[Salon] Surviving the Hybrid War: How Iran Thwarted a Western-Israeli Regime-Change Attack - ArabDigest.org Guest Post

Surviving the Hybrid War: How Iran Thwarted a Western-Israeli Regime-Change Attack Summary: recent violent unrest in Iran was not a spontaneous protest but a sophisticated foreign-orchestrated hybrid attack, involving economic sabotage, armed cells, and digital disinformation coordinated by Western and Israeli intelligence to overthrow the government. Though Western media promoted a false narrative to justify military intervention the operation failed, a sign of declining imperial power. The events that have unfolded in Iran over the past weeks represent a pivotal and brutal confrontation, one that has been profoundly misrepresented by a near-universal tsunami of Western propaganda. What began in late December 2025 as protests over economic hardship - a condition directly engineered by years of crippling American sanctions - rapidly escalated into a violent, coordinated insurrection. As the dust settles and the full picture emerges from a flood of videos, official reports, and material evidence, the inescapable truth is clear: this was not a spontaneous popular uprising. It was a sophisticated, foreign-orchestrated hybrid attack, a deliberate “October 7th”-style assault designed by Israeli and Western intelligence agencies to shatter the Iranian state. Its comprehensive failure marks a historic inflection point, revealing both the desperate aggression of a declining imperialist order and the resilient defiance of a nation under siege. To comprehend the crisis of January 2026, one must first examine its manufactured origins in the preceding year. In March 2025, the Trump administration intensified its “maximum pressure” campaign, sanctioning Chinese refineries that purchased Iranian oil and deliberately triggering the rial’s catastrophic freefall. By autumn, hyperinflation meant the cost of food and rent consumed 130% of an average worker's salary, a state of affairs openly celebrated by US officials. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted that American sanctions had put Iran’s “currency and living conditions in freefall,” proving the economic misery was a deliberate weapon. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani gloated that US sanctions had forced Iranians to sell their organs in the street. This engineered destitution provided the tinder for the unrest. The spark was lit with precise geopolitical timing. Coinciding with a meeting between Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a sudden and suspicious crash of the Iranian currency occurred, a classic tactic of financial warfare. If a single financier like George Soros could break the British pound, the combined might of the US Treasury and intelligence services could certainly destabilise Iran. This manufactured collapse ignited initial, genuine protests in Tehran's Grand Bazaar on 28 December. Yet these organic economic demonstrations were swiftly hijacked and transformed into something far more sinister. What followed was not a protest movement but a paramilitary operation. The comforting Western narrative of “brave, peaceful protesters” was utterly dismantled by a deluge of video evidence emerging from Iran itself. The footage depicts a chilling reality: groups of black-clad, agile operatives, described by eyewitnesses to the Financial Times as looking “like commandos”, firing hundreds of rounds in coordinated assaults on police stations; the brutal murder and beheading of unarmed security volunteers; and systematic arson attacks on over 250 mosques, shrines, libraries, and fire stations, where firefighters were burned alive. This was not civil disobedience but urban terrorism. The hardware of this rebellion betrayed its foreign provenance. Iranian security forces announced the seizure of 60,000 weapons in Bushehr, all destined for insurgents in Tehran. Most damningly, the New York Times itself, while peddling a fairy-tale narrative, admitted that roughly 50,000 Starlink terminals were active in Iran. This admission is a stunning self-indictment: how could a “ragtag network of activists” in a heavily sanctioned country possibly afford or smuggle in tens of millions of dollars worth of cutting-edge, embargoed technology? The implausibility reveals the truth. These terminals, alongside weapons and funding, were supplied and distributed through intelligence networks to various militant and separatist groups inside Iran, creating a distributed network of armed cells primed for coordinated action. Had the coup succeeded, Iran would have faced years of chaos, Palestine would have been wiped out, and Zionist hegemony would have been locked in place This was a meticulously planned regime-change operation, not a popular revolt. Iranian intelligence revealed a detailed US- and Israeli-linked plot, spearheaded by the exiled Reza Pahlavi’s key ally Bijan Kian. This project, years in the making, involved drafting a post-overthrow constitution, funding cyber operations, and even grooming a symbolic female figurehead to front the coup. The plan aimed to use small, armed cells to seize key points once nationwide chaos was triggered, a model copied from insurgencies in Sudan and Venezuela. While this violent insurrection raged, the Western media performed its designated role in the hybrid war: manufacturing consent for military intervention. It was a textbook propaganda blitz, chillingly reminiscent of the lies that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Major outlets performed a staggering act of omission, willfully ignoring the overwhelming video evidence of terrorist violence to frame events solely as a government “crackdown on peaceful protests.” They became megaphones for grotesquely inflated casualty figures, uncritically citing numbers from US-government-funded NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy-backed Abdorrahman Boroumand Center. CBS News and the Mossad-linked outlet Iran International propagated claims of 12,000 to 20,000 dead, numbers designed to scream “genocide” and justify a “humanitarian” invasion. Laughably, the UK government, which overthew Iranian democracy in 1953 and has arrested thousands for peacefully protesting the ongoing US/Israeli genocide, demanded the Iranian authorities respect the right to protest. The stage management was brazen. The performance of US intelligence asset Masih Alinejad - who spoke of “millions massacred” and broke down in tears at the UN Security Council - was broadcast widely without the crucial context revealed in a 2009 State Department cable. Her act was a direct echo of the “Kuwaiti incubators” lie that fuelled the 1991 Gulf War. Alinejad has received over $830,000 directly from the US government for propaganda projects against Iran. Meanwhile, editorial pages openly advocated for destruction. The Wall Street Journal argued for the dismemberment of Iran, suggesting the “best option may be to help secession happen.” The scale of the narrative assault was immense; The Guardian alone ran 74 articles on Iran in seven days, while the BBC disgracefully misquoted the Iranian Supreme Leader and misrepresented vast pro-government rallies as anti-regime protests. The digital dimension of this information war was equally brazen. An Al Jazeera investigation exposed a massive Israeli astroturfing campaign (#FreeThePersianPeople), which used AI-generated content and fake accounts to promote the restoration of the monarchy and call for US military strikes. A separate Haaretz investigation revealed an Israeli state-linked influence operation using fake accounts to push Reza Pahlavi - who had publicly called for government workers to be killed - as a viable alternative. Most tellingly, Israeli officials and media openly boasted of their involvement. A Channel 14 journalist tweeted, “foreign actors are arming the protesters...Everyone is free to guess who is behind it,” while phones from arrested rioters were found to have a video of a woman - clearly a foreign intelligence agent - giving instructions on how they should act when caught. Faced with this unprecedented multi-front assault - economic, military, digital, and psychological - the Iranian state did not crumble. Its decisive counterstroke was to identify and neutralise the attack’s central nervous system: the Starlink-enabled coordination network. With Russian technical assistance, Iranian electronic warfare units deployed advanced systems to disrupt the GPS signals upon which Starlink depends, effectively blinding and isolating the insurgent cells. Once this digital umbrella was shattered, the coordinated groups lost all cohesion. Iranian security forces, now able to pinpoint the remaining terminals and armed cells, moved decisively to quell the violence. The insurrection was defeated not by a crackdown on peaceful dissent, but by a sovereign state successfully neutralising a foreign-funded terrorist invasion. The calm that returned was underscored by vast popular marches across Iran, with thousands of citizens fervently denouncing foreign interference and reaffirming national sovereignty - scenes that were almost entirely blacked out in Western coverage. The events of January 2026 constitute a second failed imperialist onslaught against Iran in just seven months, following the unsuccessful US-Israeli military strikes in June 2025. This was a test of unprecedented scale, combining years of sanction-driven destabilisation with a sophisticated, boots-and-bytes hybrid offensive. Its success would have rewritten the geopolitical landscape: Iran would have been plunged into decades of chaos, Palestine would have been obliterated, and the racist apartheid genocidal Zionist project would have cemented its hegemony over the region. That this did not happen is of profound historical significance. It demonstrates that the coercive power of the Western imperial order - its ability to economically strangle, militarily sabotage, and narratively smother a nation - is meeting its limits. Iran, composed and focused, weathered the storm. The old CIA-Mossad playbook of manufacturing chaos and screaming “right to protect” was executed in full view and still failed. This failure is a stark testament to Iranian resilience and a clear signal that the era of effortless regime change is over. The empire’s most powerful weapons - sanctions, propaganda, and proxy terror - are being met, and countered, on the ground. The decline of unipolar domination is not an abstract theory; it is being written, defiantly, in the streets of Tehran.