← The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
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- [00:03]
A
Sky News, the full story first. Hello, it's me, Yalda, and I'm currently in London.
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B
And me, Richard Engel, and I am in Washington, D.C. a week after President Trump ordered American forces to capture, arrest and remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and take him here to the United States now there are widespread anti government protests in Iran.
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A
Tens of thousands of people have come out onto the streets. And we understand the regime has blocked the Internet. There's a complete Internet shutdown. The death toll continues to climb and the number of protesters that are being arrested.
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B
Iran said that they would consider military.
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A
And commerc basis as legitimate targets.
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B
If you struck, are you concerned about that? We'll consider things targets that they wouldn't believe. If they do that, we will hit them at levels that they've never been hit before. They won't even believe it. I have, I have options that are so strong. So I mean, if they did that, it'll be met with a very, very powerful force. President Trump says he's locked and loaded, ready to. And just a short while ago, and we were recording this Tuesday, January 13, he says that help is on the way. So is the Iranian regime in power since 1979 about to fall? Welcome to the world podcast.
- [02:08]
A
Richard. The last time we spoke, you were in Columbia. You're now in D.C. and what a time to be in Washington when so many huge decisions are currently being mulled over. Discuss. President Trump and his team say all options are on the table when it comes to Iran. How are you doing?
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B
I'm doing well. Yeah. It's one of these years. And I think as we talked about last week, we're just getting started. First it was Venezuela, now Cuba, maybe. President Trump keeps talking about Greenland. There might be military action against Mexico. But right now the focus is on Iran. I'm hearing from activists that many, many protesters have been killed. President Trump now says he's going to take some sort of action. This is a critical moment. And having covered Iran for years, having spent quite a bit of time there over the last year, or though I have not seen the government this week, I haven't seen them face a protest movement like this before. Revolts, people out, blocking the streets, refusing to leave, and then revolutions where the existence of the state is at risk.
- [03:27]
A
Yeah. And Richard, I mean, currently all eyes on the situation in Iran, which is what we're going to focus this week's podcast on. And of course, you spent so much time last year in Iran. So I want to talk more about that. I've also been speaking to a tech founder, an Iranian American, who was instrumental in getting Starlinks into the country, which has helped us get a sense of what's happening right now in Iran, despite this Internet blackout right across the country.
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B
That part of this story is so critical. The ability, or often now, inability of the protesters to communicate among themselves and show their movement to the world and show it specifically to President Trump is fundamental in all of this. And I know you've got some interesting reporting on that. I can't wait to hear it.
- [04:18]
A
And of course, as always, send us your thoughts at the usual place, the worldatsky.uk and follow us wherever you get your podcasts, whether that's Apple or Spotify. And of course, you can follow us on our YouTube page.
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B
All right, Yelda, why don't you bring everyone up to speed about what we know about what is going on in Iran now?
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A
Yeah. So, Richard, these protests began sort of towards the end of December. And basically it started off with the bazaaris who were seeing this economic crisis unfolding for the last 47 years or so, or since the revolution of 1979. They've been tough economic sanctions imposed on Iran. And what we saw towards the end of December is the high inflation in the country, wages not being paid, you know, prices skyrocketing. People were, are and were really suffering. And so you saw, you know, that kind of middle class starting to come out onto the streets. It wasn't just those, the elites who are anti regime in the country. You were starting to see people angry about the fact that the economy is a mess. And they were asking for the regime to do something different, to offer them some kind of respite because even the price of a loaf of bread was so expensive for the average Iranian person. Like I said, you know, wages weren't being paid. People are suffering. The Iranian economy is an absolute mess. And so that's how it started that we saw, you know, those within the bazaar coming out protesting about this, the economic crisis in the country. And then very, very quickly, you know, it turned into a much bigger attack on the regime. So initially, the president came out and tried to have some consultations with, you know, the bazaaris, the people who are looking at the economic issue in the country, those in the marketplace, the middle class, wanting to reach out and talk to them and say, look, we're looking at various different solutions to bring about some kind of relief. And then even these reformists within the regime suddenly have started to crack down on the protesters because they see those who are out on the streets now, as agitators, agitators who have been told by Israel, by the United States, to come out onto the streets and destabilize this regime. These protests that we've seen, which have gained momentum over the last five or six days, we're being told that this time it feels different. And the reason for that is this wild. President Trump, you know, unlike previous American administrations who have perhaps tried to put pressure through sanctions on the Iranian regime, Donald Trump, you know, has proven that he's not afraid to take direct action, whether that was in the last few weeks in Venezuela or frankly, in Iran itself during the 12 Day War where he launched those attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities.
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B
I remember the last time I was in Iran and the last year I spent, when you add up all the trips together, several months in Iran, which is quite extraordinary for an American journalist. And I saw this. People just didn't have any money. I would go to the Grand Bazaar, which is a beautiful, fabulous place. And it's not just one big room, it's a labyrinth. And there's shops and there's an area that does carpet, an area that does jewelry, an area that does clothing. And it's a traditional marketplace where there's buying and selling and there was nobody there. And even if you wanted to buy something they didn't have, they couldn't take currency, you couldn't use a credit card, you can't bank. There were things that I wanted to buy because there's many beautiful things there, but unless I had cash in pocket, and you can only carry so much cash around with you, I couldn't buy. So even as a. As a willing customer, I couldn't do business there. And this affects everyone. It affects the rich, it affects the poor, it affects the middle class. And the government's response is death to America. Death to America. Death to America. After 47 years, people say, yeah, we've heard that, but we can't buy anything, we can't sell anything. We can do better than this. And maybe it's time for a change.
- [08:53]
A
Yeah. And, Richard, the question that keeps popping up around change is, is the regime going to collapse? But frankly, when you look at particular regime and its 150,000 strong Revolutionary Guard, and, you know, perhaps close to a million, and if you include the reservists as well, the besieged, the militia that are an offshoot of the Revolutionary Guard, one has to wonder why over the course of the last 47 years, we have not seen defections even from the regular army. We've not seen them Say, come out and say, no, we're not going to shoot at the protesters. You know, when you think about Egypt and the uprising in. In Egypt, when the Arab Spring happened.
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B
The so called Dahrir Square. Yeah.
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A
And. Yeah, and you were there. I was there. You know, we saw a momentum building against President Mubarak at the time, the dictator in Egypt and the army split with him and said, no, we're not going to shoot at arrowed people. And frankly, we just don't see that here in Iran. We didn't see it in the 2009 protests. We didn't see it in 2019, 2022, and we haven't seen it now. You know, these brave protesters go out onto the street night after night after night, risking their lives. Young teenagers coming out, knowing that they could potentially not go back home and go home in a body bag. And yet they continue to do it. And they're up against a militia, an army that is willing to shoot at them. And so that has been a big question for me. Why can't it be penetrated? Not from the top, not from the middle, not from the bottom. And I think we talk about oppositions, we talk about protest movements, we talk about uprisings, we talk about the fact that Trump might launch some military strikes. But frankly, as you and I both know, when it comes to the collapse of these regimes, unless it doesn't sort of break from within on some level, and the rot that you see from within sort of start to crack, you know, I am not sure how much these military strikes that Trump or others might launch will fundamentally make a massive amount of difference.
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B
So before we get into all the scenarios of what could happen if this regime collapses, why don't we help people understand a little bit what Iran is and what it's not. I'm in the US Right now, and I keep trying to tell people, hey, this is not Venezuela. Don't think that a couple of Delta Force guys are gonna go in, they're gonna snatch the supreme leader of Iran, and President Trump is gonna declare victory. And the inner circle around the leader is just gonna say, okay, no problem, we're happy to be a colony. Now bring in your oil companies and let's play. That's not Iran. That's not its history. It's got a much more complex history. It has a much deeper history. It's a big country, mountainous, 100 million people wedged between Afghanistan and Iraq. We all know how complicated those interventions were, particularly from where I'm sitting right now in Washington.
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A
And Richard, you know on the Venezuela point, you know, there's proximity as well. I mean, I know that the US has bases in the region which they could use, especially in the Gulf states. I'm not sure, you know, how comfortable at the end of the day, the Gulf states and whether, whether they will have much of a. Anyway, if those countries are then used in the bases, the American bases in those countries, to completely destabilize and collapse another regime in the region. You know, we've seen how regime change has gone in places like Iraq, as you say. But why don't we, as you have just mentioned and laid out, perhaps go back to 1979, January 1979, roughly when we started to see a momentum building where there were demonstrations starting to develop in Iran just before the 1979 revolution.
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B
With your permission, Yalda, I'm just going to go back a little bit further and I'm not going to tell the whole history of Persia going back to, you know, Cyrus the Great. But let's just go back a little bit further. Let's go back to, let's even go back to the turn of the century. So the turn of the century, oil becomes a mate and it's all about oil. At the end of the day, all of the Venezuela was about oil. This one's about oil too. It's about revenge. But let's go. But at the turn of the century, the turn of the 1900s, oil becomes a major factor in the world economy. The, the, this now in this case, it's the uk. So the Anglo Persian Oil Company, later known as BP for those who might be familiar with it, had a huge stake in Iran and they were getting enormous amounts of wealth from this country. Jump ahead a few decades. In the 1950s, there is a popular prime minister. So Iran was run at that period by the Shah. The Shah, meaning the monarch. The Shah was in power. The US and others were working with him. The Brits were working with him. They were selling oil. But in the 1950s, there's a powerful prime minister, Mossadegh, and he's rising up in power. And the Shah is now not an absolute monarch. He's kind of becoming a constitutional monarch and he's sharing power with Mosaddegh. And it's becoming, I don't want to say democratic, but a more representative political system. Mossadegh is seen as a major threat. The Brits don't like him. The Americans don't like him. British intelligence particularly doesn't like him. After he nationalizes the oil companies. Right, he nationalizes the Oil companies and the British intelligence services go totally berserk. After several years trying to convince the Americans to join them, they finally do under President Eisenhower, and they launch in 1953 this operation, this secret operation called Operation ajax, where the CIA, MI6 go in, remove Mossadegh by fomenting civil unrest. They reimpose the Shah as an absolute monarch, more beholden than ever before to the United States and UK because it was the intelligence agencies that removed his limitations on power. Becomes more corrupt, becomes more authoritarian, becomes more unpopular. And in 1979, there was a radical change. There was the Islamic Revolution. And Ayatollah Khomeini returns and returns to these street protests and says, no more Shah, no more monarchy. Death to America. Death to the UK too. They were really just as angry with the UK as they were with the us. The Shah escapes as Khomeini is returning, and he's saying, we're going to get rid of this monarchy. We're going to get rid of this whole system. It's corrupt. Death to America and their domain. Demand was, give us the Shah, send him back from exile from the United States so we can put him on trial. Now, over the last several decades, the 47 years, the regime has proven to be not what it was advertised, not as quite inspired divinely by God. It has become corrupt. It has become increasingly unpopular. And there is a whole new generation of Iranians who are out on the streets right now who are saying this system didn't work. This experiment where we're going to live as a theocracy didn't work. We've been cut off. We have no money. These people are hypocrites. They're not as religious as they claim to be. Look what they're doing. They're killing people on the streets. Get rid of them. And that's why some of them are saying, bring back the Shah. Most of the people on the streets are so young, they never knew the Shah. They didn't live one day of their lives under the monarchy. There's just this nostalgia for better times. Now, here's the big question. You had a huge swing. You went from absolute unpopular monarchy to absolute theocracy. Now the President Trump does a couple of bombings, potentially. Where does it go from here? If you attack those people, the Revolutionary Guard and the ayatollahs, who steps in? Who governs this country of 100 million people? Does the monarchy come back? Is it an absolute monarchy? Open questions. And I think that's what we're talking about here. This is a big Historic moment.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. And, Richard, you've done a heroic job in kind of summarizing the past and then bringing it to the present. I'm just gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to hear more about the regional leaders, about what they think might happen.
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B
Welcome back. We've all seen these images that have been coming out of Iran despite an Internet blackout. And by the way, as you know, someone who does this for a living, as you do too, you know how hard it is to get pictures out of a country when the country doesn't want to allow you to do that. And Iran has cut off the Internet, yet certain images, video is coming out and they're using this Starlink system, which is a system developed by Elon Musk. Each Starlink unit is about the size of a laptop and it links up directly to satellites. So if the government closes the pipe, the Internet pipeline and shuts down the phone lines and in some cases even physically cuts the landlines, if you have one of these Starlink units, and they're rare in Iran, you can get your message out. Now, Yaldi, you just spoke to, you had this extraordinary conversation. Did you just speak to someone who's like managing this operation? Who's getting people Starlinks? How is this working? Tell me more about this. It is, it is a fascinating part of the story.
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A
Yeah, it is quite extraordinary. I just spoke to someone, this tech investor, Shervin Pesheva. He is an Iranian American and he has been instrumental, perhaps the person who began this link between Elon Musk, Starlink and the Iranian protesters.
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C
I think we were in a historic, you know, 24, 48 hour period of time. The time to act is now. The Iranian people have shown unbelievable courage. They are the brave hearts of our time and they are laying down their lives, spilling their blood for their freedom. They've been living in an open air prison for 47 years and they've had enough. President Trump's courageous call of support to the Iranian people had a major impact. The millions of people are calling for the return of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. The time to act and recognize Reza Pahlavi as not the recommended choice, but the declared choice of the people. His name is in the streets. He's called for people to come at 8pm on different nights. And they have responded. They have come. Their courage is inspiring the whole world. And now this Islamic regime, this criminal organization, terrorist organization, has taken over Iran for 47 years, is using the military to mow down these young people, these Defenseless young people who are fighting for their freedom. And so this is a moral question of our time. We've inspired them to come in the streets, they're being mowed down. You know, the families are being torn apart. You see these images of mothers hugging their children in the body bags. The numbers are in the thousands. Whether it's 5,000, 10,000, they're using the military and military guns to mow down defenseless young people. So whether it's the next 24 hours or 48 hours, this moment in time that, you know, that doesn't come often. This is a revolution. This is not protests.
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A
He said to me, this goes back to 2009, 2010, during the Green Revolution in Iran, where people were coming out onto the streets protesting against electoral fraud.
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C
The history goes back to 2010, during the first wave of the Green Revolution and the revolutions in Egypt and across North Africa and Libya. I had a dinner with the Secretary of State at the time, along with Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, and Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google @ the time. And I said this idea and the line that I said is that the last bastion of dictatorship is the router. Every time a revolution like this begins, dictators and tyrants block the Internet. They block the router, they block. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's basically, you know, a time where, you know, what we could. The solution is to use satellites to bring Internet to people when dictators try to stop them from recording the violent acts that's happening to them and telling the truth and showing their courage to the world. And so I flew into Benghazi at that time, two weeks before Gaddafi was killed. I went to Tahrir Square, met with the protesters, and in east Libya, there was a cellular network connected to satellites that was able to use to fight for their freedom. And then Elon Musk, who's an old friend and I was an investor in SpaceX a long time ago, and when he started to create starlinks, I knew that that was the.
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A
Solution. And then over the years, he worked with Elon Musk to get those starlink routers into Iran, especially during the 2022 Women Life Freedom revolution. He told me, now there are tens of thousands of these starlinks across the.
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B
Country. Tens of thousands were planted in, and they were, because they weren't around, you know, they're relatively new technology, so they were put in during the women Life freedom.
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A
Protests. Yeah. So back in 2022, he managed to get all of these.
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B
In. That's like you smuggle them in. That's a covert.
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A
Op. Yeah, you smuggle them in through northern Iraq, through places like Dubai, for example. And so, you know, I said to him, we're starting to get some of the images out, even though they've had a complete Internet blackout for the last time, five or six days. He said, yes, because they know when to turn them off, when to turn them on. We, we teach them basically how to hide it so it's not.
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C
Detected. There's instructions that have gone out about how to, how to obviously hide, hide, hide. The starlings. That's been from the beginning, but also recently in terms of like, how to get around the jamming and, and, but you know, they're hunting down the starlings now. They're going door to door. And, and it reminds you that these are occupiers. Some of the mercenaries that are being used aren't even Iranian. And so this is an occupied nation. Iranian people are living in an open air prison, 92 million of them. And we're so close to freedom that if courageous action happens and the promises that were made to the Iranian people that we would have their backs if there was.
- [25:53]
A
Violence. He described it as, you know, as I said, these freedom tools that they have, which is allowing the world to see the brutality of the regime against the protesters. But it is risky business because don't forget the regime believe that all of these protesters have been sent there by Israel, by the United States. You know, they see them as.
- [26:18]
B
Enemies of the state and they're now putting people on television. Have you seen any of these forced confessions? There've been about 95 of them so far. According to a human rights group here in the US there's about 10,000 plus people who've been detained and are missing. And just under a hundred of them are now making these television appearances. You know, I'm sorry, I was a traitor to my nation and I was part of a foreign terrorist group. And the government is on this massive PR campaign to say, look, look at these people. These are foreign agents, they are deviants, they are anarchists, they are, you know, rioters. They're not people who want democracy and we're doing the right thing by crushing them. It's not clear that that campaign is working, that it's not clear that that campaign is convincing anyone. But that's what the government's messaging is, that anyone who's got a Starlink, anyone who's out on the street is a traitor. And treason in these extraordinary circumstances could come with the death.
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A
Penalty. Yeah, and Richard, I've been speaking. Well, I spent the weekend speaking to regional leaders and those who despise this regime, those who work very closely with this regime. And they told me they were looking at a couple of things. I mean, as you say, Iran is a massive country, 90 million plus people. So where the protests are, the size of the protests matters. I was told by, by one regional leader that 10,000 is noise people. 10,000 people out on the streets is noise. A hundred thousand is significant. A million changes the equation and tens of millions has the potential to overwhelm the regime. We're not seeing that at the moment. The other thing that they're looking at is deflection, which we've already talked about. Whether it comes from the top, the middle or the bottom, they don't believe it's going to come from the top. So whether it's the regular army sud saying we're not going to shoot at the protesters, the third thing that they're looking out for now and in the last 24 hours that I am being told is now the only thing that they're looking at is what does Trump do next? And we've seen Donald Trump, as you say, put out these statements saying, you know, keep protesting, we're going, help is on its.
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B
Way. Does that mean more starlings or does that mean bombs? Yeah, yeah, well that's more pallets of comms.
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A
Equipment. Yeah, well that, that's the thing. Whether it's going to be through cyber attacks, whether it's going to be military strikes, exactly how that's going to look, the mood music and what I'm hearing, the momentum is building that within perhaps the next few days we may potentially see some kind of direct attack on Iran. Whether that's done through cyber or whether that's direct and targeted military strikes, we'll have to wait and.
- [29:08]
B
See. I'm hearing the same that something is coming, something could be coming soon. President Trump made it very explicit. He said, well if the regime keeps shooting at protesters, we're gonna shoot at them. And by all evidence that we're able to verify and receive from the outside, it seems very clear that the government is still shooting at protesters. So A plus B could lead to military action. But what's the plan? What's the follow up plan? Is bombing the Rev Guard enough? Because as you said, there aren't millions of people on the street. The regime has been able to mobilize counter protesters. The government still does control the airwaves for now. I would think that would be probably the first target is they knock off state television and it's knockoff, because that's what they did in the 12 Day War too, if you remember that. They were in the middle of a broadcast in Iran and boom, the studio was hit. So you take out the counter messages and you kind of paralyze the regime. Because I think talking to people here in D.C. what they're hoping. And hope's not a good plan, what they're hoping is if they strike the regime, the regime collapses and then democracy ensues. But, man, we've been down this road before and you cook up a plan in two weeks and then implement it, that's fast and has the potential to, I don't know, split Iran into sections. I could picture a scenario where parts of the country fall, other parts of the country don't fall because the protests, from what I'm hearing, are still big, probably hundreds of thousands of people across all of Iran's provinces. So that means not millions of people in one location like Tehran. That's what brought Egypt down. There were millions of people in Cairo shutting down the capital. This is more spread out, which is both kind of more powerful, but it also has the potential for more divisions. Look, this is something we're going to follow. We're going to keep talking about this. I'm still thinking about those initial pallets of Starlink that were brought into the country and then turned on, and they were given training on how to use them. That's an extraordinary piece of information that will go down in the historic record. Thank you for sharing that.
- [31:41]
A
Yalda. Thank you, Richard. And as you say, we will be watching this space very carefully and closely because it's unclear exactly what's going to happen in the next few days. Donald Trump says all options on the table. The Iranian people are still out on the streets and the regime continuing to crack down. This could go any which.
- [32:00]
B
Way. Until next time. I have a feeling we're gonna be talking about this more and probably.
- [32:06]
A
Soon. Richard, good to see you. And thank you so much to our listeners for.
- [32:10]
B
Listening. And don't forget, send us your questions. Subscribe. We like it. It helps us. It makes our bosses happy, helps us keep doing this. Good things happen. Hit the like, subscribe, all that kind of jazz. And thanks for.
- [32:23]
C
Listening.