Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In a strongly worded statement issued from Paris, where the NCRI is based, Rajavi urged Iranians to take their destiny into their own hands and end decades of clerical rule.
Her remarks came a day after Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last Shah, called on Western powers to support regime change as a path toward regional peace and stability, reports Al-Rai daily.
In response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Iran in the aerial conflict that began on June 13, Rajavi described the development as “a step forward toward the third option: no war and no truce.”
She added, let the Iranian people themselves determine their destiny.
Rajavi outlined her vision for Iran’s future — a democratic, secular, and non-nuclear republic that guarantees gender equality, the separation of religion and state, and autonomy for Iran’s ethnic minorities.
She also emphasized that the Iranian people have repeatedly rejected both monarchical and theocratic rule through a century of uprisings. “This long and bloody struggle has proven that the people do not want the dictatorship of either the Shah or the mullahs,” she stated.
While calls for change are growing louder, the opposition landscape remains fractured. With no unified leadership and deep divisions among various political and ethnic groups, analysts remain skeptical about the possibility of a large-scale popular uprising in the near term.
Sources noted that the NCRI maintained a low profile during the recent air war between Iran and Israel, releasing only limited statements in an apparent effort to avoid being seen as supporting Israeli military actions from abroad.
The NCRI’s leading faction, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), originally supported the 1979 Islamic Revolution but broke away from Iran’s ruling clergy shortly afterward.
The group fought the regime during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and has since been repeatedly accused by Tehran of inciting unrest. Several of its members have been executed in the past year.
