The Friday Prayer
On September 30, 2022, worshippers filed out of the Great Mosalla of Zahedan after Friday prayers. They entered a street that had already been prepared for them.
Snipers were positioned on rooftops.
Security forces opened fire on the crowd. Eighty-two people were confirmed dead by Amnesty International — the single deadliest event of the entire 2022 nationwide uprising.1 The province of Sistan and Baluchestan, home to Iran’s Baloch minority, would record over 130 deaths by the end of that year. A province representing two percent of the national population absorbed a vastly disproportionate share of the killing.
The man leading those prayers — Molavi Abdolhamid, a Sunni Friday prayer leader — had been, until that day, a cautious reformist who sought engagement with the system. After the massacre, he began delivering fiery sermons demanding a national referendum, rights for all minorities — explicitly including Baha’is, a remarkable stance given Sunni-Baha’i theological tensions — and a transition away from the Islamic Republic.
His weekly protests in Zahedan became the most sustained, organized component of the uprising. A Sunni cleric in Iran’s poorest province became a national opposition figure.
And in Tehran, university students — Persian, Shi’a, from the center of the country — responded with a chant that breached every wall the regime had built between ethnic groups: “Zahedan, cheshm-o cheragh-e Iran.”
Zahedan, the eye and light of Iran.
Half of Iran
Iran is not the monolith that most coverage implies.
Nearly half the population identifies with a non-Persian ethnicity. The government deliberately does not release census data by ethnicity — preferring religion-only categorization to foster a “unified Islamic identity” — but the best estimates paint a complex portrait.
| Ethnic Group | Estimated Share | Primary Region | Religion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Persians | ~55-61% | Central plateau | Shi’a |
| Azerbaijanis | ~16-24% | Northwest | Shi’a |
| Kurds | ~10% | West | Sunni/Shi’a |
| Lurs | ~6% | Zagros Mountains | Shi’a |
| Arabs | ~2-3% | Khuzestan (southwest) | Shi’a/Sunni |
| Baloch | ~2% | Southeast | Sunni |
| Turkmen | ~2% | Northeast | Sunni |
The divide isn’t just ethnic. It’s structural. Groups that share Shi’a Islam with the state — Azeris, Lurs — have greater access to political and military power. Sunni minorities — Kurds, Baloch, Turkmen — face what scholars call “double marginalization”: excluded both because they are non-Persian and because the constitution requires the President and Supreme Leader to be Shi’a.
The execution data makes the disparity concrete:
| Group | Population Share | Share of Political Executions (2010-2024) |
|---|---|---|
| Kurds | ~10% | 52% |
| Baloch | ~2% | 29% |
Two ethnic groups comprising 12 percent of the population account for 81 percent of all political executions over fifteen years.2 The Baloch are overrepresented in executions by a factor of roughly ten times their population share.
The Kolbar and the Sookhtbar
The marginalization isn’t abstract. It produces specific economies of desperation.
In Kurdistan and Kermanshah provinces, the state has deliberately withheld industrial investment for decades. Thousands of Kurds earn a living as Kolbars — porters who carry heavy loads of goods across the mountainous border with Iraq. Electronics, tea, tires. The state classifies them as smugglers. Border guards open fire on them regularly.
In 2024, the human rights organization Hengaw documented 339 Kurdish Kolbars killed or injured on Iran’s borders.3 Fifty-nine were killed outright. The numbers rose 15 percent from the previous year.
The Kolbar has evolved from economic victim into a symbol of Kurdish resilience — proof, activists argue, that the state keeps the region deliberately underdeveloped to prevent political empowerment.
In Baluchestan, the equivalent is the Sookhtbar — fuel porters who transport subsidized Iranian fuel across the border to Pakistan. Security forces shoot at fuel convoys. The vehicles explode. The drivers burn to death. The name itself carries the meaning: sookht means both “fuel” and “burned.”
In 2024, dozens of Sookhtbars were killed. A billion-dollar annual fuel-smuggling economy — born from desperation, sustained by the province’s deliberate impoverishment — runs on the bodies of the poorest Iranians.
Pahlavi’s Blind Spot
When GAMAAN polls measure opposition leadership preferences by region, a clear fault line appears. Reza Pahlavi’s support — which averages 31 to 39 percent nationally — drops below 20 percent in Kurdistan and West Azerbaijan.
The reason is historical, and the Pahlavi name is directly implicated.
Reza Shah — Pahlavi’s great-grandfather, founder of modern Iran — viewed ethnic and tribal diversity as backwardness. His “One Nation, One Language” policy enforced Persian as the sole language of administration, education, and public discourse.4 Publication of books and newspapers in minority languages was effectively banned. Place names were Persianized: Arabistan became Khuzestan in 1925, a policy of geographic erasure designed to dilute Arab identity.
The campaign against tribes was violent. Nomadic lifestyles were criminalized. Tribes were forced into guarded villages, their economic base destroyed. In the Lur regions, the American traveler William O. Douglas recorded accounts that border on genocide: “Lur after Lur was beheaded.”
In 1946, the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad lasted eleven months before being crushed. Its leader, Qazi Muhammad, was hanged in Chahar-Cheragh Square — a site that remains sacred to Kurdish nationalism. The Azerbaijan People’s Government collapsed the same year, followed by the public burning of Turkish-language books — an event that traumatized a generation of Azeris.
These are not ancient grievances. They are living memory passed through families. When a Kurd in Sanandaj sees the name “Pahlavi” on a ballot, they see the name of the dynasty that tried to erase their language.
And Yet — January 2026
The data is more complicated than the wounds suggest.
In January 2026, in Dehloran — a city with a Kurdish and Lor population — and in Baghmalek, protesters explicitly shouted: “This is the national slogan: Reza Pahlavi.”
Ethnic minorities adopting a nationalist symbol. Choosing state integrity over separatism. The periphery reaching toward the center.
This doesn’t erase the historical damage. But it suggests that the fear of state collapse — the experience of watching Syria, Iraq, and Libya fragment along ethnic lines — may be powerful enough to override even the deepest community memories. For many ethnic minorities, the Pahlavi brand may represent protection from chaos more than it represents Persian chauvinism.
The Question That Broke an Alliance
In 2023, a group of opposition leaders — including Reza Pahlavi and Kurdish leader Abdullah Mohtadi of the Komala party — formed the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran, commonly called the Mahsa Charter.5 It was the most promising attempt at opposition unity in decades.
It lasted months.
The fault line was federalism.
The federalist camp — represented by the Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran (CNFI) and major Kurdish, Baloch, and Arab parties — argues that a centralized Iran will inevitably be authoritarian. Their model: a federal democratic republic along Swiss, Canadian, or Indian lines, where ethnic regions have autonomy over education, policing, and local resources.
The centralist camp — represented by Pahlavi, constitutional monarchists, and many Persian republicans — fears that federalism is a “Trojan horse for separatism and partition.” Their preferred alternative: “administrative decentralization” — delegating power to provinces irrespective of ethnicity. “Territorial integrity” is their rallying cry.
Under pressure from their respective bases, the centralists attacked Mohtadi’s federalist history. The ethnic parties felt their demands for linguistic rights and decentralized governance were being diluted. The coalition fractured.
The regime, watching from Tehran, smiled. The one narrative it deploys more effectively than any other — the one that keeps Persian nationalists loyal even as they despise the mullahs — is the specter of partition. “Without us,” the regime says, “Iran becomes Syria.” And the opposition, by splitting along exactly this line, handed the regime its most potent argument for survival.
The Diaspora Mirror
The same fracture runs through the Iranian diaspora — six to eight million people scattered across the globe, commanding collective resources that rival the GDP of small nations.
The diaspora isn’t one community. It’s four distinct waves, each carrying different politics:
Wave 1 (1979-1982): The revolutionary elite — Pahlavi aristocracy, military generals, industrial magnates. They established “Tehrangeles” in Los Angeles. Staunchly monarchist. Their memory of Iran is frozen in 1978.
Wave 2 (1983-1995): The war and repression generation — professionals, draft dodgers, political dissidents. They carry the trauma of the Iran-Iraq War and the 1988 prison massacres. More ideologically diverse. Former leftists, liberals, and MEK members who hate each other as much as they hate the regime.
Wave 3 (1997-2009): The brain drain and reformist exit — journalists, students, intellectuals crushed by the failure of reform and the 2009 Green Movement. They understand modern Iran from direct experience, not memory.
Wave 4 (2018-present): The survival exodus — doctors, engineers, young activists fleeing economic collapse and political crackdown. Iranian students abroad doubled from 60,000 to 110,000 in just four years. This is not ideological emigration. It is survival.
The political fault lines mirror the homeland’s. Wave 1 is monarchist. Wave 2 is ideologically fractured. Wave 3 favors parliamentary democracy. Wave 4 is pragmatic — less interested in the battles of 1979, more focused on what works.
If economics is the diaspora’s strength, politics is its Achilles’ heel. The community possesses what analysts call the “trinity” of influence: wealth, intellect, and access. Yet it suffers persistent paralysis — “often fighting the battles of 1979 in 2025.”
The challenge for any future Iran is whether the country can be organized around something broader than ethnicity, broader than nostalgia, and broader than the shared hatred of the current regime. Because hatred is a demolition tool, not an architectural one.
The Builders
There is a historical irony that the current debate tends to forget.
The very ethnic groups now marginalized created the modern Iranian state.
During the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 — Iran’s first experiment with democracy — the heroes were not exclusively Persian. Sattar Khan, an Azerbaijani from Tabriz, held off royalist forces for months and became the “National Commander.” He didn’t fight for Azeri independence. He fought for a constitutional Iran. Sardar Assad Bakhtiari, leading the Bakhtiari tribal confederation from the Zagros Mountains, marched on Tehran and deposed the autocratic shah. Yeprem Khan, an Armenian, led the volunteer militias that were critical to the constitutionalist victory. The Armenian Dashnak party collaborated with Iranian constitutionalists, viewing a democratic secular Iran as the best guarantee for Christian minorities.
Azeris, Bakhtiaris, Armenians, Kurds — the multi-ethnic coalition that built Iran’s first parliament.
A century later, the regime’s narrative frames ethnic assertion as a foreign separatist plot. But the historical record shows the opposite: ethnic minorities weren’t trying to leave Iran. They were building it.
The question for the next Iran is whether it can honor that history. The Sassanid concept of Iranshahr — the “Domain of the Iranians” — defined a civilizational sphere broad enough to encompass Kurd, Turk, Baloch, and Persian alike, united by shared culture rather than coerced religion. Whether the opposition can revive that inclusive vision, or whether it fragments along the same lines the regime exploits, will determine whether the next Iran holds together.
The data on what Iranians want to destroy is clear. The data on what they want to build is the unfinished question — and the answer will be written not in polls, but in the choices made by people who have never agreed on anything except that this cannot continue.
This article is a companion to What Iranians Actually Want. For the polling methodology behind the data cited here, see The Methodology Wars.
Footnotes
-
Amnesty International, “Iran: At Least 82 Baluchi Protesters and Bystanders Killed in Bloody Friday Crackdown in Zahedan,” October 2022 ↩
-
Iran Human Rights and Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, execution data compiled from political execution records, 2010-2024 ↩
-
Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, annual report on Kolbar casualties on Iran’s western borders, 2024 ↩
-
Touraj Atabaki, “Recasting Oneself, Rejecting the Other: Pan-Turkism and Iranian Nationalism,” in Iran Facing Others, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, Princeton University Press, 1982 ↩
-
Georgetown University, Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran (“Mahsa Charter”) formation meeting, 2023; Clingendael Institute, “Opposition Politics of the Iranian Diaspora: Out of Many, One — But Not Just Yet,” 2023 ↩