Tehran's judiciary chief frames new 'combined war' against the Islamic Republic, and points to 2022 protests as the template

On the morning of 22 June 2026, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, the head of Iran's judiciary, took to a podium in Tehran and named the threats. They were, in order: foreign intelligence services, opposition media outlets, exiled activists and a category he called "internal agents." Sitting beside senior security officials, he announced that Iran now faced a "combined war" waged jointly by Israel's Mossad, the United States CIA, the British MI6 and the domestic political opposition. He framed the response in the same vocabulary the security services used to describe the 2022 protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in morality-police custody: a hybrid assault on the Islamic Republic that must be met in kind, on every front, at once.

The remarks read less like a routine judicial address and more like a doctrine statement. Mohseni Ejei pointed to the September 2022 Mahsa Amini protests as the working template: street-level mobilisation directed from abroad, amplified by diaspora media, and answered with mass arrests, expedited "revolutionary courts" and, ultimately, executions. The judiciary, he said, was now reorganising to apply the same integrated playbook against what he described as a renewed "combined war."

The vocabulary of "combined war"

The phrase matters. It does not appear in casual political speech inside the Islamic Republic. Iranian security doctrine divides hostile action into overt military attack, covert intelligence operations, sanctions-driven economic warfare, and the mobilisation of domestic unrest. When a senior official collapses those categories into a single word, "combined," the implicit message is that the regime reserves the right to treat every one of them with a single instrument: the coercive apparatus of the state. The judiciary becomes, in effect, the long arm of military command.

Iranian state-aligned outlets Tasnim and Al-Alam carried the address prominently, framing the "combined war" line as the centrepiece of a renewed national-security campaign. The framing closely echoes language used by the judiciary in the wake of the 2022 protests, which Human Rights documentation and United Nations fact-finding have attributed to the security services' use of mass detention, judicial expedited processes, and the death penalty as political tools, with the Iranian authorities attributing the unrest in significant part to foreign intelligence direction.

What the 2022 template actually looked like

The reference point is consequential. In the months after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini's death in September 2022, the morality police's handling of Amini, who had been arrested for allegedly violating Iran's mandatory hijab law, became a catalyst for sustained nationwide protests, particularly led by young women and university students. Iranian authorities responded with a sustained crackdown that rights groups say killed several hundred protesters, detained thousands and produced multiple judicial processes that ended in executions of demonstrably minor participants. Tehran's official line then, as now, was that the demonstrations were foreign-directed "riots."

The judiciary's procedural response in 2022 and 2023 is the operational template Mohseni Ejei's address implies. Iran's "revolutionary courts," already operating without public jury trials and with limited defence access, accelerated case processing for protest-linked charges. International human rights reporting described sentencing patterns weighted heavily toward national-security offences carrying the death penalty, with executions often following within months of arrest rather than after multi-year appeals. The official answer to mass street protest, in other words, was the mass application of judicial procedure repurposed as a counter-insurgency tool.

Why the choice of 2022 as a model is revealing

There is a telling asymmetry in what the judiciary has chosen, and not chosen, as its precedent. The Iranian state has weathered foreign sanctions, covert operations, and even the targeted killings of senior nuclear scientists without publicly elevating the counter-doctrine to the status of "combined war." It is the experience of street protest, of the kind visible in the 2022 mobilisations, that the judiciary now chooses to elevate into a general model. The choice is, by itself, an admission: the regime views the hardest threat it has faced in the past decade not as external kinetic attack, but as organised domestic dissent with external technical support.

That framing also widens the universe of who can be prosecuted. If the 2022 protests were, in the official reading, a foreign-directed operation, then anyone who organised solidarity events, distributed information, or expressed solidarity abroad can in principle be located inside the same legal architecture. The diaspora press, satellite television channels operating from London and Washington, and platforms such as Telegram and Instagram, which Iran's official apparatus treats as hostile infrastructure regardless of jurisdiction, would all sit within reach of a doctrine explicitly modelled on the post-2022 crackdown.

The audience the address is actually written for

Speeches at this level in Tehran typically carry at least three audiences, and the alignment of the messaging is often more revealing than the words themselves. The domestic audience hears a warning: anyone who treats the next protest wave as a domestic grievance will be answered with the 2022 playbook intact. The diaspora audience hears a demarcation of what is considered legitimate activity: the apparatus will treat broadcast, hosting and event-planning activities abroad as components of the declared war. The foreign-policy audience, in Washington, London and Brussels, hears an invitation to reconsider the legal framing of Iranian opposition work that, until now, has often been treated as civil-society activity outside the security domain.

The judiciary's choice of platform is significant here. By publishing through Tasnim and Al-Alam in tandem with the address, the authorities ensured the doctrine received simultaneous translation into Arabic-language media that reaches the Levant, where Iran's regional posture intersects most directly with Israeli and Western intelligence activity. The vocabulary of "combined war" is meant to travel.

What to watch before the next anniversary

The earliest test of the new doctrine will arrive well before any 22 Bahman (11 February) anniversary that might mark a renewed protest cycle. Iran's judiciary is now signalling that pre-emptive judicial preparation, not merely policing on the night, is the operating mode. Iran's international human rights obligations have continued to be a focus of United Nations reporting on Iran's use of the death penalty in connection with the 2022 protests, and Tehran's own public posture now draws an explicit link between those mechanisms and any future round of unrest. The address is not new law, but it is a clear sign that the apparatus intends to use what already exists on the books, and that opponents, dissidents and diaspora networks should read the 2022 record less as history than as instruction.

The pattern now is familiar enough to be stated plainly. A senior judicial figure names the threat, identifies the template, and waits. What is new is the explicit operational link, the institutional willingness to say out loud that the post-2022 machinery is general purpose, and the speed with which it was being repurposed.

Sources: Tasnim English (Telegram); Tasnim Plus (Telegram); Al-Alam (Telegram); IRIran_Military (Telegram); Wikipedia: Mahsa Amini protests.

Desk note: Monexus relies on Tasnim and Al-Alam as primary sources for the judiciary chief's remarks, reflecting the Islamic Republic's official framing, while reading them against independent international human-rights documentation of the post-2022 crackdown. The Telegram thread originally cited (IRIran_Military) is treated here as messaging rather than reporting and is not used to anchor any analytical claim.