Iran News Update | Mostafa Aslani | January 16, 2026
A televised statement by the Tehran IRGC chief exposes the lie of “terrorism” narratives and confirms systematic violence against unarmed Iranians during the nationwide uprising.
A recent televised statement by Hassan Hassan-Zadeh, the commander of the IRGC’s Greater Tehran Corps, has torn through the regime’s carefully constructed propaganda. While attempting to justify the security forces’ actions during the January 2026 nationwide uprising, he declared that a “significant number of innocent and oppressed people” who were merely moving about the city for daily activities were “martyred.”
This was not a slip of the tongue. It was a confession.
Far from portraying the IRGC as victims, Hassan-Zadeh’s words openly acknowledge what the Iranian regime has relentlessly denied: that its forces fired directly on civilians. The statement shatters the regime’s claim that the uprising was driven by “terrorists” or “rioters” and confirms that ordinary citizens—by the commander’s own admission—were killed while going about their daily lives.
This single sentence dismantles years of official deception. It validates what the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), eyewitnesses on the ground, and independent human rights organizations have consistently reported since the earliest days of the uprising: the IRGC and its auxiliaries unleashed live ammunition against unarmed civilians across the country.
The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) has previously reported that the number of those killed in the nationwide uprising exceeds 3,000. This figure is not conjecture. It is based on extensive investigations drawing from local sources, hospitals, forensic institutes, and the families of the slain and disappeared across 195 cities. The scale of the killings, the widespread use of live rounds, and the secret nighttime burials all align with this assessment.
Hassan-Zadeh’s remarks also inadvertently expose the depth of fear gripping the ruling establishment. He spoke of “attacks by angry people against IRGC and Basij forces,” an admission that the uprising has moved beyond protest into direct confrontation with the regime’s repressive apparatus. This is not an externally manufactured crisis, as the authorities claim; it is a social eruption from within—an expression of accumulated rage after decades of rule by bullets, prisons, and executions.
An admission of killing “innocent people” is irrefutable evidence of organized state crime. It places responsibility squarely on the institutions that ordered, executed, and now attempt to rationalize mass murder.
Ali Khamenei’s regime survives only through naked violence. Yet today it faces a generation that neither fears nor retreats. The targeting of repression centers is not chaos; it is the predictable response of a society suffocated by systematic brutality.
Hassan-Zadeh intended to defend the regime. Instead, he exposed it—before the Iranian people and the world—as a system that knows it has lost legitimacy and now stands indicted by its own words.