Iran's security chief frames 'continuous shooting' as avenging Minab and Lamerd child deaths
Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, named as Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, was quoted across four Iranian state feeds between 09:56 and 10:16 UTC on 25 July 2026 saying operations would continue 'until the complete surrender of the enemy' and tying them to avenging the deaths of children in the southern towns of Minab and Lamerd.
At 09:56:46 UTC on 25 July 2026, the English service of Iran's Tasnim News carried a line attributed to the Secretary of the country's Supreme National Security Council: that "continuous and targeted shootings of our fighters will continue until the complete surrender of the enemy and revenge for the blood of the oppressed children of Minab and Lamerd." Within twenty minutes, near-identical wording had surfaced on Tasnim's Farsi channel (10:01:27 UTC), on the Arabic-language Al-Alam arm of Iranian state television (10:02 UTC and again at 10:16 UTC), and on PressTV's English feed (10:12 UTC). The official named across the broadcasts is Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr.
The coordinated wording is the story. Iranian security statements normally travel a familiar path, from Tasnim outward to the Arabic and English services over hours, not minutes. Here four monitored feeds carried substantially the same sentence inside a twenty-minute window, with PressTV's 10:12 UTC post adding an explicit "avenged" closing clause on the Minab and Lamerd reference. That pacing points to a pre-cleared text rather than an off-the-cuff remark, and it puts the security council's secretary, rather than the foreign ministry, at the front of an unusually escalatory public register.
What the four outlets actually said
Read against the timestamps, the language is almost identical. Tasnim's English service (09:56:46 UTC) wrote of "continuous and targeted shootings of our fighters" continuing "until the complete surrender of the enemy and revenge for the blood of the oppressed children of Minab and Lamerd." Tasnim's Farsi channel, JahanTasnim, carried the same line in Persian at 10:01:27 UTC. Al-Alam Arabic opened at 10:02 UTC with a red "Urgent" banner and reproduced the surrender and revenge formulation, and re-broadcast the same wording at 10:16 UTC. PressTV's English channel at 10:12 UTC added the closing clause that the blood of "innocent Minab, Lamerd children" was to be "avenged."
Monexus analysis: in Iranian security communiqués, the appearance of the same paragraph across Tasnim, Al-Alam and PressTV inside twenty minutes is itself a finding. The usual escalator runs from foreign minister statements to UN letters to IRGC ground-force communiqués. Going straight to a coordinated, multi-feed statement from the body's secretary, with "complete surrender" as the stated end-state and civilian child casualties named as the casus belli, shortens the rhetorical distance between words and use of force.
Minab and Lamerd, and the southern anchor
Minab and Lamerd are two towns in southern Iran, on the Hormozgan coastline facing the Strait of Hormuz. The cited source items name them but do not specify the date on which children there were reported killed, the casualty count, or the party the SNSC holds responsible. PressTV's 10:12 UTC post implies an attack has already taken place, because the language avenges children rather than preparing a response to a hypothetical incident, but the cited posts do not specify when, where, or by whom. The available thread evidence does not specify which branch of Iran's armed forces is conducting the "continuous shooting" the statement describes, or against which targets.
That southern anchor does specific rhetorical work even on the limited evidence in the four cited feeds. The SNSC's statement places the named grievances on Iran's Persian Gulf flank rather than on its western border or its missile corridors. A plausible reading of the available wording, given that the security council has chosen to name southern Iranian towns in a statement about "continuous shooting," is that Tehran is consolidating a narrative in which attacks on Iranian soil, not just retaliatory exchanges with a foreign adversary, are now framed as part of the active battlefield. The framing of "continuous shooting" as the active operation is repeated across the four feeds without elaboration; the cited posts do not specify which branch of Iran's armed forces is conducting it, or against which targets.
The register shift, and what it forecloses
The unusual register is in the tying. By binding active "shooting" to the deaths of named children in two specific southern towns, the SNSC secretary has moved the public framing of the operation from strategic denial to retribution. In the diplomatic grammar Iran has used in recent years, an SNSC secretary invoking "surrender" is a step beyond the usual choreography, and naming "complete surrender" as the stated end-state narrows the negotiation space around any partial deal, because anything short of surrender can be read by hardliners as a betrayal of the children's blood.
Monexus assessment: that tightening cuts both ways. It locks Tehran into a higher-tempo public line that obliges its own forces to be visibly active, which raises the probability of further kinetic episodes and makes a quiet diplomatic off-ramp more expensive domestically. It also, by naming "complete surrender" as the goal, forecloses partial deals that an Iranian negotiator might once have sold at home as tactical patience. The cited posts do not specify whether the wording was negotiated with the foreign ministry or the IRGC chain of command; that internal coordination is the part of the picture the public feed does not show.
What the wire still has to confirm
The four monitored feeds all attribute the statement to Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr by name and title, identifying him as Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. They do not name a venue (press conference, sit-down interview, written statement) for the remarks, nor do they specify when or where the children of Minab and Lamerd were killed, or by whom. The framing of "continuous shooting" as the active operation is repeated in all four posts without elaboration; the source items do not specify which branch of Iran's armed forces is conducting it, or against which targets. Independent confirmation from Reuters, the BBC, or the AP would be the obvious next step before treating any of this as more than official Iranian messaging.
Desk note: Monexus treated Tasnim, PressTV and Al-Alam as the named primary sources here, with the caveat that all three are Iranian state outlets. The article foregrounds the unusual register and the coordinated wording rather than the operational claim, because the latter is not specified in the cited posts and the former is independently observable across four feeds.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/tasnimnews_en/27863
- https://t.me/JahanTasnim/226777
- https://t.me/alalamarabic/489695
- https://t.me/presstv/200281
- https://t.me/alalamarabic/489700