Iran leader vows regime will “not back down” and says vandals trying to please Trump as web blackout continues

Thousands of Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran and other cities Thursday night, heeding a call by the country’s exiled crown prince to make their voices heard in the most serious challenge to the Islamic Republic’s hardline rulers in many years.

The protests had spread across the country for 12 days, leaving about 40 people dead and more than 2,000 detained by security forces, but despite the arrests and a nationwide internet and phone service blackout, the unrest escalated dramatically on Thursday night.

It was impossible to get a clear picture of the extent of the unrest, given the clamp down on the flow of information. But Iran’s ruler appeared in a brief television address on Friday morning, defiantly accusing President Trump of inspiring the protests, showing he remained in charge, and vowing that his regime would “not back down.”

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, called for unity and accused “a bunch of vandals” in Tehran, where a state TV building was set alight, of having “destroyed a building that belongs to them to please the U.S. president.” 

As he spoke, an audience in front of him shouted the familiar refrain of “Death to America!”

Given the communications blackout, which continued Friday morning according to the NetBlocks internet monitoring organization, short videos posted online, largely by anti-regime activists, provided the only real window into the chaos across the country.

It appeared to ramp up dramatically from 8 p.m. local time on Thursday, the moment at which exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi had urged Iranians to shout and chant from their windows against the regime.

“Iranians demanded their freedom tonight,” said Pahlavi, the son of the former head of state Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who fled the country just before the 1979 Islamic revolution that brought the current regime to power. 

In statements posted online, he called for European leaders to join Mr. Trump to “hold the regime to account,” using “all technical, financial, and diplomatic resources available to restore communication to the Iranian people so that their voice and their will can be heard and seen. Do not let the voices of my courageous compatriots be silenced.”

Pahlavi had issued his call several days earlier for mass chanting against the regime at 8 p.m., which is noon on the East Coast of the United States, on both Thursday and Friday, so it’s possible the regime will face another night of massive unrest.

In the videos, which are difficult to independently verify, many people could be heard chanting “Death to the dictator!” and “Death to the Islamic Republic,” while others called for a return of the monarchy, declaring: “Pahlavi will return!”

As of Thursday, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which relies on a network of contacts inside the country, said at least 42 people had been killed and more than 2,270 others detained, but that was before a clear picture could be gained of the chaos on Thursday night and Friday morning.

“All of the huge crowds in my neighborhood are pro-Pahlavi and from several areas my sources report the same — pro-Pahlavi crowds are prevailing, undeniably,” one source in Tehran told CBS News on Thursday night, calling it “monarchists responding to Reza,” before his communications were cut off.

“For the first time, the government decided to shut the internet yesterday, and usually when they shut the Internet, it means that they’re going to use violence against people,” Maziar Bahari, editor of the independent IranWire news site, told CBS News on Friday.

Bahari said activists and journalists outside Iran had heard reports of security forces shooting at people in different parts of the country, but that the information was impossible to verify. Other CBS News sources, both people inside the country and those in contact with family in Iran, said there did not appear to have been massive, widespread violence on Thursday evening, but they stressed that it was difficult to get a clear picture amid the communications cuts.

“Even Starlink, which has been the main line of communication for some activists in different parts of the country, has been jammed,” Bahari said, referring to the satellite communication system run by Elon Musk.

CBS News has sought comment from SpaceX, which runs Starlink, but did not get any immediate response.

Bahari said this would likely result in the “incarceration of hundreds or even thousands of protesters. It’s gonna lead to torture and interrogation of thousands of protestors, into killing of the protestors. But it has not prevented protests in the past. People have continued to protest, and this time, because the middle classes – the traditional bazaar merchants – they have joined the young people, I think the protests, it will be very difficult for the regime to stop.”

How might Iran respond?

“Many people have called what is happening in Iran right now a revolution, and we can see different signs of revolution in Iran at the moment, but a revolution usually needs a leader for the revolution … We don’t have that leader,” said Bahari, who was working as a journalist in Iran in 2009 when a previous round of massive protests swept across the country. He was arrested and detained for over 100 days.

He said he expects the protests to continue, regardless of any steps the regime takes to crack down, which he said could vary significantly based on the whims of local and regional commanders.

“I think people are more desperate than before. In 2009, the economic situation was not as bad as it is now,” Bahari said. “In 2009 the protests were really about dignity and citizen rights. In 2022, the ‘woman life freedom’ [movement] was mainly about the rights of women to determine their own destinies. But I think these protests, they are about the economic situation, but also about dignity. It’s about the national pride. And because of that, these protests will be very, very difficult to contain.”

“I was very lucky that I was a journalist for a foreign publication at that time … and because of that, I wasn’t treated the same way that unknown prisoners were treated,” Bahari told CBS News.

But despite his status as “a VIP prisoner,” Bahari said he was “tortured physically. I was tortured psychologically. I was threatened with execution. And I know for a fact that many of the protesters in 2009 who were arrested with me and did not have my profile, they were treated much more harshly by the prison guards in different parts of the country.”

“Iranian people, they do not lack bravery. They lack leadership in terms of opposing the government,” Bahari said. “But at the same time, many of the protesters, they have nothing to lose. Their rate of suicide in the past couple of decades in Iran is really high. And when you’re suicidal, when you have nothing to lose, you don’t care about what may happen to you in a protest. So you just come out and ask for your rights.”

Echoing Khamenei, Iran’s state-controlled media on Friday accused “terrorist agents” of the U.S. and Israel of causing the violence. It acknowledged casualties, but gave no details.

The protests began on December 28 as merchants in Tehran closed their shops and took to the streets to vent anger over Iran’s long-ailing economy, which has been hobbled for years by global isolation and a raft of sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other nations over its nuclear program and backing of armed proxy groups across the region.

Iran’s autocratic regime has quashed several previous waves of unrest, violently, and the source in Tehran told CBS News there was significant fear among many people that the current protests would draw a similar draconian crackdown.

This time, however, the protests are playing out under the threat of a direct U.S. intervention by President Trump.

“I have let them know that if they start killing people, which they tend to do during their riots — they have lots of riots — if they do it, we are going to hit them very hard,” Mr. Trump said Thursday during a radio interview. 

Vice President JD Vance told reporters at the White House that the U.S. stood by anyone engaged in peaceful protests in Iran. Asked if the U.S. would, as it did over the summer, join in any new Israeli strikes on Iran, Vance called on Tehran to negotiate with Washington over its nuclear program, but said he would “let the president speak to what we’re going to do in the future.”

Bahari said that Iranian officials had told him they were concerned about Mr. Trump potentially intervening in Iran even before these protests. 

The recent U.S. attack on Venezuela, “has really scared many Iranian officials and may have affected their actions in terms of how to confront the protesters. But at the same time, it has inspired many protesters to come out, because they know that the leader of the world’s main superpower is supporting their cause.”