Tens of thousands of Iranians have flocked to sign an online petition with a rare but pointed message to the country’s hard-liners: Go fight the war against the United States yourselves.
Within a day of appearing on the online platform Karzar, more than 100,000 people — and the number continues to climb — demanded in the petition that members of Iran’s ultraconservative Paydari Front political faction be sent to the country’s southern war zones — where US air strikes have focused much of their attention to “better understand the realities on the ground.”
The campaign is a response to the Paydari Front’s opposition to any negotiation between Iran and the United States, which has continued even as American strikes hit Iran’s southern coastal cities.
Signatories, in a rare public showing of the depth of anger over the continued fighting, argue that hard-line factions, lacking firsthand experience of conditions in the south, are making decisions from a distance that put ordinary lives at risk.
Iranian authorities say almost 40 people have been killed in southern Iran over six consecutive nights of air strikes and accuse Washington of bombing civilian infrastructure. US Central Command (CENTCOM) says it is degrading Iran’s military capabilities.
A parallel online campaign calls for prominent anti-negotiation lawmakers — including Hamid Rasaei, Amirhossein Sabeti, and Mahmud Nabavian — to be sent personally to Hormuz Island, which lies in the Persian Gulf, just offshore from the port city of Bandar Abbas.
Local media have also picked up on the growing discontent among Iranians over the war, especially with the destruction in southern Iran.
The Tehran-based reformist daily newspaper Sazandegi wrote in a commentary on the petition that “one cannot sit at home under an air conditioner and prescribe war” for soldiers in the scorching heat on Hormuz Island.
The campaign, it said, is less an online spat than a symbol of genuine public anger from people who’ve shouldered millions of dollars in power grid damage and brutal summer blackouts and now want war’s armchair theorists to face the consequences on the ground themselves.
The centrist paper Jomhuri-ye Eslami struck a similar note, arguing that those who “chant for war and disparage negotiators” should go south themselves.
Their leaders, it noted, fled the front during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, only claiming battlefield-hero status once it ended — a contradiction that has become fodder for satire.
Hard-Liners Grow Louder, But Do They Have Power?
Hard-line figures close to the Paydari Front have intensified calls for revenge against the United States over the death of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed in joint US-Israeli strikes on February 28, while rejecting any continuation of talks with Washington.
Its lawmakers have been sharply critical of President Masud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who doubles as Iran’s chief negotiator, for their push to hold talks with Washington.
Paris-based analyst Reza Alijani described the hard-liners’ renewed voice as an aftershock of Khamenei’s funeral earlier this month, which reopened old wounds and gave them a platform to push their staunch views.
They are not a unified bloc, he said; some are rivals of the negotiating team, others share an apocalyptic worldview aligned with Khamenei’s own, while some are simply reacting to the moment. Israeli infiltration and Russian interests also may be amplifying the noise, Alijani said.
Alijani noted, however, that despite their rhetoric, this particular sect of hard-liners holds no real power at the top. After all, he argued, military, political and technocratic figures alike within the Supreme National Security Council voted for negotiations with Washington.
Establishment Figures Split Publicly
Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, deputy head of the Assembly of Experts, urged officials to halt talks and treat the existing memorandum of understanding — a deal signed last month that aimed to halt fighting as the two sides negotiated a peace deal — as void.
Ali Khomeini, a grandson of the Islamic republic’s founder, said recently that anyone seeking peace through negotiation is a “traitor.”
The remarks drew backlash among ordinary Iranians who are suffering from the war and want peace.
Reformist journalist Milad Alavi wrote on X that it is the Iranian people — not officials posturing from podiums — who should decide between peace and war, calling for a referendum on whether to negotiate as laid out under Articles 6 and 59 of the constitution.
The people’s will “is the final word”, not comments from the likes of Khomeini’s grandson, he wrote.
Qalibaf has defended continuing talks with Washington despite the escalation, saying negotiation is not capitulation but, alongside war, part of a strategy to protect national interests.
Referencing Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s statement last month about the talks, Alijani argued that Khamenei is adopting a two-way approach: rejecting negotiations in principle publicly, while quietly permitting direct talks with the United States at lower levels.
Alijani said as long as that continues, negotiations will proceed even as hard-line rhetoric runs in parallel — though Iran’s infrastructure and public fate remain effectively hostage to the Hormuz standoff for now.
He expects the confrontation to end back at the table because neither side believes a military solution works, and after further retaliatory strikes, talks are likely to resume — given “shaky support” in the US for Trump’s strategy while Iran also remains in dire economic straits. Hard-line voices, he said, will ultimately be reined in.
This comes as the Jomhuri-ye Eslami newspaper this week warned that news of strikes on southern Iran risks becoming as routine as traffic accidents.
It said a collapse of negotiations — tantamount to full-scale war returning — is precisely what Israel wants and urged religious leaders to push talks toward success, denying adversaries any pretext.
Calls to close the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait alongside the Strait of Hormuz, it argued, betray foreign actors posing as allies — an implicit reference to Russia — and it urged officials to confront such infiltration directly to keep Iran from the brink of war.
The Bab-el-Mandeb Strait is another major global maritime transit chokepoint between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Djibouti and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa.
Analysts fear Iran could mobilise its Houthi proxy forces in Yemen to target shipping in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, through which roughly 10 per cent of the world’s seaborne oil passes.
