Retired Iranian officers urge Israel to help topple ayatollah regime, bomb supreme leader’s home

A former Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) officer and a retired Iranian air force colonel urged Israel to help topple the ayatollah regime in an unprecedented interview with Israeli Channel 12, which was broadcast on Saturday. Due to safety reasons, the faces of the former Iranian officials were blurred, and the retired Iranian air force colonel spoke under the pseudonym “Arash.” 

“Netanyahu needs to order an attack on Khamenei’s home,” Arash bluntly stated, referring to the ayatollah regime’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “And we, the military can take over sensitive political centers and officially announce Iran’s freedom and friendship with Israel,” he continued. 

The retired Iranian air force officer who is disillusioned with the ayatollah regime, believes that the overwhelming majority of Iranians (claiming 95%) backed the Israeli military’s large retaliatory strike on Iranian military sites on Oct. 26, which degraded much of Iran’s missile and aerial defense capabilities.

The Israeli strike was a response to Iran’s large but largely unsuccessful missile attack on Israel on Oct. 1. The former Iranian air force officer told Israeli media that the ayatollah regime has “taken us, the people, hostage.” He further argued that many Iranians “have this kind of wish that Israel will go further” in potential future strikes “so that the nation will be emboldened and take to the streets.” 

“They themselves will cut [the regime’s] roots from the country,” Arash continued. 

Furthermore, a former IRGC officer who used the pseudonym Javad, also blasted the ayatollah regime. The elite IRGC organization is separate from the conventional Iranian military and is tasked to preserve the ayatollah regime. 

“I don’t see Israel as criminal. We say ‘death to Israel,’ but Israel doesn’t say ‘death to Iran,'” Javad told the Israeli TV channel. He further called for restored relations between Iran and Israel and recalled the long history of friendship between the two ancient nations in pre-Islamic times. 

“We’ve been friends days since the days of Cyrus [the Great],” the former IRGC official argued. “Cyrus saved the Jews of Babylon. Now we expect something in return – that you lend us a hand of friendship, that the power of the Israeli army come to help the Iranian nation.”

Arash revealed that IRGC is concerned that its terrorist proxies Hezbollah and Hamas will not recover from the severe blows that they sustained in the war with the Jewish state. 

“Israel has hurt the leaders of the resistance movements. In the pager attack and others, Nasrallah himself said they took a heavy blow,” Arash assessed. “What the IRGC thinks now is that Hamas won’t recuperate. Hezbollah won’t recuperate. Where do they place their stock? In Yemen.”

The retired Iranian air force officer agrees with Israeli intelligence assessments that Iran’s airspace is “wide open” following Israel’s large-scale aerial strike last October on Iran’s aerial defense systems. 

“The computer system that receives orders and launches missiles at planes – those systems have been taken completely offline,” he revealed, adding that the Israeli airplanes hit “sites with S-300 anti-ballistic missile silos that Russia gave Iran, as well as drones.”

“Now they have no advanced anti-plane systems,” Arash assessed. “They have the same old systems we used in the [1980-1988] Iran-Iraq War, two pipes that we sit behind and shoot out of."

Arash argues that “all the soldiers in the military feel estranged from the IRGC, from this regime. I can even say that 60% of soldiers in the IRGC hate it.”

The ayatollah regime openly calls for Israel’s destruction. However, in an interview in August 2024, the founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Mohsen Sazegara, assessed that Iran is militarily weak and concluded that “Iran is not in a position to fight Israel.”