Make no mistake: the U.S. and Israel are ready to seize this moment in Iran’s mass protests to drive a regime change operation. And it’s not even subtle.

Trump has openly threatened airstrikes against Iran — and he’s told protesters to keep going, promising: “Help is on the way.”

And Israeli security analysts are already gaming out a collapse scenario — suggesting the Israeli military could hit Iran’s strategic infrastructure and government targets if the state begins to crumble — to weaken the Islamic government and shape the outcome towards regime change with a plan to install Reza Pahlavi, the son of the brutal dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

And the timing matters. Iran sits at the heart of the Axis of Resistance, and Israel has been hit with many political and regional losses from resistance in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen. With its global reputation destroyed after the genocide in Gaza and stalled normalization plans with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Israel’s default issue is to attack Iran, as the Islamic Republic is the number one target of the apartheid state.

This is why Israel is seizing this moment now. Its own intelligence agency posted on its Farsi-language account urging Iranians to join the protests, even claiming that Mossad was with them “in the field.”

What began as legitimate protests over the collapsing rial, rising prices, economic hardship and calls for real political reforms is now bwwwwwweing hijacked by pro-monarchy rioters waving Shah-era flags, openly calling on Israel and the United States to help overthrow the government.

Reports indicate these rioters who are openly backed by Israel have burned down over 30 mosques, and committed attacks and killings against civilians and pro-government demonstrators, using military-style weapons, hunting rifles, knives, axes, and blades, while targeting police and state institutions.

MintPress has documented how Israeli intelligence covertly transfer weapons into Iran through its eastern border and often times through Israeli-tied Cargo Ships that travel past Yemen through the Red Sea. A MintPress investigation revealed that Zodiac Maritime, operator of the Mercer Street, has deep ties to the IDF and Mossad — using commercial ships to move arms and operatives for covert operations, including assassination missions inside Iran.

Phony Human Rights Groups

Despite these facts, Western corporate media are pushing out bogus casualty and mass arrest numbers that are being shared by diaspora Iranians in the push for regime change. But we at MintPress News traced these numbers back to one source:  the Human Rights Activist News Agency – an arm of the Human Rights Agency in Iran (HRAI).

A new MintPress investigation found that this agency and its news arm are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout organization.

They’ve become the go-to source for some of the most inflammatory claims and shockingly high casualty figures reported in the press. In the past week alone, their numbers have been repeated across outlets like CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, ABC News, Sky News, and The New York Post, among others.

Even mainstream liberal commentators repeat these claims as settled fact. One example of this is Owen Jones, who wrote in The Guardian that Human Rights Iran is a “respected” group, and that their death toll claims are “probably significant underestimates.”

But what these reports almost never disclose is the funding pipeline connecting it directly to the CIA. Human Rights Activists in Iran presents itself as independent, but it’s based in Fairfax, Virginia — right inside the Washington intelligence ecosystem of the CIA. On its website, it describes itself as “non-political,” and even claims it does not accept financial aid from political groups or governments. Yet in the same paragraph, it admits its major donor is from the National Endowment for Democracy, a group created by the CIA to covertly do what the CIA once did openly.

And Human Rights Iran isn’t the only “human rights” NGO being signal-boosted into Western headlines. Another organization widely cited in coverage of Iran is the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, led by Roya Boroumand — cited by outlets including  The Washington Post, PBS, and ABC News.

And again, the proximity to the U.S. foreign policy apparatus is rarely mentioned.

Although the Boroumand Center does not prominently advertise it in its funding disclaimer, it has been supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. A 2024 NED press release described the center as a “partner” organization — and the NED awarded Boroumand its 2024 Goler T. Butcher medal for democracy promotion.

At that ceremony, NED officials openly praised the Boroumand Center’s work as an “indispensable resource” and said the NED was “proud to support” their advocacy toward what it called a “democratic future for Iran.”

And sitting on the center’s board is Francis Fukuyama — a former NED board member, and an editor of the NED’s own publication, the Journal of Democracy.

So when Western corporate media presents these organizations as neutral, independent referees while using them to justify escalations, sanctions narratives, and regime change pressure, understand what’s happening.

Propaganda Onslaught

These messages are being reinforced digitally on social media through coordinated media messaging, diaspora amplification, and bot-driven campaigns traced back to hubs including Tel Aviv, Virginia and LA, boosting hashtags calling for the downfall of the Islamic government.

Of course, Iranians have the right to self-determination But what is happening now is unfolding inside a long-standing U.S.-Israeli framework built around sanctions, information warfare, and “democracy promotion” pipelines, including CIA-linked front structures like the National Endowment for Democracy, designed to steer unrest and manipulate Iranian diaspora toward regime change.

We have to remember: Israel has spent decades pushing the nuclear red-herring — the claim Iran is always “months away” from an atom bomb — to justify sanctions, sabotage, and escalation.

This summer, Israel and its allies tried to pull the U.S. into direct strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. But instead of a clean victory, Israel took a major blow when Iran retaliated, hitting military targets and causing damage reportedly worth billions, including in and around Tel Aviv.

Israel can’t win a full-scale war with Iran on its own.

So the strategy shifts from direct confrontation to destabilization from within, through sabotage, information warfare, and regime-change pressure. That is why unrest inside Iran is being treated as an opening to exploit. That has been the official US and Israeli strategy for decades. And Israeli officials are already framing this like a Syria scenario.

In the last year alone, Israel has been deploying an AI enabled operation on X targeting Iranians in the diaspora — using fake bot accounts, AI-generated personas, fabricated crisis content, and synchronized posting to push regime change messaging — pushing the idea that Iran must be de-Islamicized, that the Islamic Republic must fall, and that the “solution” is a secular, Western-aligned order. Ironic, of course, considering it is being pushed by an ethnic-Jewish state.

And when they say “de-Islamicize Iran,” Israel means destroy its revolutionary spirit from its roots.  Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew a US and British backed Monarchy is rooted in Islamic history and stories of Imam Hussain and Karbala, standing against a tyrannical system of exploitation, class warfare and oppression no matter the cost even if it means to stand alone.

That story is the moral backbone of Iran’s resistance identity, including why it backs Palestinian liberation, working class movements, independence and rejects U.S. and Israeli imperialism in the region and is part of a resistance movement for liberation.

Therefore, weakening that Islamic identity weakens resistance, targeting not just Iran, but Hezbollah, Yemen, and Gaza. That is why secularization is being sold as “liberation,” even though Iran is a majority-Muslim country.

This AI signal boosting promoting secularism, the monarchy, and regime change to the diaspora is not new. During previous unrest, hashtags like #WomenLifeFreedom and #IraniansDetestSoleimani were aggressively signal-boosted by bot networks — with MintPress analyses showing major traffic patterns tied not to Iran, but to hubs in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv, and even MAGA-linked account clusters pushing the messaging. In some cases, over 80% of the traffic tied to these hashtags was coming from outside of Iran, according to X activity patterns and Google Analytics.

This is all built to shape diaspora perception — and then feed Western headlines. Israel and the United States aren’t operating separately; they operate as an ecosystem. Israel drives the information war: narrative shaping, psychological operations, and online influence. The U.S. provides the infrastructure layer: funding pipelines, Persian-language media influence, pro-democracy NGO networks, and diaspora-facing institutions that convert narrative momentum into political pressure.

Modern regime change against Iran doesn’t start with tanks. It starts with civil society capture — shaping what people believe, what they protest for, and what outcome they’re pushed toward through “pro-democracy NGOs” that are CIA cutouts. The stated goal and policy is to covertly do what the CIA once did openly.

That pipeline runs through a network of “democracy promotion” groups tied into U.S. foreign policy that can be traced back to the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy, and organizations in its wider orbit like Foundation for Democracy in Iran, United for Iran, Tavaana, NUFDI, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and Farashgard. Different branding — same function: media narratives, activist training, diaspora pressure campaigns, and political steering toward one destination: regime change.

One of the pressure points repeatedly weaponized is culture, especially women and the hijab, framing Islamic governance as backward, while selling “freedom” as secularization and Western capitalism as the future of freedom.

Now here’s the part most people never hear: it’s an influence architecture, where Washington-linked NGOs generate the numbers, Western outlets repeat them as fact, and the funding networks behind them stay off-screen and are represented as “independent.”

In Washington, Iran policy runs through institutions that are funded by weapons manufactures like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and pro-Israel billionaires with board members that read like a war criminal roster.

The pressure campaign is sustained by think tanks like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Atlantic Council, pushing maximum pressure, sanctions escalation, and regime change year after year.

These institutions are fueled by donor networks tied to hardline pro-Israel politics — billionaire megadonors like Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and Haim Saban — who bankroll the ecosystem that keeps Iran framed as the permanent enemy and regime change as the permanent solution.

Imperial Games

And of course, Iran sits inside a broader U.S. Cold War framework targeting Russia, China, and Iran as the core adversarial bloc. Iran’s “crime” is refusing to submit — standing independent, backing resistance, and defying U.S. and Israeli power.

So the policy becomes familiar: isolate, sanction, destabilize. And if that fails, destroy.

Israel’s strategic doctrine has long treated the region’s strongest adversarial states  – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran – as targets for destabilization, because these states and alliances block Israeli dominance.

Its plan to weaken these states is documented in its Yinon Plan — the argument that Israel’s long-term security is strengthened when major states are broken into smaller sectarian and ethnic entities.

In 1996, a strategy paper written for Netanyahu’s circle called “A Clean Break” argued for reshaping Israel’s environment by weakening hostile states and rolling back adversaries. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Brookings Institute published “Which Path to Persia?” treating regime change in Iran as a standing policy option, while outlining methods from pressure campaigns to covert destabilization.

If regime change doesn’t deliver a compliant Iran, partition becomes the fallback. The plan is to carve out a Sunni statelet across western Iraq and eastern Syria — specifically to cut the land corridor that connects Iran to its allies. That corridor runs Iran → Iraq → Syria → Lebanon — the route that links Tehran to the Mediterranean and to Hezbollah. And if you break that corridor, you isolate Iran, weaken the Axis of Resistance, and sever the regional link that makes Iran such a strategic problem for Israel.

The plan has already been partially executed with the U.S. and Israel’s proxy war in Syria, the new HTS leadership, the arming of Kurdish separatists, and breaking off Kurdistan into its own state in Iraq. This is called the Sunnistan plan inked by neocon war hawk John Bolton, and it is being put into action through policy by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, AEI, and the Washington Institute.

This has been the official plan for Iran and the region to target any resistance to U.S. and Israeli imperialism. So when bystanders call for regime change under the guise of humanitarianism, they do not realize they are falling into the trap of imperialist propaganda and war planning that is fueled by a very sophisticated messaging system.

Even if Iranians overthrew their government today, that does not mean Iran’s future would suddenly be decided freely. Because the moment a state collapses, a vacuum opens. Washington and Tel Aviv will fill that vacuum. They will intervene politically, economically, and through media and proxy networks to shape the outcome.

And that’s why the replacement is being preloaded right now. If the Islamic Republic falls, the preferred answer is ready: Reza Pahlavi, a secular figurehead. A pro-West, pro-normalization with Israel, reversing the Islamic Revolution’s economic independence, and reopening Iran’s strategic industries — oil, gas, infrastructure — to Western capital and privatization. That’s the sad truth.

Iran is not a chessboard. It is 90 million human beings, with a civilization, culture, and identity far deeper than any foreign policy narrative. This is a people shaped by deep history and resilience, not a caricature in a policy playbook. And if the world truly believes in self-determination, then Iran’s future cannot be decided by think tanks in Washington or intelligence agencies in Tel Aviv.

Yet Western governments — where police state repression is increasingly the norm at home — are acting like they have the moral authority to tell Iranians to overthrow their own government.

In the United States, Trump has unleashed ICE in ways that have involved grave abuses, all while that same government lectures the world about human rights and “freedom.”

And history shows us this clearly: when the empire intervenes, it’s ordinary people who bleed first. Iran’s future belongs only to Iranians.

Feature photo | Police speak to demonstrators as they hold placards, banner and flags as they protest outside the Iranian Embassy in London, Jan. 16, 2026. Alastair Grant | AP

Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh.

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