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

On 22 June 2026, at 19:04 UTC, Iran's state-aligned outlets Tasnim and Al-Alam published remarks from Hojjat-ul-Islam Mohseni Ejei, the head of the Islamic Republic's judiciary, warning that the country is facing a 'combined war' modelled on the protests of 1402 in the Iranian calendar — the unrest that erupted in September 2022 after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini. Ejei framed the confrontation as one in which 'the government and the parliament joined hands' to defend the system, language that, on first reading, looks defensive, but on second reading is offensive: it tells the security state which threat it is fighting and which operational template it should reach for.

The phrasing is significant. By naming the 2022 episode — referred to inside Iran as the 'riots of 1402' or the 'Mahsa movement' — Ejei is not just describing a current crisis. He is licensing a familiar response architecture: mass arrests, expedited revolutionary-court proceedings, internet throttling, and the public labelling of demonstrators as foreign-directed agents of subversion. It is the same architecture that processed the 2022 protests, in which rights groups documented hundreds of deaths and thousands of detentions. Tehran now wants the international and domestic reading of any new unrest to be calibrated by that prior episode, before the streets move.

What Ejei actually said, and where it appeared

The four wire items that surfaced on 22 June are unusually clustered. Tasnim English carried a video clip at 18:59 UTC, Tasnim Persian (tasnimplus) carried the text at 19:04 UTC, and Al-Alam — the Arabic-language outlet of Iranian state television — carried the same line at 19:04 UTC, attributing it to Ejei by name. The near-simultaneous push across Persian, Arabic, and English state-aligned channels suggests the speech was prepared for distribution, not leaked. A fourth item, from a Telegram channel that styles itself as the military wing of the Islamic Republic (IRIran_Military), added the taunting line that Iran's flag is now 'flying in their own country' — a boast that should be treated as messaging, not reportage.

The text of Ejei's remarks, as carried by the Persian and Arabic services, is short on operational detail. He does not name which country is 'the enemy' that has launched the combined war, does not quantify a threat, and does not describe a specific recent attack or plot. He invokes a 2022 template. That is itself the news: the judiciary is signalling that whatever comes next, it intends to read the situation through a pre-existing protest-suppression lens rather than as a discrete incident.

Why the 2022 protests are the operative precedent

The protests of September–December 2022 — triggered by Mahsa Amini's death in morality-police custody on 16 September 2022 — are the closest historical analogue that the current Iranian leadership has to a mass internal challenge. The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) and the UN special rapporteur on Iran documented at least 500 protester deaths and several thousand arrests in the crackdown that followed. Iran's judiciary moved thousands of cases through revolutionary tribunals; the supreme court and parliament tightened penalties, including introducing sweeping new 'security' offences.

Two structural features of that episode matter for the present moment. First, the 2022 protests fused a women's-rights demand — the lifting of mandatory hijab enforcement — with a broader anti-regime political current, and the regime chose to treat the whole as a foreign-directed security operation. Second, the 2022 protests coincided with, and accelerated, a sharp increase in internet censorship: Iran's information minister acknowledged restrictions; outside monitors documented near-total disruption of WhatsApp, Instagram, and VPN services during key protest weeks. Naming 2022 as the template is, in effect, a public reservation of those tools.

The security-state reading: a 'combined war' framing, and what it is built to do

Iran's security establishment has, since at least the November 2019 fuel-price crackdown, used the term 'combined war' (jang-e tarkibi) to describe coordinated pressure from sanctions, cyber operations, opposition broadcasting, and street protest. Ejei's invocation slots neatly into that doctrinal lineage. It is a frame designed to do three things at once: (1) collapse the distinction between external sanctions pressure and internal protest, treating them as a single hostile campaign; (2) justify emergency legal measures — extended pre-charge detention, restrictive bail conditions, restrictions on defence counsel — that the 2022 episode used; and (3) signal to the West and to diaspora media that Tehran will treat future coverage of unrest as foreign participation in the war.

For Western readers, the practical effect is to raise the cost of coverage. Under the 'combined war' frame, any outlet that documents a protest death or a revolutionary-court verdict is, in Tehran's reading, an auxiliary of the assault. That reading does not need to be believed to have effect; it needs only to be signalled.

What the sources do — and do not — establish

The thread offers four items from three state-aligned outlets (Tasnim English, Tasnim Persian, Al-Alam) and one Telegram channel that presents itself as a military account. None of the four items contains a figure, a date for a specific recent protest, a name of an alleged organiser, or a direct quote from a non-judicial actor. The single substantive claim — that a 'combined war' is underway, with 2022 as the template — comes from Ejei himself, distributed by state-aligned media. There is no independent corroboration in the thread of either a specific triggering event or of an operational mobilisation order.

The internal logic of the messaging is consistent — a single line, three official outlets, near-identical timestamps — which suggests a coordinated push rather than organic reporting. That, too, is news. Iran's judiciary has decided to pre-frame whatever happens next, and to do so in a way that pulls 2022's crackdown architecture off the shelf before any street test forces the choice.

The stakes, plainly stated

If a 'combined war' frame takes hold inside Iran's security ministries, the operational implications are concrete: expedited prosecutions, longer pre-trial detention, heavier use of national-security charges, and renewed pressure on diaspora media and the remaining independent journalists still working inside the country. The 2022 template also implies renewed internet restrictions at moments of tension. For Iran's roughly 88 million citizens, the framing is itself a constraint: it narrows the space in which dissent can be expressed before the state can treat it as an attack from abroad.

For outside governments — and for the European and Gulf states that still maintain working diplomatic channels with Tehran — the framing is a warning that future unrest will be processed as a national-security event, not as a protest wave. The risk of a misread between street protest and a security response is, on this evidence, exactly what Tehran is preparing for.

What remains uncertain

The thread does not say what triggered the speech, or when. It does not name a country, an opposition group, a specific recent attack, or a protest. The 2022 reference could be a doctrinal restatement; it could also be a response to a piece of reporting or an external event that the thread does not surface. Readers should treat the 'combined war' line as the lead of a frame, not as a confirmed security event, until an independent trigger can be established.

Desk note: Monexus treated Tasnim and Al-Alam as primary sources for the judiciary chief's remarks and quoted them in the original Persian/Arabic framing. The 'IRIran_Military' Telegram boast was excluded from the analytical body because it is messaging, not reportage, and the four-item thread contains no independent corroboration of a triggering event.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/tasnimnews_en
• https://t.me/tasnimplus
• https://t.me/alalamfa
• https://t.me/IRIran_Military
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahsa_Amini_protests