Free Republic

daryasafai: Jan 26, 2026. My speech on Sunday was in English because, through our broken hearts, we were speaking to the whole world. In the first few seconds, I asked my dearest compatriots for permission to speak to the world in English. 👇 “We are mourning—but we are stronger than ever. In just three days, we lost 60,000 beautiful young lives. Where were all the human rights activists then? Where were they when it was about Iran? I shared the video of a young girl beaten to death by the IRGC simply because she refused to wear the hijab. Where...

In Tehran, the capital of Iran, security forces opened fire at protesters from the roof of a police station. In Karaj, they fired live rounds into a march, shooting one person in the head. In Isfahan, young men barricaded themselves in an alley as gunfire and explosions rang out. Scattered protests had percolated since late December, starting with a strike in Tehran’s bazaar and fueled by a plunging economy. But by early January, Iranians had revolted en masse, and the security forces began to crack down with deadly force. It was not just the protests unnerving the regime. President Trump...

Dear friends and family, Once again, we are sitting on the edge of our seats. Will Trump attack Iran or won’t he? I want to try to share the feelings here in Israel. On the one hand, most Israelis want a military operation—either by America alone or jointly with Israel—that would result in regime change in Iran. Iran is the proverbial head of the snake. If the Ayatollahs could be replaced with a “normal” regime, it would completely change the face of the Middle East. It would dry up much of the funding, supply lines, and support to Hamas, Hezbollah,...

Criminal illegal aliens with ties to foreign terrorist organizations, according to the Department of Homeland Security. (DHS). FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Department of Homeland Security in the past year has arrested multiple illegal aliens it says have known ties to terrorist organizations, including ISIS and al-Qaeda. According to the agency, the illegal aliens include members of al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Islamic Republic Guard Corps of Iran, and MS-13, which President Donald Trump designated a foreign terrorist organization when he returned to office. “Just a year ago, under [President] Joe Biden, our border was wide open, and criminals, gang members, and...

The daughter of a top Iranian official has been dismissed from employment at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, following US sanctions on her father in the wake of the Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on protesters, according to the university’s newspaper Saturday. Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani is the daughter of Ali Larijani, senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and has served as assistant professor at Emory’s medical school, teaching hematology and medical oncology at the prestigious southern US university. After learning of her employment at the school, Rep. Buddy Carter, who represents Georgia in Congress, called on Emory to dismiss...

The remains of the final Israeli hostage being held in Gaza has finally been recovered following a dramatic last-ditch effort, Israel said Monday — well over two years after the Israel-Hamas war broke out. Police officer Ran Gvili’s body was located and identified following a “large-scale operation” in a cemetery in northern Gaza over the weekend, according to Israel’s Defense Force. “There are officially no more hostages in captivity in Gaza,” the IDF confirmed in statement in X. Gvili’s body will now be returned to his family in the Jewish state for burial, officials said. Israeli teams started combing through...

The daughter of one of Iran’s most powerful officials was quietly ousted from her position at Emory University following a wave of public outrage over her employment, The California Post confirmed. Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, an assistant professor at Emory’s prestigious Winship Cancer Institute, is no longer employed by the prestigious Atlanta-based school, a university spokesperson said Sunday. Ardeshir-Larijani’s father, Ali Larijani, is a top dog in the Islamic Republic’s brutal regime, serving as secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. “A physician who is the daughter of a senior Iranian government official is no longer an employee of Emory,” said Andrea...

Animated humanitarian aid items, angry that they're being misused by Hamas for military aggression.

More than 36,500 killed in deadliest two days in Iran protest crackdown: report. More than 36,500 Iranians were allegedly killed during a brutal, two-day crackdown against anti-regime protesters, the deadliest in the history of the Islamic Republic, according to a new report. The latest estimates paint a horrific image of the violence that fell across Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 when Tehran’s security forces opened fire on thousands of civilians protesting the government’s rule and failure to fix the nation’s ailing economy. Despite downplaying the death toll in recent weeks, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ own records allegedly acknowledge...

Peace talk aside, the ticking in Iran isn’t diplomacy—it’s a death-rattle, as a murderous regime nears judgment and a brutal people pray that liberation, at last, is real.In my column last week about the situation in Iran (“The Fog of Prewar in Iran”), I wrote:Many commentators, noting Trump’s oft-proclaimed desire for “peace on earth,” believe he has paused to see if negotiations with Iran might end the slaughter. I doubt it. Trump’s desire for peace is perfectly genuine. But I note that the last time he said he wanted “peace on earth” was when he was asked whether he had...

The U.S. citizen killed by a missile launched from a pilotless drone aircraft over Yemen was the ringleader of an alleged terrorist sleeper cell in Lackawanna, N.Y., administration officials said yesterday. Kamal Derwish, one of two unindicted co-conspirators in the Lackawanna case, died along with the intended target of the attack, senior al Qaeda leader Abu Ali al-Harithi, who is accused of masterminding the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in which 17 sailors died. These two men and four others were traveling in a car outside the Yemeni capital of Sanaa when they were hit by a Hellfire...

Word out of Iran has been scarce over the last few days. The regime has engaged in hideous repression of the uprising Iranian people, and the internet, and thus the flow of information out of the country has all but ceased. That's disconcerting, but in a bit of interesting news, there are now reports that the Supreme Leader himself, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that savage barbarian theocrat out of another century, has gone underground. Perhaps out of fear of American airstrikes?The 86-year-old supreme leader has moved to a fortified shelter in Tehran connected to a series of elaborate underground tunnels...

The ‘nothing ever happens’ people seem to be, sadly, correct about Iran thus far, although one hopes that the brutal Islamic Republic might still be overthrown. It’s hard to know what to think, and at times like this we all turn to the experts to give their analysis of what might happen and what might follow. Foreign policy expertise is hard work, because it requires both a specific knowledge of the national culture and the relative strength of personalities. Because there are so many factors involved, analysts frequently get things completely wrong, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles being the notorious...

The Iranian protests reveal the “pro-Palestine” lie. Moment 586. Jan 18, 2026 Mark Changizi. YouTube. Dr. Mark Jangzizi, here's your science moment. They claimed that they were only pro Palestine, not pro- Hamas. They told us over and over again, "We're not pro Hamas, we're just pro Palestine." Now, never mind that the 10/7 war wasn't about Palestine at all. It was about Gaza. The Palestine Authority wasn't even part of the broad conflict that had half a dozen Islamic Republic proxies. Never mind that they never spoke out against Hamas, who had been Gaza's brutal, unelected oppressor for a...

Per capita per unit time, suppose around 30,000 Iranians were massacred in just a couple of days. Let’s contrast that with Gazan civilian deaths, which may be of the same order of magnitude relative to population, but spread over two years. Let’s put Gazan deaths at 50,000 (a likely overestimate). Iran: 167 deaths per million per day (30,000 of 90 million killed in 2 days) Gaza: 34 deaths per million per day (50,000 of 2 million killed in 2 years) Even this is not a fair comparison. Per-capita rates implicitly treat all 90 million Iranians as equally at risk as...

ranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been transferred to an underground bunker in Iran after senior officials in the country’s security forces assessed that concerns are growing over a possible American strike, Iran International reported Saturday. Khamenei's son, Masoud, has assumed governing authority. Meanwhile, Iran Times, a newspaper identified with the IRGC, quoted the Iranian Defense Ministry spokesperson as saying that Iran’s defensive and missile capabilities have become more effective, and are quantitatively and qualitatively superior compared to what they were during Operation Rising Lion in June 2025. At the same time, levels of preparedness and tension ahead of...

Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi. The first tell was visual: the set, complete with a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian. The most peculiar part was the show-within-a-show:...

Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said on Thursday it would begin legal proceedings against Islamic State detainees transferred from Syria after the rapid collapse of Kurdish-led forces in northeast Syria triggered concerns over prison security.The U.S. military said on Tuesday its forces had transferred 150 Islamic State detainees from Syria to Iraq and that the operation could eventually see up to 7,000 detainees moved out of Syria. It cited concerns over prison security after the military setbacks suffered by the Syrian Democratic Forces. An Iraqi military spokesperson confirmed that Iraq had received a first batch of 150 Islamic State detainees, including...

The fact that Trump hasn’t dropped a bomb on Iran doesn’t mean that he is without options. Assume he knows the mullahs’ weaknesses and is acting accordingly. Whether you’re a Trump loyalist or someone who thinks Trump’s the devil, in Iran, we’re on the cusp of an incredible opportunity not seen since the end of WWII, and this is true despite the regime’s past survival in the face of uprisings. Historically, Iran’s internal security forces have brutally salvaged the regime. Beginning with Obama’s first term, the IRGC suppressed the 2009 Green Movement, the 2017–2018 economic protests, the November 2019 fuel...

"I think we should let them come down into the US" US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant...oil pipeline from Alberta... Russian attacks across Ukraine late tonight... Another deadly US attack on a boat... The threat of Iran being attacked this weekend high...killing Iran's religious and political leadersship would be a likely scenario... Multiple airlines cancelling flights in the Middle East... Thousands marched in Minneapolis today protesting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement... Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan acknowledging Israel..."is looking for an opportunity to strike Iran"... In Spain the Public Prosecutor's Office declining to prosecute singer Julio Iglesias... The United States adding...