By Jabir Deralla

Widespread protests erupted across Iran on 28 December 2025 amid deepening economic hardship marked by soaring inflation and rising prices. What began as demonstrations over daily survival rapidly evolved into nationwide anti-government protests demanding political change. The speed of this transformation reflected not only economic desperation but years of accumulated political frustration and exclusion.

The state responded with force. Security units were deployed across major cities, mass arrests followed, and an internet blackout was imposed to obstruct independent reporting and limit the circulation of images, testimonies, and coordination among protesters. The blackout itself became part of the repression, designed to fracture collective awareness and delay external scrutiny.

Death toll and the limits of verification

No officially verified death toll has been released by Iranian authorities. Human rights organizations, including the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, estimate that at least three thousand people were killed during the unrest. Other monitors caution that the real number is likely higher. The communications shutdown, restrictions on journalism, and absence of independent observers make precise verification extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, in real time.

Drones as instruments of repression

During the crackdown, drones were widely observed over protest sites in Tehran and other cities. Credible reporting indicates that these drones were primarily used for surveillance, monitoring crowd size, tracking movement, and coordinating the deployment of security forces on the ground. Eyewitness accounts describe drones flying unusually low over crowds during violent confrontations, suggesting their integration into operational crowd-control tactics.

While claims circulated that military drones were used directly to kill protesters, independent reporting has not confirmed verified evidence of drones firing on civilians. Most accounts indicate that drones functioned as reconnaissance and targeting tools, assisting snipers and ground units rather than acting as weapons themselves. Their presence nonetheless contributed to the efficiency and reach of the crackdown.

Admitting death, denying responsibility

In a rare public acknowledgement of the scale of the violence, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, stated that “several thousand” people were killed during the unrest. This admission, however, was immediately paired with deflection. In the same speech and related statements, Khamenei blamed U.S. President Donald Trump, the United States, and Israel for the violence inside Iran.

Khamenei labeled Trump a criminal, accused foreign powers of orchestrating unrest, and described protesters as “butlers” and “soldiers” of Israel and the United States.

Khamenei has a long history of framing major internal unrest in Iran as being driven by external “enemies”, especially the United States and Western governments. In past protests and major political moments he’s accused these actors of interference and destabilization — a consistent pattern in his foreign policy rhetoric. By framing the protests as externally instigated, Iran’s government is seeking to discredit domestic dissent, externalizing responsibility for the crackdown, and appealing to nationalist sentiment at home.

Shifting responsibility away from the perpetrator

In violent behavior analysis, “look what you made me do” is a form of externalization of responsibility, victim-blaming, and moral disengagement. The perpetrator acknowledges harm only to redirect causality. In other words, violence is admitted, but agency is denied, and responsibility is reassigned to the victim or a third party. This allows the actor to retain moral legitimacy while committing harm.

This argument is common and well-studied in domestic abuse cases, where the abusers often claim: “You provoked me” and “If you hadn’t done this or that, I wouldn’t have hit you.” Courts and psychologists treat this as coercive control, not justification.

During criminal interrogations, violent offenders frequently argue that the victim “forced” the act, and that circumstances “left no choice.” This is considered mitigation rhetoric, not explanation.

Terrorist and extremist narratives justify violence by claiming: “We were defending ourselves” and “The enemy left us no alternative.” This is a standard radicalization technique.

When used by a head of state, this pattern becomes even more severe. While individual criminals often seek personal absolution, minimize personal guilt and blame the victim, the authoritarian state seeks historical legitimacy, normalizes mass violence, and blames entire populations.

In the case of Khamenei, by blaming Trump, the U.S., or “the West,” the Tehran regime erases the protesters’ agency, recasts citizens as instruments of foreign enemies, and transforms repression into “defensive necessity.” This is nothing but a sheer moral inversion, and not an argument at all.

Moral disengagement as state doctrine

The psychological mechanism at work here is moral disengagement, as described by American psychologist Albert Bandura. Within his theory, ‘accusing the victim’ functions as a core cognitive mechanism under the victim-locus of moral disengagement.

Once this cognitive framework is activated, the scale of permissible violence expands dramatically. Within Bandura’s theoretical framework, the displacement of responsibility is obvious in the claim that “foreign actors caused this”. Diffusion of responsibility is reflected in the claims such as “the system had to respond”. Khamenei also uses dehumanization  by claiming that protesters are “seditionists”, therefore, according to him “not citizens”. In the end, he seeks moral justification by claiming that the authorities had to “protect the nation”. Once activated, these narratives make any level of violence permissible.

In other words, this is a narrative that equals to “look what you made me do”.

Khamenei, as well as other authoritarian figures in history and now, use the same argument used by violent individuals and criminals. The difference is the scale, not the structure. When a state leader uses it, the consequences are not one or several victims, but thousands of dead. That is why responsibility is deliberately erased.

Propaganda as permission, not explanation

I vividly remember the line “Niko ne sme da vas bije,” in Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic’s infamous speech of Gazimestan, Kosovo, in 1987. To me, this was an ominous speech that announced the bloody dissolution of the former Yugoslav federation in the 1990s. Milosevic was tried and died in the ICC prison in 2006, accused but not convicted of war crimes.

That sentence, “Niko ne sme da vas bije” (“No one is allowed to beat you”) was not a promise of protection. It was a permission structure. What followed was a familiar authoritarian move: violence framed as necessity, responsibility shifted outward, and guilt laundered through grievance. The logic was simple and deadly: we did not choose violence; it was forced upon us.

We are hearing the same logic again today.

When Khamenei acknowledges mass killings and then blames Trump, the United States, or “the West,” he is not offering an explanation. He is deploying a doctrinal narrative. It is the same narrative used by Vladimir Putin to claim that “NATO forced the invasion of Ukraine,” and by Bashar al-Assad to rebrand civilians as “terrorists” in order to annihilate the opposition. Different regimes, identical script.

Hybrid warfare propaganda and the strategy of paralysis

This is far from a rhetoric born of emotion. It is hybrid-warfare propaganda. Indeed, this qualifies as hybrid-warfare propaganda because the narrative is deliberately deployed alongside state violence to externalize responsibility, shape international and domestic responses, and paralyze accountability across political, legal, and information domains — aiming not to persuade, but to delay, divide, and deter effective reaction.

The method is precise. First, admit that death, atrocities and destruction occurred — because denial is no longer credible. Second, invert causality: the killer becomes the responder, and the victim becomes the provocation. Third, externalize blame to foreign enemies, turning citizens into proxies. Finally, flood the information space with enough ambiguity that accountability stalls. The goal is not persuasion, it is paralysis.

In hybrid warfare, confusion is victory. Once journalists debate “context,” diplomats urge “restraint on all sides,” and institutions delay action pending “verification,” the narrative weapon has done its job. Violence on the ground is stabilized by fog in the mind. That’s what is happening on the ground in Ukraine now, that is what war criminals and dictators use in their propaganda war to kill people, conquer territories, retain power, and kill the truth.

The pattern and its fate

Milosevic perfected this in the Balkans by invoking threatened Serbs and foreign conspiracies. Putin repeats it by claiming existential encirclement. Assad sanctified it as counter-terrorism. Khamenei now echoes it by portraying protesters as instruments of hostile powers. The phrases change, but the function does not. It is always the same message: Look what you made me do.

History is unkind to this argument. Milosevic’s slogans did not age into truth, they aged into indictments. The same will be true for today’s rulers who believe narrative inversion can erase responsibility and accountability. It cannot. It can only delay judgment, never prevent it.

Recognizing this pattern matters. It shifts our response from outrage to analysis, from personalities to doctrine, from isolated crises to a shared authoritarian operating system. And it strips the propaganda of its most valuable asset: the pretense that mass violence is ever unavoidable.

Because when a state claims it was “forced” to kill its own people like Khamenei now, or attack other nations like Putin is waging war against Ukraine, it is not explaining reality.

It is confessing to a strategy.

Jabir Deralla (pen name of Xhabir M. Deralla) is a journalist, political and hybrid-warfare analyst, and civil society leader based in North Macedonia.

© 2026 Jabir Deralla. Published by CIVIL. All rights reserved. The views expressed are solely those of the author.
Illustration created with the assistance of AI-generated imagery using OpenAI tools. Editorial responsibility rests with the author.