands, burning about 46,000 hectares. A recent study of the southern Zagros recorded more than 13,000 fire events from 2000 to 2023, with a sharp increase in the most recent years covered by the study.
The year that began in March 2026 has opened with another wave of fires, from Khayiz and Mongasht to the highlands of Lorestan, Fars and Kordestan provinces. Mongasht, a long mountain massif between Khuzestan and Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari, is one of several rugged areas where local residents are often the first responders.
The financial picture has also worsened. On paper, the rial budget of Iran’s Natural Resources and Watershed Management Organization has increased. But once the collapse in the value of Iran’s currency is taken into account, its real resources appear to have fallen sharply.
Calculations based on budget figures cited in Iranian media and market exchange rates suggest the organization’s dollar-denominated budget dropped from roughly $94 million in the Iranian year that began in March 2021 to about $41 million in the year that began in March 2026. Compared with the year that began in March 2016, the decline is estimated at more than 60 percent.
The direction is clear: while the fires have grown, the state’s real capacity to fight them has shrunk.
The consequences are visible on the ground. The fire in Khayiz is now out. But for Changalvaei‘s family, and for the families of others who died trying to save the Zagros, the fire has not ended.
Without changes in policy, funding and firefighting capacity, next summer will bring the same scene again: men with shovels, branches and bottles of water climbing toward the smoke, while fire moves through the oaks and leaves behind ash and names.
