Internal rifts are intensifying within the Iranian regime following the ceasefire agreement with the United States, as anger over the US-Iranian war shifts into a domestic struggle between a hardline faction rejecting any compromise with Washington and leadership figures seeking to manage the new phase, according to a CNN report.
As Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian walked alongside the coffin of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran last week, some of the black-clad mourners surrounding him chanted not in tribute to the late leader, but directly at him – “death to the compromiser.”
Not far from that site, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister who negotiated a ceasefire with the Trump administration and lifted some sanctions on the country, was forced to flee the funeral after a mob pelted him with rocks amid death chants accusing him of being a “traitorous sellout.”
The hostility directed at top officials during the funeral reflects a theory that has been gaining traction within the Iranian regime’s most radical factions for months: that Iran’s wartime leaders who negotiated and signed the agreement with Washington are staging a soft coup against the republic and its revolutionary ideals while the new supreme leader remains largely invisible for fear of his life – or, as some have suggested, because he is incapacitated, said the report.
The hardline factions that attended the funeral in large numbers believe that instead of avenging Khamenei’s killing, Iranian officials have surrendered by signing an agreement that defies the orders of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, the late leader’s son and successor. But Khamenei has remained hidden from public view, neither addressing the nation directly nor visibly asserting his authority, even as officials negotiate or govern in his name.
Hardliners have accused Iran’s visible leadership – those running and representing the country as Khamenei remains in hiding – of plotting to consolidate power by suspending parliament, defying his orders in negotiations and attempting to disperse the nightly street rallies that had become a potent power base for fundamentalists.
“Warning to the people of Iran: Is a coup on the way?” Mahmoud Nabavian, an outspoken radical lawmaker, asked on X days before Khamenei’s funeral.
“In these moments of farewell to (Khamenei), we raise the banner of vengeance for his blood and stand firm against the coup,” he wrote days later.
In Mojtaba’s absence, chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Pezeshkian and Araghchi have become the most visible faces in charge of post-war Iran.
On Tuesday, Nabavian, the hardline lawmaker who fiercely opposes the agreement and has been one of the leading voices warning of a “coup,” was removed from his position on the parliament’s National Security Commission, along with another parliamentarian critical of the deal.
Nabavian, who was part of Iran’s negotiating delegation before turning against the talks and attempted to derail the agreement by leaking the text to the media before it was signed last month, claimed that Iran’s negotiating team were defying the supreme leader’s red lines in their talks with the US. CNN could not reach Nabavian for comment.
He and others echo the views of “Jebhe-ye Paydari” (the Endurance Front) whose hardline members are often described by observers as “Super Revolutionaries.” They see themselves as the guardians of the values of the 1979 revolution that overthrew the pro-Western monarch and established a theocracy.
Experts say Iran’s visible leaders are actively trying to marginalize them.
“We’re seeing Ghalibaf exerting influence to sideline these hardline elements,” Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told CNN.
“They are too costly for the system and they’re bringing their rivalries out in the open especially as the situation in Iran becomes unstable.”
Their numbers are small, but they hold influential positions across the country, including in parliament and at the national broadcaster IRIB, which launched its own campaigns against the president.
