Since the following answers provided by Anarchist Front inside their open telegram channel at the beginning of April could be of interest to comrades worldwide, they are being re-published here.

AGAINST ALL STATES, AGAINST THEIR WAR!

Answers to the questions from Maciej A. an anarchist comrade in Poland.

1. Is the anarchist movement in Iran niche and fragmented, mostly concentrated in university cities? And how active is the diaspora?
   The anarchist movement in Iran is young. It is only in recent years that anarchism within the geography of Iran has developed into an actual movement in the full sense of the word. It is also only in the past few years that some anarchist books have been officially translated into Persian and received permission for publication inside Iran.
   That said, the movement is more geographically widespread than outsiders might expect. According to surveys we conducted on Twitter and Telegram, anarchists are present in all 31 provinces of Iran, from very small towns to very large cities, across the entire geography of the country. The movement is everywhere, even if it is not always visible.
   Due to the conditions of severe repression in the country, the anarchist movement has operated in an increasingly decentralised manner. This decentralisation is not a weakness, it is a survival strategy.
   We are the only anarchist organisation with approximately 17 years of continuous organised activity. We began on August 15, 2009, outside Iran under the name “Voice of Anarchism.” From 2011 to 2014 we reorganised under the name “Anarchist Network.” From 2013 we operated the Asranarshism website. After comrades from Afghanistan joined us in 2015 we merged all activities into the Asranarshism collective. In 2018 together with two other anarchist organisations, one in Iran and one in Afghanistan, we founded the Anarchist Union of Afghanistan and Iran. In 2020 this became part of the Federation of Anarchism Era. In mid-April 2025 the Federation was effectively dissolved, we preserved its pages as an archive, partly as a record of our history and partly to prevent anyone from using the name while the pages remained inactive. Since April 30, 2025 we have been operating under the name Anarchist Front, with a focus on the geographies of Iran, Afghanistan, and the surrounding region.
   We have no desire to expand our organisational strength in a conventional institutional sense. Our focus is on the quality and depth of our organising, not on growth.
   On the diaspora: our situation is the opposite of most other Iranian opposition forces, whose main base is outside the country. In our case, our roots and primary presence are inside Iran. Outside Iran, the number of anarchists is still not large.
   
   
2. The Federation of Anarchism Era and Zanan-e 8 March — competing groups or branches of the same ideological tree?
   As explained above, the Federation of Anarchism Era no longer exists, it was dissolved in April 2025 with the largest number of collaborators from the dissolved Federation now self-organized within the Anarchist Front. The Anarchist Front has a coalition structure composed of various anarchist tendencies. We work with all anarchist currents except those that combine anarchism with pacifism, nationalism, religion, or capitalism.
   Our collaboration with Afghan anarchists began in 2015. Three groups (one from Afghanistan) founded the Anarchist Union of Afghanistan and Iran in 2018. Afghan comrades have been part of the Anarchist Front from its very beginning. There are also comrades from several other geographies who are members of the Anarchist Front.
   Regarding Zanan-e 8 March: they are not anarchists. They are Maoists, connected to the Communist Party of Iran (M.L.M). We share an opposition to the Islamic Republic and some common ground on women’s rights, but they represent a fundamentally different political tradition: one organised around party structure, vanguardism, and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology. We do not consider them competitors but we are not the same ideological tree.
   
   
3. Where is the situation worse — Iran or Afghanistan? And is Afghanistan forgotten?
   Both situations are catastrophic but the forms of catastrophe are different and must be named precisely.
   In Iran today, people face at least three simultaneous major challenges: extreme poverty, widespread repression, and a devastating war. The intensity of the war in Iran is severe. Over 1,500 documented civilians have been killed, including more than 200 children. The global internet has been cut since February 28th. People are under bombs, under bullets, and under economic collapse simultaneously.
   In Afghanistan, people face at minimum five simultaneous challenges: extreme poverty; the mass expulsion of Afghan refugees from both Iran and Pakistan; repression; a limited but ongoing conflict with Pakistan; and the comprehensive exclusion of girls and women from education, work, and public life under the Taliban. In Afghanistan we do not yet have an anarchist movement in any meaningful sense, inside and outside the country there are only a small number of anarchist individuals.
   The situation of Afghanistan changed completely from the beginning of the Ukraine war. International attention shifted entirely. Afghanistan entered a state of being “forgotten”, abandoned by the same Western powers that created the conditions for the Taliban’s return, no longer strategically useful as a news story, invisible in the global media landscape despite the ongoing catastrophe of 40 million people living under one of the most totalitarian gender apartheid systems in modern history.
   We refuse that invisibility. Both situations demand solidarity. Neither can be ranked above the other in human terms. But the forgetting of Afghanistan is itself a political act, and we name it.
   
   
4. How did the anarchist movement respond to the December–January uprising? Did our comrades participate?
   Naturally, when people are in the streets protesting, anarchists are there too. When tens of thousands of people are arrested, anarchists are inevitably among the detained. Our comrades were present, organised, documented, and some were arrested.
   However, after the massacre of tens of thousands of people, concentrated primarily on January 8th and 9th, 2026, anarchists and many other political activists have made a decision not to participate in street protests. Not because the struggle is over, but because the current form of street protest does not bring down this government. The regime has demonstrated it is prepared to massacre tens of thousands more. It has announced explicitly that anyone who participates in street protests will be treated as an enemy and met with bullets.
   The question we face is not whether to resist, it is how to resist effectively without simply providing the regime with more bodies to kill. That question does not have an easy answer. But it is the honest one.
   
   
5. What if most Iranians actually want the return of the Shah?
   Let us be precise about what actually happened.
   People entered street protests from December 28, 2025, on their own initiative, without any call from opposition groups outside the country. For eleven days, people were in the streets without any call from any foreign-based opposition. It was the Kurdish organisations that on January 8, 2026, called for a general strike. After that, Reza Pahlavi called for participation in protests on January 8 and 9.
   His call, coming eleven days after people had already been in the streets independently, provided the context for the massacre of tens of thousands of people on those two days. The timing is not incidental. The monarchists attempted to ride a wave that had been entirely self-organized and independent for eleven days before they intervened.
   According to various polls, supporters of monarchy in Iran are approximately 17 percent of the population. That is not a negligible number, they have unified leadership and organizational advantages. But 17 percent is not a majority and it is not representative of the Iranian people.
   Since the protests began on January 7th, various coalitions and congresses have formed that are extremely diverse and varied. In contrast, gatherings associated with Pahlavi include only his supporters. Pahlavi represents monarchists. He does not represent the Iranian people.
   
   
6. Were the protests unpatriotic* given the threat of attack? Were they provoked by sanctions?
   The Islamic Republic came to power in 1979. Nearly one month later, the mass protests of women against compulsory hijab began (March 8, International Women’s Day). In that same year, the Kurdish people’s movement was crushed by military force. In the 1980s and 1988, thousands were executed in prisons. In the 1990s we saw urban protests in dozens of cities, all suppressed. Then the student movement of 1999. Then 2009 and the Green Movement. Then 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2025. In forty-seven years, people have been in the streets again and again: for freedom, against repression, against electoral fraud, against price increases, against the water crisis caused deliberately by the IRGC’s dam-building mafia that diverted river courses to serve water-intensive civilian and missile industries, and against the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini.
   The Islamic Republic has looted the wealth of the Iranian people. Dozens of officials have left the country with billions of dollars. The rest invested in proxy groups across the region, in dozens of underground missile cities, in nuclear energy. They destroyed Iran’s environment. They left the population in poverty.
   The January 2026 protests began because the dollar had multiplied catastrophically in price in a short period, making all goods unaffordable. People went to the streets because of the unbearable pressure of daily life, poverty, price increases, and the absence of freedom. They had gone beyond the theocratic government ruling Iran.
   People went to the streets themselves, without any call from any opposition or any foreign government for eleven days. After that, the monarchist wave-riding began, and Israel and America attempted to capitalise on protests that had been entirely popular and independent from eleven days earlier.
   To call this unpatriotic is to erase forty-seven years of independent Iranian resistance and reduce it to a foreign project. We reject that erasure completely.
   
   
7. On the contested death toll from the January protests
   Tens of thousands of people were killed. No one can provide an exact figure, and that impossibility is itself a product of deliberate state policy.
   What happened is clear: unarmed people in the streets were shot with heavy machine guns, snipers, and thousands of armed security personnel with military weapons. Anyone in the street was killed, including people who were not at the protests but simply in the streets for their daily lives.
   Our position is: cite verified minimums, acknowledge that real figures are significantly higher, and refuse both the regime’s minimisation and inflated figures that cannot be verified. The truth, however partial, is more powerful than a convenient number, even one that seems to serve our cause. What is not in dispute is that the scale was catastrophic and deliberate.
   
   
8. On the “war of liberation” framing
   There is no such thing as a war of liberation conducted by states.
   War means the destruction of human beings, the environment, and civilisation. But throughout the past century of history, repressive, totalitarian, and fascist governments have been defeated as a result of foreign war, because states do not only fight their own people; states also fight each other, for their own state interests, ideological interests, or security interests.
   This war is not our war. It is a war of states. The US and Israel are pursuing their own strategic interests: the elimination of Iran’s missile capabilities, its naval capacity, its nuclear program, and its capacity to challenge American and Israeli dominance in the region. None of these objectives include the freedom of the Iranian people. The bombs prove it: over 1,500 civilian dead, hundreds of children, schools destroyed, medical centres hit.
   We oppose the Islamic Republic and we oppose this war. Both positions are consistent with the same principle: we stand with people, not with states.
   
   
9. How do we coordinate under the internet blackout?
   Under conditions of complete internet blackout, combined with widespread repression, mass arrests, bombs destroying the geography of Iran, unemployment, and soaring prices, there is naturally very little that can be done.
   In such conditions no one can monitor the situation of political prisoners. Communication between popular resistance groups breaks down. People in areas about to be struck often remain uninformed and cannot warn each other or provide mutual aid. Communication between Iranians outside the country and their families inside is cut, millions of Iranians abroad have no information about their loved ones inside. We cannot provide security information to people inside the country to help them minimise harm during the war. The combination of war, blackout, repression, and economic collapse has created conditions of multiple simultaneous crises that overwhelm any organised response.
   We do what we can. We document. We communicate when connectivity allows. We maintain our presence. But we will not pretend that these conditions do not severely limit what is possible.
   
   
10. On Soheil Arabi’s disappearance
    Many former political prisoners have been arrested without any reason during the current period. Soheil Arabi, anarcho-syndicalist and atheist, has disappeared. Due to the internet blackout we do not know in which prison, in which solitary cell, and under what torture he currently finds himself, unless he has been transferred to a general ward. Afshin Heyratian, from a Baha’i family, but an atheist, former political prisoner, and anarchist, was arrested before the protests began and remains in prison. He has not been permitted to post bail even temporarily.
    We say their names. We hold their situation. Under current conditions of blackout and war, we cannot verify details. That uncertainty is itself a form of torture, for them and for those who care about them.
    
    
11. Others we ask you to remember
    During the 2022 Woman-Life-Freedom (Jin Jiyan Azadi/ Zan Zendegi Azadi) uprising, more than 100,000 people were arrested and judicial files were opened for 90,000 of them.
    During the 2025-2026 protests, at least 50,000 people were arrested, including hundreds of children, most of whom are still imprisoned or at risk of execution.
    The number of people currently at risk of execution is very large. And every day dozens more are being arrested.
    The list of names is too long to complete. Every name is a life. Every life matters. We ask international comrades to keep the pressure on: document, demand, amplify. Do not let the blackout become a wall of forgetting.
    
    
12. On minorities — separatism, autonomy, Rojava model, or something else?
    We, as anarchists, oppose any form of state and support stateless ethnic societies and advocate for popular self-determination and self-organisation. The Rojava model can be very instructive and offers a good alternative to state-centrism: horizontal, federated, multi-ethnic, with real power in the hands of communities.
    But the peoples living in Iran, with their languages, cultures, and specific demands, are the ones who will make their own decisions. It is not our place to decide for them or to prescribe solutions. We respect their decisions.
    What we do know is this: the diverse society of Iran cannot achieve its demands under a centralised, centralising, fascist state that insists on a single language, individual despotism, and the negation of diverse human identities. Such governments cannot serve the needs of a genuinely plural society.
    We believe in freedom. We do not prescribe solutions for anyone. We support their decisions, even as we continue to oppose every form of state and work toward the elimination of states, borders, and authoritarianism.
    
    
13. On Ukraine and the Russian invasion
    Russian imperialism is pursuing the restoration of its lost empire, it is engaged in conquest, in the occupation and seizure of territory, having initiated a devastating war.
    Since we are fundamentally opposed to wars between states and imperialist wars (wars that destroy the lives of people, the environment, and the lives of children) we condemn this war as we condemn the war of the US, Israel, and Iran. Our position is consistent: we oppose all state wars without exception. The destruction of human life and the natural world is not justified by any state’s flag or ideology.
    
    
14. The moral dilemma: if US ground troops attacked, should Iranian anarchists defend their country or remain neutral?
    The war between Iran, Israel, and America is not our people’s war. State wars have fundamentally nothing to do with the people. States fight each other and eventually make peace, and in the meantime only the lives of human beings, animals, children, and the environment are destroyed.
    We do not fight for states. We do not fight alongside the Islamic Republic under any circumstances. A regime that has spent forty-seven years killing our comrades is not our ally because a foreign power attacks it.
    What we defend is our communities, our people, our lives, not the state, not its flag, not its military interests. The distinction matters. And in conditions where ground occupation would mean a foreign power controlling the lives of ordinary Iranians, we would defend our communities through whatever horizontal, popular means are available, not as soldiers of any state, but as people defending people.
    
    
15. What should Western comrades always remember when thinking about Iran?
    We anarchists have always stood beside the peoples of the world. We oppose all governments of the world without exception.
    The life and existence of people in no geography is worth more than the life and existence of people in any other geography.
    We make no distinctions between states. We are against the wars of states without exception.
    But remember this above all: the people of Iran are under American and Israeli bombs. They are under the bullets of the Islamic Republic’s heavy machine guns. They are in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. And simultaneously they suffer from poverty, hunger, unemployment, and a complete internet blackout that has created enormous additional difficulties for everyone.
    They are carrying all of these burdens at the same time. Not one. All of them. Simultaneously.
    That is what solidarity means to hold in mind: not a simplified story about liberation or regime change, but the full weight of what ordinary people in Iran are living through right now.