An Iranian opposition supporter inside Iran recently asked me to remove every reference to Shervin Hajipour and Toomaj Salehi from one of my articles. Both men, he insisted, were IRGC agents. He openly supports Israel — and still suspected that the link to my own article might be an IRGC trap.

This is one of the regime’s deepest successes. It has taught even some of its enemies to distrust the people whose voices it worked hardest to break.

The war launched in February was aimed, by Washington’s and Jerusalem’s own account, at changing the regime. It killed Ali Khamenei. Yet the mass uprising Israeli planners reportedly counted on never came, and the Islamic Republic still stands — now under his son Mojtaba. This week, with the ceasefire declared over, the naval blockade back in force and hundreds of strikes across Iran in recent days, the debate over what could bring the regime down is open again — including calls to arm its opponents. That debate keeps skipping the first question — the one nobody wants to answer.

Iran does not lack courage. It lacks the secure communications, trusted institutions and organization that let brave people find one another and act together.

Hajipour showed why the regime fears communication. In September 2022 his song Baraye gathered over 40 million views on Instagram in two days: Iranians could suddenly see they were not alone. The authorities arrested him and forced the song off his account. Copies kept appearing anyway. For a few days, a song connected people faster than any opposition organization ever had.

Toomaj Salehi shows the other side: what the regime does to the........

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