I'm John Batson with my colleague and friend Bill Rajio, senior fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

He and his colleagues keep the Long War Journal, where you can see reporting in the hot spots around the Middle East and across the Eurasian continent and into the Americas.

But right now we're focused on Tehran.

And we welcome our colleague Jonathan Saya of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy,

who is a birth in Tehran. He was born there. My relatives live there. And Tehran is a very large,

more than 10 million people live there, city, a very large city, with import from all the regions of Iran.

Think of Tehran as the center of a donut.

All of the regions, Khuzestan, the Azeri, all of the regions feed into Tehran, and it's a blend, just like New York City is, of the different

loyalties and backgrounds and histories in this large and very rich country, Iran, but not

recently. The collapse of the water system, which is ongoing, the inflation which is beyond

endurable now with the the Real, merely worthless.

And with the state within the state, the IRGC now opening fire, we're told, but there's

through glass darkly because the Internet's down. So I'm keen on Jonathan's opinion right now of what he has been able to see and what he has learned in these last days of what's going on in Tehran.

Jonathan, a very good evening to you.

Thank you for joining.

How would you characterize this upset compared to what happened in 2009 when there were protests in the streets of Tehran. Thank you.

Great to be with you. And yes, I was on the streets in 2009 back in the day being a civic activist, but this is like nothing we've seen before.

Even though the trigger was economic, you're talking about a nationwide protest movement that some are calling a revolution. One, we've never seen this scale. When you look at the numbers in the street, it's nothing like 2019 or 2022. The demographics are very different. You have the young people, old people, of different walks of life. Sectors that were at one point part of the regime.

Support base are now turning against it.

And we've never seen a movement be sustained as long as this has, despite the repression.

So there's been an internet shutdown for the last few days.

But what was really unprecedented is the fact that they're also shutting down electricity and landlines.

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