After a Massacre Iran’s Underground Opposition Is Changing Its Tactics

When Iran doubled the price of gasoline purchased beyond subsidized quotas on Sept. 8, the government appeared ready for an explosion. Police, Basij forces, plainclothes agents and anti-riot units were deployed around fuel stations and streets in Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, Karaj, Isfahan, Tabriz and other cities. Internet connections reportedly slowed in some locations. The precautions recalled the nationwide protests triggered by a sudden fuel-price increase in 2019.

But no comparable uprising immediately followed. That absence could be read as resignation. A more plausible explanation is that January’s massacre fundamentally changed the risks and tactics of protest.

On Jan. 8 and 9, security forces fired directly on demonstrators during an uprising that had spread across Iran. Estimates of the dead vary dramatically, reaching into the tens of thousands, because authorities cut communications, concealed bodies, pressured families and blocked independent investigators. The exact toll remains unknown. What is clear is that the repression was designed not only to clear the streets, but to destroy the networks capable of bringing people back into them.

The fuel increase nevertheless produced signs of continuing resistance. Workers, nurses, teachers, retirees and drivers held strikes and gatherings in several cities between Sept. 6 and 9 over unpaid wages, benefits, working conditions and the cost of living. These actions cannot automatically be attributed to the fuel decision, nor to any political organization. Their fragmented and sectoral character, however, illustrates what dissent looks like after a massacre: anger persists, but large centralized crowds have temporarily given way to dispersed actions conducted under an intense security presence.

At the same time, another form of opposition has begun testing a more calculated kind of visibility.

In early September, a group of motorcyclists and several cars moved through the streets near Karaj, west of Tehran, in broad daylight, displaying flags and symbols of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, or MEK. Public support for the banned organization can bring long imprisonment and, in some cases, a death sentence. The importance of the motorcade was therefore not its size, but the participants’ decision to expose themselves to surveillance cameras and the security apparatus.

Its visibility was therefore a direct response to the January massacre—an attempt to break the climate of fear created by the killing of thousands of protesters in just two days.

State television quickly claimed that everyone shown in the footage had been identified and arrested, although it offered no names, numbers or evidence. The response was revealing. A government that portrays the MEK as a finished and socially irrelevant force treated a small public display as a national-security matter.

The networks the MEK calls Resistance Units have operated in their current form since around 2014. They are generally small, flexible and locally rooted. Their traditional activities have included graffiti, banners, leaflets, projected images, election-boycott campaigns and protests against executions and compulsory hijab. Many actions were conducted at night and ended within minutes: the message was made visible while the people behind it remained hidden.

Their activities are not all identical. Some are symbolic and informational; others target symbols or facilities associated with the repressive apparatus, and the MEK also reports direct operations against security institutions. The organization says its principle is to target the machinery of repression while avoiding harm to civilians. The target, method and consequences of each category should be evaluated separately rather than placing every action under a single label.

The Karaj motorcade marked a tactical departure. Instead of leaving behind a banner or projected slogan, participants appeared collectively, moved through public space and then dispersed. They did not abandon clandestine organization. They combined secrecy with a brief, coordinated moment of public exposure — long enough to demonstrate presence, but short enough to deny security forces a fixed crowd to surround.

This method reflects a broader lesson from January. A large demonstration can transform the political atmosphere, but it also gives a highly organized state a concentrated target. A network capable of producing many short actions across different cities creates another problem. Each event may be modest, but their cumulative effect communicates survival, geographic reach and coordination while forcing security forces to disperse their resources.

According to the MEK, its Resistance Units conducted more than 4,000 operations against structures of repression over the past year. Around the organization’s 61st anniversary in early September, it reported 150 activities, actions and small gatherings in Tehran and 27 other cities, along with dozens of projected displays. These figures cannot all be independently verified in Iran’s closed information environment. Still, footage from some actions, the geographic spread of images and the government’s own reaction provide evidence of an organized effort extending beyond a single city.

Assessing the size and composition of such networks is nearly impossible. Iran has no free elections, credible opinion polling or legal opposition activity. Even the number killed in January cannot be independently established. Demanding public data about the age, gender or occupations of people whose identification could lead to torture or execution mistakes the consequences of repression for evidence of nonexistence.

The more useful test is capacity. Can a network maintain communications during an internet shutdown? Can it replace arrested members, preserve a presence in multiple cities and reappear after successive crackdowns? According to sources associated with the Iranian Resistance, more than 2,000 Resistance Unit members disappeared after the January uprising. The figure cannot be independently confirmed, and it remains unclear how many were killed, detained or remain missing. Yet the appearance of coordinated actions months later suggests the crackdown did not eliminate the network.

This matters because social anger alone rarely produces political change. An uprising creates energy, but organization determines whether that energy survives repression, connects different local struggles and endures when the state regains control of the streets.

Iran today contains two distinct currents: recurring protests over wages, livelihoods, discrimination and social freedom, and clandestine networks seeking the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Independent labor and social protests should not be assigned to the MEK without evidence. The political importance of the Resistance Units lies instead in whether they can eventually connect dispersed discontent with sustained organization.

The Islamic Republic recognizes that possibility. For decades it has claimed that the MEK has no support, while devoting extensive intelligence, judicial and propaganda resources to imprisoning and executing its supporters. A movement that has rebuilt networks across generations after the mass executions of the 1980s and the 1988 massacre of political prisoners does not fit the government’s description of a force without roots.

The Karaj motorcade does not prove that the Resistance Units can lead a nationwide transition. It establishes something narrower but important: after January’s bloodshed, a network the state sought to destroy reappeared in the same city and chose to make itself visible in daylight.

Authoritarian governments can disperse crowds, close the internet and impose unbearable costs on activists. What they cannot easily know is whether those who survived have stopped organizing — or merely changed how they organize. The events since January suggest that at least part of Iran’s underground opposition has chosen the latter course.