BEHIND THE IRAN HEADLINES Series, October 17, 2025, Alireza Jafarzadeh, NCRI-US Deputy Director
In today’s Iran, where dissent is a crime and silence is enforced by fear, a new force has risen from within the people — the Resistance Units.
They are not soldiers or armed factions. They are teachers, students, workers, former political prisoners, mothers and fathers — ordinary Iranians who have become the living conscience of a nation that refuses to bow to tyranny.
The idea of the Resistance Units was introduced in 2014 by the Iranian Resistance — a strategy to turn anger into organized defiance, to transform despair into resistance within Iran itself.
For more than four decades, the clerical dictatorship has ruled through mass executions, torture, censorship, and fear. The regime’s courts and prisons do not deliver justice; they enforce terror.
In just two weeks this fall, 115 executions were carried out — one every three hours. Political prisoners in Ahvaz and Sanandaj were hanged after years of unjust detention.
But every time the regime builds a gallows, the Resistance Units, affiliated with the MEK network inside Iran, light a fire.
Their actions — burning Khamenei’s images, dismantling IRGC and Basij centers, or exposing the propaganda machinery of the MOIS — are not acts of vengeance. They are acts of defiance, of self-defense by a people long denied freedom.
Under international law, when a regime uses systematic violence against its citizens, resistance becomes a legitimate right. The Resistance Units’ targets are not civilians; they are instruments of oppression. Their courage proves that the dictatorship is not invincible.
Their greatest power lies not in what they destroy, but in what they awaken. Every act of defiance declares that freedom is within reach.
When tyranny builds its gallows, the people will answer with fire — the fire of freedom, the fire of Iran’s Resistance.