Khamenei to Trump: You won’t depose Islamic Republic
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said the United States will never succeed in toppling the Islamic Republic and warned that even the world’s strongest military can suffer crippling blows.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said the United States will never succeed in toppling the Islamic Republic and warned that even the world’s strongest military can suffer crippling blows.
“The US president said in one of his recent remarks that for 47 years America has been unable to eliminate the Islamic Republic; he complained about it to his own people. For 47 years, America has not been able to eliminate the Islamic Republic. That is a good admission,” Khamenei said at a meeting with people from East Azarbaijan province on Tuesday.
“I say: You, too, will not be able to do this.”
His comments come days after Trump said regime change “would be the best thing that could happen.”
Khamenei also addressed remarks by the US president that the American military is the strongest in the world.
“The strongest army in the world may at times receive such a slap that it cannot rise,” he said.
“They keep saying we have sent an aircraft carrier toward Iran. Very well, an aircraft carrier is a dangerous device, but more dangerous than the carrier is the weapon that can send it to the bottom of the sea.”
His statements come amid heightened rhetoric between Tehran and Washington over military deployments and regional security and at the time a new round of negotiations mediated by Oman is underway in Geneva.
Talks with US
US threats and demands, Khamenei added, reflected an attempt to dominate Iran. “These statements by the US president, sometimes threatening, sometimes saying this must be done or that must not be done, mean they seek domination over the Iranian nation,” he said.
“Iran will not pledge allegiance to corrupt leaders currently in power in the United States.”
“They say let us negotiate about your nuclear energy, and the result of the negotiation should be that you do not have this energy,” he continued. “If a negotiation is to take place, and there is no place for negotiation, determining its result in advance is wrong and foolish.”
US presidents and some senators, he went on, were making an “absurd” demand by setting conditions before any dialogue.
January protest remarks
In the same speech, Khamenei said those killed during the January protests are mourned as martyrs.
“Blood was shed. We are grieving. I say we are in mourning for the blood that was shed,” he said, adding that not all of the dead fell into the same category.
Security forces responded to the latest nationwide protests with lethal force, mass arrests, and communication blackouts. At least 36,500 people killed in the recent wave of unrest, while authorities acknowledge a far lower figure of about 3,117.
Security forces, according to the Amnesty International, moved quickly after the killings to impose sweeping controls aimed at silencing survivors, intimidating families of victims and preventing documentation of what it described as unlawful mass killings carried out to crush what it called a popular uprising.
The measures included arbitrary mass arrests, enforced disappearances, bans on gatherings, night-time curfews, and a near-total internet blackout, alongside the deployment of heavily armed patrols across cities and inter-city roads, Amnesty International said.
Khamenei argued some were “corrupt elements and instigators,” while others were not involved in organizing the protests. He divided the dead into three groups, beginning with what he described as "defenders of security" – police, Basij and Guards members and those alongside them – calling them “among the greatest martyrs.”
He described a second group as bystanders. When turmoil breaks out in a city, he said, “innocent people walking toward their workplace or their homes are also killed,” adding that they too should be considered martyrs because their deaths occurred within “the enemy’s sedition.”
A third group, he said, consisted of those who had been misled. “They were deceived, inexperienced… they are also ours; they are our children,” he said, adding that some later wrote to him expressing regret. Officials, he said, were right to count those killed from this group as martyrs.
“Therefore, the circle of our fallen whom we count as martyrs is a wide one,” he added, excluding only what he called “the ringleaders and those who took money and weapons from the enemy.”
Khamenei concluded by offering prayers for mercy and forgiveness for those he described as misled participants, framing the uprising as an enemy-driven plot rather than a domestic protest movement.
Human rights investigators say evidence indicates Sam Afshari was alive when security forces detained him in the city of Karaj, but was later killed by a gunshot wound to the head consistent with an execution carried out after his arrest.
“The bullet entered through the back of his head and exited through his face," Shahin Milani, IHRDC Executive Director told Iran International.
"The injury he sustained during the protests was not the shot that killed him,” Milani said.
Before leaving to join the protests, Sam sent a final message to his father on Jan 7.
“Dad, don’t tell mom anything. I’m going to fight for my rights. Iran is in danger. Please don’t tell my mother.”
His father, Parviz Afshari, who lives in Germany, would spend days searching for answers after his son disappeared.
According to Milani, testimony gathered from the family indicates that Sam’s initial injury during the protests was not fatal.
Residents living nearby Taleghani Square in Karaj saw that Sam had been wounded and attempted to bring him inside to help. Before they could do so, security forces arrived and dragged him away while he was still alive, according to his father’s account.
"The inhuman repressive forces dragged my son," Parviz told IRHDC in a video recording.
After that, he vanished.
“When his family eventually recovered his body, it was clear he had been shot again,” Milani said.
Where the fatal shooting occurred remains unclear. Sam’s father received conflicting accounts — one suggesting it may have happened at a medical facility and another claiming detainees were shot while being transported. Investigators say those details cannot yet be independently confirmed, but the available evidence indicates he was killed after arrest.
Sam's father described him as an exceptionally talented teenager — a computer science prodigy, a competitive swimming champion and fluent in multiple languages.
Milani said interviewing the father was deeply personal, underscoring how the profile of victims in Iran has changed over time.
“The father is nearly my age,” Milani said. “It forces you to realize that the young people being killed today are children who could have been our own.”
Sam Afshari’s case is part of a broader pattern emerging from Iran’s January crackdown, during which students and minors were among those killed. An Iranian teachers’ union has published the names of roughly 200 students killed during the protests, describing the list as both a record of loss and a demand for accountability.
At least 24 children, including a three-year-old, were killed by direct fire from security forces during Iran’s nationwide protests, according to the HANA Human Rights Organization. The group said it confirmed the identities of the children through on-the-ground research and cross-checking multiple sources.
HANA said the shooting of children was not an isolated incident but part of a systematic pattern, with gunfire in many documented cases directed at vital parts of the body.
For Sam's father - the loss is already painfully clear — a teenager who left home believing he was fighting for his future and never returned.
Sam had been preparing to join him in Germany later this year — a plan that ended before it could begin.
The trials were presided over by Judge Abolghasem Salavati, head of Branch 15 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, who is widely known for handing down severe sentences in protest-related and political cases, the sources said.
Salavati has been holding simultaneous virtual hearings in which detainees are tried in groups of 14, according to the sources.
Among those sentenced is Abolfazl Karimi, a detained protester who the sources said had told his family in a phone call that he had been subjected to forced confessions under beatings and torture.
Karimi is the father of a young child and previously worked as a motorcycle courier in eastern Tehran.
He was arrested on January 6 while returning from work in Tehran’s Hengam neighborhood, where he encountered two injured women whose legs had been hit by gunfire from security forces, the sources said.
When he went to assist them, officers shot his leg with pellet rounds and arrested him along with the two wounded women, the sources added.
After about a month in detention in Greater Tehran Prison, he was recently transferred along with around 50 other protesters to Ghezel Hesar Prison, the sources said.
In a later phone call, Karimi told his family he had been tortured without medical treatment for his wounds and, while blindfolded, was forced to sign papers containing confessions against himself, according to the sources.
In recent days, Iran’s judiciary has intensified the process of trying protesters detained during the nationwide protests and issuing death sentences, the sources said.
On Monday Tehran Revolutionary Court, also presided over by Salavati, sentenced 19-year-old Mohammadamin Biglari to death on the charge of “enmity against God,” and the case has been referred to the Supreme Court, the sources said.
Biglari was arrested on January 8 on Tehran’s Damavand Street.
His mother is deceased, and his father was unaware of his fate for weeks, searching for him among bodies in Kahrizak before authorities informed him after three weeks that his son had been detained, the sources said.
Separately, on Sunday, the judiciary announced the first hearing session for three detained protesters—Ehsan Hosseinipour Hesarloo, Matin Mohammadi and Erfan Amiri—on charges including allegedly setting fire to Seyed al-Shohada Mosque in Pakdasht and alleged participation in murder.
Other charges against the three were announced as “assembly and collusion to appear and act against the country’s internal security following calls on hostile social media, particularly the US president and the Zionist regime (Israel)…” according to the judiciary-affiliated Mizan News Agency.
Norway-based rights group Hengaw said the case against the three was marred by due process violations.
"The hearing was held despite reports that the detainees have been denied basic rights since their arrest, including access to a lawyer of their choice and contact with their families. They were subjected to intense pressure and torture during detention and compelled to provide forced confessions," Hengaw said.
Tens of thousands of people have been arrested during the nationwide protests, many facing heavy charges, the sources said.
Some families have reported being pressured by security bodies to refrain from speaking to media or publicly discussing the cases of detained relatives, the sources added.
