Tehran Braces for Possible Mass Protests as Street Control Appears to Weaken Across Iran

and the state TV [music] in Iran themselves confirmed that at least 10 have been destroyed.

>> Something important is unfolding across Tehran right now and it connects two separate but increasingly intertwined crises in ways that analysts are only beginning to fully process.

The Israeli Air Force, guided by IDF intelligence, has struck and destroyed checkpoints and roadblocks set up by the Iranian regime’s barage militia in Tehran.

That is not a minor tactical adjustment.

It is a direct strike at the foundation of the system that has kept Iran’s streets under control for decades.

And the implications of that shift layered on top of everything that has already happened inside Iran since late December raise a question that is now being asked openly by regional analysts.

If the structures that enforce compliance on the ground are being systematically reduced, what happens next when 88 million people already pushed to their limits decide to move? To understand what is actually at stake, you need to go back to where this current wave of pressure began.

On the 28th of December 2025, protests erupted in Iran following a sharp currency collapse and amid soaring inflation, chronic state mismanagement of essential services, and worsening living conditions.

Starting with shop closures and strikes in Thran’s Grand Bazaar, protests quickly spread nationwide, evolving into street demonstrations calling for the downfall of the Islamic Republic.

That progression from merchants shuttering shops over exchange [music] rates to crowds across all 31 provinces demanding an end to the system itself happened within days.

The speed of that escalation told its own story about how much pressure had been building beneath the surface for years.

The [music] protests followed a year of economic freefall and spiraling devaluation of the ruble, which had lost more than 40% of its value since Israel’s 12-day conflict with Iran in June 2025.

And those losses were just the latest in a prolonged collapse that had erased nearly 90% of the rubles’s value since the United States quit the nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions in 2018.

By the time protests erupted in December, [music] the currency crisis was not a new emergency.

It was the final rupture in a structural collapse that had been unfolding for years.

Ordinary Iranians had watched their savings evaporate, their purchasing power disappear, and their government respond not with reform, but with budget proposals that, according to Britannica’s reporting, increased security spending by nearly 150% while offering wage increases amounting to only about 2-fifths of the rate of inflation.

That budget decision
alone captures the fundamental contradiction at the core of how the Islamic Republic has chosen to govern under pressure.

Not by addressing the conditions driving dissatisfaction, but by investing in the machinery capable of suppressing the response to them.

The machinery of that suppression has a specific architecture.

It does not operate primarily through conventional military force.

It operates through the Bazar, through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps units embedded in neighborhoods, through roadblocks and vehicle inspections, and an omnipresent street level presence that signals to the public that the state sees everything and can respond to anything.

For years, the Islamic Republic has relied on a dense web of basie police and revolutionary guards positions to control neighborhoods and quickly suppress unrest.

During the recent nationwide protests earlier this year, these same networks formed the backbone of the crackdown that sealed off districts and quashed the demonstrations.

That network is not incidental to the Islamic Republic’s survival.

It is central to it, and understanding that makes what has been happening over the past week considerably more significant than conventional military strike reporting would suggest.

The January crackdown was brutal in ways that drew urgent condemnation from international institutions.

According to evidence gathered by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, security forces, including the IRGC and Iran’s police force, unlawfully used rifles, shotguns loaded with metal pellets, water cannons, tear gas, [music] and beatings to disperse, intimidate, and punish largely peaceful protesters, resulting in the killing of at least 28 [music] protesters and bystanders, including children, in 13 cities across eight provinces [music] between December 31st, 2025, and January 3rd.

2026 based on credible information gathered.

But that was only the beginning.

By late January, Time, the Guardian, and Iran International, citing local health officials, reported [music] that between 30,000 and 36,500 protesters were killed during January 8th and 9.

Those figures, if accurate, [music] represent a scale of domestic repression not seen in the Islamic Republic’s history.

They also explain something important about the current dynamics.

The memory of January did not disappear.

It became a permanent feature of the political landscape, embedded in the grief and calculation of millions of Iranians deciding how to act now that the external military campaign has changed the environment on the ground.

The nationwide protests, which analysts described [music] as the most serious challenge to the Iranian government since the 1979 revolution, began on the 28th of December 2025 after the value of the Iranian real collapsed to a record low.

But the regime’s response to that challenge followed a script that analysts had anticipated.

The crackdown, the internet shutdown, the arrests, the curfews, what the regime had not anticipated or at minimum had not fully prepared for, was the combination of that unresolved domestic pressure [music] with a sustained external military campaign targeting not just conventional military assets, but the specific units responsible for keeping streets [music] quiet.

In surprise attacks on a Wednesday night, Israel carried out precision drone strikes against basie militia checkpoints that had been set up across Tehran in recent days.

The drone attacks marked the beginning of aerial operations targeting forces involved in domestic repression inside Iran.

The method used was notable in its own right.

[music] Informed sources told Iran International that the Israeli military is carrying out such operations through a new method which uses a flying platform acting as a mother launcher to deploy drones equipped with artificial intelligence and a large database of targets.

The use of AI assisted targeting against street level security deployments rather than only large fixed installations suggests a deliberate strategic decision to operate at the level where the regime’s domestic control is actually enforced.

The reported checkpoint locations hit included positions in multiple districts across the capital, including [music] district 14 near the Mahalati Highway, District 15 opposite the Hashimabad gas station, district 16 on Fadaya Islam Street, and District 1 at the end of Artis Boulevard.

These are not remote military compounds.

These are checkpoints placed in the middle of residential and commercial zones at highway entrances and major intersections designed to monitor the movement of civilians and deter any organized gathering.

Their placement in those locations tells you exactly what they were built for.

Their removal or the credible threat of their removal changes the calculation for everyone within visual range of where they used to stand.

The response from within Iran has been striking in its own right.

Multiple social media accounts observed by Euro News Persian team claim that ordinary Iranian citizens are filming bus checkpoints or military hideouts [music] and posting the videos on social media as a form of opposition after thousands of Iranian protesters were killed and injured by the militia and other security forces during the violent crackdown preceding the war.

That is a significant development.

It suggests a portion of the civilian population is not waiting passively for external action to determine their circumstances.

They are actively providing targeting information or at minimum signaling their awareness that the security presence around them is now potentially vulnerable in ways it was not before.

Israel is reportedly gathering and verifying some of the targeting intelligence from these videos.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the psychological dimension of this dynamic cannot be separated from its practical implications.

A phrase has been trending on social media saying that every drone that hits a barage checkpoint gladdens the souls of those killed during the January crackdown, suggesting that these strikes provide new momentum and renewed hope for the protest movement.

[music] That kind of sentiment spreading through a population that has been under communication restrictions and that sustained enormous losses just weeks [music] ago indicates that the strikes on checkpoints are being interpreted by many Iranians not as a distant military development but as something directly relevant to their own situation.

The question of whether that interpretation translates into organized action depends on a set of variables that remain deeply uncertain.

Social media accounts are also reporting that barage members across Iran are reportedly receiving threatening messages on Telegram warning them that they are under surveillance, that their crimes have been documented, and that they should surrender or flee with the message that there will be no second warning.

As a result, reports have emerged that Iranian regime security officers are being forced to adapt to new tactics to evade targeting, including disguising themselves as civilians.

When a security force that deres part of its deterrent power from visible presence begins to conceal its identity, that is not a sign of strategic confidence.

It is a sign of institutional stress.

And institutional stress in the specific units responsible for neighborhood level control matters enormously in a country where the gap between the number of people willing to take to the streets and the practical capacity to prevent them from doing so has always been the critical variable.

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War reported that commercially available satellite imagery showed that at least nine of the 23 Barage regional bases in Tehran had been targeted as of 6th March.

That figure reflects a measurable reduction in the fixed infrastructure of the street control network.

But the more consequential effect may be the one that does not show up in satellite images, the shift in how both security personnel and ordinary citizens are calculating their options.

A passage member who is now uncertain whether their position is being observed and potentially targeted is a less effective enforcer than one who operates with impunity.

And a civilian who watches those positions being removed or who sees security personnel abandoning uniforms is making different assessments about what is possible than they were 2 months ago.

The regime is aware of this dynamic and is not remaining passive in response to it.

Ahmmed Reser Radan, the commander of the state security forces, told state television on the evening of March 10th, 2026, [music] “If anyone comes to the streets at the enemy’s request, they will not be viewed as a protester.

” That statement reflects the regime’s current framing strategy to position any renewed domestic unrest as externally directed rather than organically motivated, thereby justifying a security response framed in military rather than civil terms.

Iranian authorities have explicitly warned they will forcefully act against any anti-establishment internal protests as Israel and the United States have threatened to further target the basi.

That dual positioning claiming the capacity to respond decisively while also acknowledging that the bases under targeted external pressure creates a contradiction that will become more visible over time as conditions on the ground continue to evolve.

The broader strategic picture in which this checkpoint campaign is unfolding is one of unprecedented simultaneous pressure on multiple systems the Islamic Republic has relied upon for stability.

The US military said it had struck around 6,000 targets since the start of the war.

While the IDF said it had destroyed more than 250 Iranian drones and dozens of launchers and killed numerous soldiers and commanders in Iran’s unmanned aerial vehicle array.

The degradation of Iran’s air defense network and its conventional military assets has created the conditions that make the checkpoint strike campaign operationally feasible.

Without functional air defense coverage over urban Thran, the drones that have been targeting these street level positions can operate in ways that would have been impossible even months ago.

The question of how much of that coverage has been degraded and how sustainably is one that regional defense analysts are watching closely.

The relentless military strikes by the United States and Israel against the Iranian military and security establishment have undoubtedly corroded its capacity, although not necessarily its will, to suppress any new protest wave.

That distinction matters.

An institution can lose material capacity while retaining the willingness to deploy whatever capacity remains.

The Bas and the IRGC units responsible for domestic order have shown repeatedly over decades that their tolerance for using extreme force against civilian demonstrators [music] is not constrained by international condemnation, legal accountability, or the opinions of the broader population.

What constrains them is material personnel, equipment, communications, command structure, and the confidence that their own positions are secure enough to hold.

Each of those factors is now under varying degrees of pressure in ways that have no recent precedent.

The UN Independent International Fact-finding mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran officially warned on March 11th, 2026 that Iranian civilians are facing escalating risks, noting that the simultaneous pressure of external military force and internal security measures has increased the risk
of grave human rights violations to an unprecedented level.

Military and law enforcement officials of the regime have employed explicit rhetoric to categorize domestic protests as military targets.

That framing is significant.

When a state begins treating potential civilian demonstrations as military security threats rather than expressions of political disscent, it reflects a fundamental shift in how the leadership perceives the threat environment it is operating in.

It is also paradoxically a signal of the degree to which the internal dynamic has merged with the external one in the calculations of those currently governing Iran.

What makes the coming days particularly consequential [music] is the timing.

Now roots the Persian New Year falls in late March, a period that traditionally involves large public gatherings, family movement across cities, and social events that make population monitoring significantly more difficult.

It is also a period with cultural resonance that opposition movements have historically used as a moment for organized expression.

As Iran approaches Nar’s 2026, activists say festivals such as Naruz and Chahashan Basuri are becoming symbols of resistance and demands for democratic change.

With the country finding itself at a critical crossroads between celebration and mourning and between aspirations for freedom and the persistence of authoritarian rule, the convergence of a reduced street control network, a population carrying the
accumulated weight of the January crackdown, a continuing external military campaign, and a cultural moment associated with public gathering, creates a combination of conditions that those monitoring the situation are paying close attention to.

The Islamic Republic’s response to the 2025 to 2026 protests suggests so far a further institutionalization of what can be described as containment governance.

Rather than oscillating between reformist accommodation and hard repression, the state increasingly relies on a calibrated toolkit, selective coercion, [music] technocratic reshuffleling, controlled narrative framing, and temporal dispersion.

The system persists, as one analyst framed it, not because grievances are resolved, but because they are managed.

But management requires working infrastructure.

It requires checkpoints to remain staffed, based units to remain confident, [music] and command chains to remain intact.

Each of those requirements is now subject to a level of external pressure that the management model was never designed to absorb simultaneously.

Iran is unusual in having experienced multiple successive waves of enormous anti-government protests over the past 20 years, making clear the extremely deep and wide citizen anger toward the ruling system.

And in Iran, the fact that the regime carried out an extraordinarily significant crackdown during the December 2025 to January 2026 demonstrations [music] means that thousands of those Iranians most inclined to protest have been killed or imprisoned, potentially robbing a new protest wave of many of its most determined participants.

That is the
analytical counterweight to the optimism embedded in the checkpoint strikes.

The human cost of January was not only a tragedy in itself.

It was a deliberate and systemic removal of the people most likely to organize and lead any future mobilization.

Whether what remains, a population that is grieving, surveiled, economically exhausted, and now watching external military pressure on the forces that suppress them will translate into renewed organized action is a question that cannot be answered with current information.

What the current moment
does establish with reasonable confidence is a set of structural shifts that have no precedent in the Islamic Republic’s history operating simultaneously.

The street control network that was deployed with full confidence in January is now operating under active targeting pressure.

The security personnel who staffed those positions are receiving personal warnings through private messaging platforms and are by multiple credible accounts changing their behavior in response.

The broader military infrastructure that supported the regime’s confidence is being systematically reduced through a continuing air campaign.

The economic conditions that triggered the December protests have not improved [music] and by most assessments remain considerably worse.

And the cultural calendar is approaching a moment that carries its own mobilization history.

The specific signals that regional observers and those monitoring Iranian civil dynamics will be tracking in the days ahead include [music] whether barage checkpoint deployments in Tehran and other major cities continue to be maintained, reduced or repositioned, whether there is visible change in the presence and behavior of security personnel in residential neighborhoods, whether communication platforms and social media access remain as restricted as they have been since January.

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