VANCOUVER-OTTAWA
In this Bureau Podcast breaking episode, I’m joined by my former colleague Negar Mojtahedi — now a Canadian investigative journalist with Iran International English — to unpack a revolt in Iran that was moving at internet speed abroad until the regime shut down networks last night, making Negar’s on-the-ground sourcing all the more crucial — especially as major broadcasters, from the BBC to the CBC, have appeared reticent to cover this monumental story.
We begin where both Negar and I share expertise: exposing the Iranian regime and the organized-crime national security story hiding in plain sight here in North America. Negar’s reporting has found “hundreds, potentially if not thousands” of regime-linked officials and intermediaries living freely in Canada — often not uniformed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps figures, but family-linked networks and financial middlemen who can move money, facilitate influence, and in some cases monitor dissidents.
We discuss how this threat extends beyond the Iranian diaspora, reaching into the Jewish community as well — including lethal threats against former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler. Later in the episode, I return to the point that even if Western citizens think they don’t care about the Iranian regime’s harms abroad, they should understand the dangers they face at home — including how organized crime networks can traffic fentanyl one day and take Iranian intelligence-linked hit contracts the next.
From there, we move into how this uprising began in an unexpected place and metastasized into something larger and more dangerous for the clerical state. We discuss how the first sparks appeared in the bazaar’s electronics and phone sector — a modern pressure point where merchants live and die by currency volatility and market shocks — before widening into a protest movement not anchored to one grievance.
We discuss how the breadth of complaints matters as much as the size of street protests — and how what stands out is where the revolt has taken root: smaller and religious cities the regime traditionally counted on, including Mashhad, alongside multi-ethnic participation from Kurds, Baluch, and Azerbaijanis. As Negar frames it, the regime’s legitimacy is eroding across constituencies it once relied on.
We also discuss the day-by-day escalation and the accelerants outside Iran’s borders. A major theme, Negar says, is the “Trump factor”: we discuss how President Trump’s warning that if the regime kills its people “we’re locked and we’re loaded” appears to have shifted the psychological environment for protesters, even if the threat so far remains rhetorical. We discuss why that message lands differently given Trump’s history of action — including the killing of Qasem Soleimani, strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, and this week’s stunning special forces extraction of Iranian regime ally President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — and how Trump’s at-times chaotic, unpredictable approach may be shaping how regime officials calculate risk now, even as he has publicly kept his options open.
Against that backdrop, we discuss reports of mounting deaths and mass arrests as the internet goes dark, and why the blackout itself becomes part of the story — cutting off real-time verification, restricting organizing, and enabling harsher repression away from the cameras.
On the ground, we discuss whether state coercive power is cracking and what signals analysts watch in a true revolutionary moment. We discuss protests targeting symbols of control, including isolated attacks on Revolutionary Guard assets, reports of some security personnel withdrawing rather than confronting crowds, and — most striking — scenes described as police in smaller towns cheering protesters.
We also discuss the regime’s use of outsourced repression, including Iran International reporting that “more than 800 members” of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia have entered Iran, alongside accounts of Arabic being heard on the streets, buses transporting detainees, and people disappearing into prisons without family notification.
