Reza Pahlavi Iran: a monarchist claim in exile and a Kurdish coalition assembled before Khamenei’s death — two branches of one fragmentation strategy.
On February 22, 2026, six Iranian Kurdish opposition groups based in Iraqi Kurdistan formed the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan. Six days later, on February 28, joint US and Israeli airstrikes killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in central Tehran.
A little more than a week after that, on March 6, Reza Pahlavi — son of the last Shah, in exile since 1979, resident of Maryland — released a video statement asking friendly Arab governments to prepare to recognize his transitional government. In between those three dates, the CIA was in active contact with the coalition it had helped bring into being.
Western coverage has treated these elements as separate expressions of Iranian instability. They were nothing of the sort. Each had been assembled in advance of the assassination, developed with US and Israeli backing over the preceding months and years, and activated within days of the strike.
The Assassination and What Was Ready to Follow It
Khamenei was killed by airstrikes at 9:40 in the morning, Tehran time, in a central compound that housed the offices of the Supreme Leader, the president, and Iran’s National Security Council. Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz named the operation “Roar of the Lion” and praised what he called the IDF’s “brilliant execution.” The Americans called it Operation Epic Fury. The CIA had provided the targeting intelligence. Iran retaliated within hours, striking US assets in Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Oman.
Iran announced an interim leadership council the following day. Mojtaba Khamenei, the late Supreme Leader’s son, was elevated to succeed his father. President Trump promptly dismissed Mojtaba’s legitimacy in a statement quoted by Reuters, saying the United States must be involved in choosing the next leader of Iran. This was not aggressive rhetoric. It was a straightforward description of what Washington was already doing.
What Washington had ready to insert into the vacuum came in two forms. One was a monarchist claimant with no organizational presence inside Iran but a decade of cultivated diaspora infrastructure. The other was a coalition of ethnic militias based across the western border, freshly organized and pre-positioned for insertion. Both had been assembled before the strike. Both were activated once the strike had opened the political space they had been designed to occupy.
Pahlavi as Manufactured Legitimacy
Pahlavi’s operational infrastructure is the National Union for Democracy in Iran, a Washington-based platform whose Iran Prosperity Project was developed to serve as a governance blueprint for a post-Islamic Republic transition. According to reporting in Forward, Pahlavi met Steve Witkoff, Trump’s top Middle East adviser, following renewed unrest inside Iran in January. He unveiled an updated version of the transition plan on the eve of the joint US-Israeli operation.
Roughly two hours after the first strikes, he posted a video to X telling Iranian security forces to abandon the regime and telling Iranians to await his instructions before returning to the streets for what he called the “final action.”
None of this was improvised. It was launched.
The infrastructure sustaining Pahlavi’s claim to represent Iranian public opinion has been documented in unusual detail, and the documentation is not the work of anti-imperialist critics. In October 2025 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, working with the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, published a joint investigation establishing that Israel had been funding a covert influence campaign designed to promote Pahlavi as a Western-friendly successor to the Islamic Republic.
Citizen Lab’s own report, titled PrisonBreak, identified more than fifty inauthentic Persian-language social media accounts. They were created in 2023, kept dormant for nearly two years, and activated in early 2025 in synchronization with Israeli military operations — including the June 23 airstrike on Tehran’s Evin Prison, during which the network posted news of “explosions” and calls for citizens to “rescue family members” before Iranian state media had confirmed the attack.
The campaign included AI-generated content. One video, titled “Next Year in a Free Tehran” and boosted to millions of views, depicted Prime Minister Netanyahu, then-Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel, and Pahlavi walking together through the streets of Tehran with their spouses. Pahlavi had made his first official visit to Israel in early 2023, hosted personally by Gamliel. The digital campaign began after that visit and intensified after the outbreak of the Gaza war.
The Haaretz investigation quoted Raz Zimmt, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, on what the operation actually accomplishes. “Ultimately, it reinforces Ayatollah Khamenei’s narrative that Israel and the US want to turn Iran back into a monarchy and client state.” Coming from an Israeli think tank analyst on the record in the Israeli press, that is not an accusation. It is an admission.
The Kurdish Vector
On March 3, CNN broke the story — with multiple sources briefed on the plan — that the CIA was arming Iranian Kurdish forces with the aim of triggering a popular uprising inside Iran. The Trump administration was in active discussion with Iranian opposition figures and Kurdish leaders in Iraq about additional military support. On the same day, Trump personally telephoned Mustafa Hijri, president of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan. Earlier in the operation he had called Iraqi Kurdish leaders directly to coordinate.
The CIA effort had been running for months before the strike. This is not an inference. It is CNN’s characterization from its own sources. Israel had cultivated ties with Kurdish organizations across Syria, Iraq, and Iran for decades, and according to Axios those relationships supplied the back-channel work that produced Trump’s direct outreach in the days after the assassination.
The White House publicly denied approving any specific insurgency plan. Multiple sources speaking to CNN and other outlets contradicted the denial. A senior Iranian Kurdish official quoted by CNN said the militias expected US and Israeli support, and added: “We believe we have a big chance now.”
The forces available for the operation are catalogued in an Al Jazeera piece from March 5. The Coalition pulls together six organizations: the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran with roughly 1,200 members, the Kurdistan Freedom Party at around 1,000, the Kurdistan Free Life Party’s Eastern Kurdistan Units at somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000, plus Khabat, Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan, and the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan.
The total across all groups is a rough ceiling of seven thousand fighters, lightly armed, based in Iraqi Kurdistan without permanent territory inside Iran.
These forces do not have the population base to sustain an uprising against a state Iran’s size. That is not a controversial claim. It is the CIA’s own assessment, referenced in the CNN reporting: Iranian Kurds don’t currently have the influence or resources to bolster a successful uprising on their own. What they can do is cross the border. What crossing the border produces without a popular uprising to sustain it is not liberation. It is engagement with an IRGC operating at full strength on its own ground, and against militias operating from bases across the frontier.
The Kurdish groups understand the arithmetic. They are proceeding because they believe the moment created by the assassination is unlikely to recur, and because they have been assured of American and Israeli air cover behind them. The strategy uses their willingness. It does not depend on their prospects. A Kurdish offensive that succeeds fragments Iran’s northwestern frontier permanently. One that fails invites IRGC repression that may itself trigger the wider uprising Washington needs. Either outcome serves the strategic objective. The Kurds carry the cost of both.
What the Timeline Reveals
The pattern Western reporting has been unable to see is visible from the calendar alone. Six days before the assassination, the Iranian Kurdish opposition coalesced into a new formation designed for military coordination. Hours before the assassination, the exiled monarchist claimant issued an updated transition blueprint. Two hours after the strikes, that same claimant was on video urging Iranians to await his call. Within a week, the American president was on the phone with Kurdish leaders and Western media outlets were carrying the CIA’s arming operation as a story-of-the-day.
Coordination on that timeline is not compatible with the description of these events as reactions to Iranian instability. They are the components of a single operation, released simultaneously because they had been staged simultaneously, and staged simultaneously because they had been designed as parts of one strategy long before the strike that opened the window they were designed to fill.
The strategy has two branches because the target requires two branches. Pahlavi supplies the international legitimacy narrative — the exile with a Western education and a democratic-transition blueprint who can be presented to European chancelleries and Gulf capitals as the acceptable face of the post-Islamic Republic. The Kurdish coalition supplies the ground game — the ethnic militias whose incursions justify the “humanitarian” framing that any subsequent expansion of US military involvement will require.
Neither branch has the popular support inside Iran to govern. Neither is intended to govern. What they are intended to do is corrode Iranian state coherence from two vectors at once, so that the state that emerges from the corrosion is compatible with what Washington regards as its interests.
The Iranian people did not call for Pahlavi. Nor did they call for the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan. The Pentagon called for both, and quietly, over years, arranged the conditions under which both could be presented as if they had been called for. That is the operation. The rest is publicity.
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