United States President Donald Trump says Washington had armed Iranian opposition groups and protesters during mass antigovernment demonstrations in December and January, in which thousands of people were killed during crackdowns by government forces.
Speaking with Trey Yingst on Fox News in a Sunday morning phone interview, the president said the US had been directly involved in efforts to destabilise and overthrow the Iranian government weeks before strikes were launched on February 28 by the US and Israel across Iran and as American negotiators were engaging with senior Iranian officials in Europe.
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As the US-Israel war on Iran entered its 38th day, at least 2,076 people have been killed in Iran and 26,000 injured.
“President Trump told me the United States sent guns to the Iranian protesters,” Yingst reported on Fox News channel.
“He told me, ‘We sent them a lot of guns. We sent them to the Kurds.’ And the president says he thinks the Kurds kept them. He went on to say. ‘We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them.’”
Trump has often framed the decision to strike Iran alongside Israel as partly inspired by his wanting to “free” Iranians from the rule of the Islamic Republic after it cracked down on those protests in January.
But his statements to Yingst could lend weight to Tehran’s own assertions that the protests were not organic and “foreign-backed terrorists” had instigated them. Still, analysts warned that Trump’s frequently shifting statements on Iran mean that it is hard to know with certainty the extent to which the US might have been involved in the protests.
Here’s what we know:
What happened during the protests?
Demonstrations started on December 28 among shopkeepers in downtown Tehran who were angry about a deepening economic crisis and the falling value of the Iranian rial.
Soon, they spread to big and small cities across the country, morphing into nationwide demonstrations as hundreds of thousands of people of all ages took to the streets. Some protesters by then had begun to call for a change in the government.
Rights groups said Iranian authorities cracked down on the protests, especially on January 8 and 9. Thousands of people, most of them young Iranians, were reportedly killed from gunshots and stab wounds, and tens of thousands of others were arrested.
Iranian authorities also cut off the internet “to conceal their crimes”, according to Amnesty International, throwing the country into an information blackout for days.
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Iran Mai Soto said at least 5,000 people were killed and the real death toll could be as high as 20,000.
At least four people have since been executed in connection with the protests, according to Amnesty, with several more people on death row.
The protests were the largest since the September 2022 women’s rights demonstrations that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. She had been arrested for not properly covering her hair. Amini’s death sparked nationwide demonstrations. Authorities were then also accused of firing at protesters and arresting and eventually executing some of them.
What did the Iranian government say?
Then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said in a rare acknowledgement on January 17 that “several thousands” of people were killed in the protests after days of official hedging on casualty numbers as bodies piled up.
However, Khamenei blamed the deaths not on Iranian forces but on US- and Israel-backed groups that he said had hijacked the economic protests.
Khamenei accused Trump of being a “criminal” and of being personally involved in the instigation.
Tehran has long blamed its enemies, the US and Israel, for fomenting domestic crises, but alleged this time that the US involvement was deeper than usual.
“Those linked to Israel and the US caused massive damage and killed several thousands” during the protests that shook Iran for more than two weeks, Khamenei was quoted as saying by state media.
“The latest anti-Iran sedition was different in that the US president personally became involved,” he added.
Iranian officials later admitted the death toll was about 5,000, including at least 500 security personnel killed by “terrorists and armed rioters”.
An unnamed Iranian official told the Reuters news agency most of the violence and deaths occurred in Kurdish territory in northwestern Iran. That area has long been home to Kurdish separatists and has often recorded unrest.
What did the US government say about the protests?
About a week into the crisis, Trump warned Iran against targeting protesters.
“If Iran sho[o]ts and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform without giving details about what a “rescue” would look like.
“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” the president added.
Then on January 13, he wrote, “Help is on its way,” appearing to address Iranian demonstrators. He urged them to “take over your institutions” while issuing threats to Iranian authorities if protesters were killed.
Trump’s warnings to Tehran came after the US bombed three of Iran’s most important nuclear sites during Israel’s 12-day war on Iran in June. Trump said then that the strikes “obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear capabilities. Iran launched retaliatory strikes on US military assets deployed at a base in Qatar.
After Trump confirmed on February 28 that the US and Israel had launched strikes on Iran, he said the primary goal of the war was to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons.
He also linked the action to the January protests.
Tehran had “killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested”, Trump said. The US was now “giving you what you want”, he said, addressing Iranians he said had been calling for US intervention.
Are Trump’s actions and words impacting the Iranian opposition?
Several Iranian Kurdish groups on Sunday denied Trump’s claims of arming them during the December and January protests.
Iranian Kurdish groups have long opposed the government in Tehran and are seeking self-determination. They share close ties with Iraqi Kurds, who successfully fought for a semiautonomous region decades ago. Many operate along the Iraq-Iran border and in northern Iraq.
While they’ve long been fractured, several of the Iranian Kurdish groups banded together in a coalition days before the US and Israel launched the war.
In its first week, Tehran began hitting Kurdish positions in Iraq after US media reported that some Kurdish opposition leaders were speaking with Trump.
At the time, analysts speculated the US could be trying to support Iranian Kurds to seize parts of Iran bordering Iraq. The aim, they said, could be to create a buffer area that would allow invading Israeli or US ground forces to move in from Iraq.
However, so far, neither Israel nor the US has launched ground attacks. Opposition Democrats in the US Congress have spoken out against the war and have particularly opposed US ground troops being sent into Iran although the Trump administration has not entirely ruled it out.
On Sunday, a senior official of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI) told the Iraqi broadcaster Rudaw that Trump’s statements to Fox were false.
The KDPI was one of the groups that the US media reported Trump had spoken with in March.
“Those statements made are baseless, and we haven’t received any weapons,” Mohammed Nazif Qaderi was quoted as saying. “The weapons we have are from 47 years ago, and we obtained them on the Islamic Republic’s battlefield, and we bought some from the market.”
The official added that KDPI’s policy is not to “make demonstrations violent and use harsh methods. Rather we believe we must make our demands in a peaceful and civil manner without weapons.”
Denials have also come from the Komala Party, another opposition group.
Iran analyst Neil Quilliam of the United Kingdom’s Chatham House think tank, told Al Jazeera that it’s hard to assign much weight to Trump’s statements because of the claims and counterclaims often coming from him and his administration.
“I don’t think it would be a surprise if it were later revealed that the US had lent support to protesters to try to encourage a revolt. In fact, I would expect them to do so,” the analyst said.
“However, Trump’s comment reveals nothing material and likely reflects more about him than anything else. His remark about the Kurds keeping the weapons sounded more like sour grapes because they refused to revolt right now rather than pocketing weapons supplies,” he added.
Still, the analyst said that even as a throwaway line, such statements from Trump are likely to affect the cohesion of Iranian opposition groups and their aim to overthrow the Iran’s government.
