Mousa Afshar: Fear of the Resistance Units Is Turning the Regime’s Factional Conflict Into a Battle for Survival

Mousa Afshar, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said that the escalating confrontation at the highest levels of power, together with the attacks exchanged by regime officials and state-controlled newspapers, demonstrates that factional infighting is no longer a routine dispute over positions and interests. It has become an existential battle over how to save a decaying regime from collapse.

Afshar said the war did not provide the clerical regime with the cohesion it later claimed. Instead, it deepened its crises and exposed the fragility of its political and security structure. Following the loss of senior officials and commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, disputes erupted over governing the country, the future of negotiations, control of state media, and the strategy most likely to preserve the regime.

He said the statement issued by the IRGC on the anniversary of Operation Eternal Light did not reflect confidence or strength. Rather, it demonstrated the regime’s continuing fear of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran. The fact that the IRGC still devotes extensive attention to that confrontation thirty-eight years later shows that the regime is effectively celebrating its temporary survival while warning its demoralized forces about the organized alternative it regards as the principal threat to its existence.

Afshar noted that the most revealing elements in the state-run media are the open admissions that decay has penetrated the regime’s foundations. When Arman-e Melli compares the crisis to a cancer threatening to spread, and Jahan-e Sanat warns that erosion may reach the nerve of a tooth and leave extraction as the only option, these descriptions amount to an internal diagnosis of a regime that has lost the ability to repair itself.

He added that the conflict surrounding state broadcasting, including the deletion or alteration of senior officials’ statements, proves that even official media outlets have become arenas for factional score-settling. Kayhan’s reminder that state broadcasting is entirely controlled by the Supreme Leader was both a public rebuke to the rival faction and an admission that the government’s supposed authority is largely ceremonial.

Afshar said the use of accusations invoking figures such as Shimr and Yazid reflects an unprecedented escalation in the regime’s internal conflict. Each faction now accuses the other of betrayal and of endangering the ruling establishment, while all of them share the same fear: that growing popular anger will converge with the organized Resistance and the Resistance Units operating across Iranian cities and neighborhoods.

He concluded that the regime’s greatest fear is not simply an internal dispute or an economic crisis, but the existence of an organized force rooted in society and capable of transforming protests into an uprising aimed at overthrowing the dictatorship. These admissions from within the ruling establishment confirm that democratic change will come neither through foreign war nor through the restoration of the Shah’s dictatorship, but through the Iranian people and their organized Resistance establishing a free democratic republic.