Thirty-seven years after the National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA) launched its historic “Operation Eternal Light,” the clerical regime is still gripped by a palpable fear of the resistance. This fear, born on the battlefields of 1988, now manifests in a frantic panic over the PMOI’s growing influence among Iran’s youth in the digital age. The regime’s desperate calls to fight the opposition online reveal that the legacy of Eternal Light is not a relic of the past, but a clear and present threat to its survival.
On July 25, 2025, during a Friday prayer sermon in Karaj, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s representative, Hosseini Hamedani, betrayed the regime’s anxiety. He declared, “Today, we desperately need the ‘virtual Chaharzebar Pass’ to be liberated from the occupation of the enemy and these terrorists through an ‘Operation Mersad’,” referring to the regime’s name for its counteroperation to Eternal Light and the pass where the heaviest clashes took place between the NLA and the regime’s forces.
Hamedani warned that the regime’s forces were “passive” and must “actively take control of the arena” by creating content and acting as a command center. His use of battlefield terminology to describe the online space underscores how deeply the 1988 offensive is seared into the regime’s psyche. It also shows that the regime is losing its grip on the situation at home and is frantically trying to regain control.
The operation that shook the mullahs to their core
The regime’s fear is well-founded. Operation Eternal Light was not a minor incursion but a large-scale military offensive that pushed deep into Iranian territory and brought the clerical establishment to the brink of collapse. Senior regime officials, past and present, have admitted the severity of the threat. Naser Razavi, a former head in the IRGC’s intelligence, recounted in a September 19, 2024 interview how the NLA “captured Sarpol-e Zahab, Kerend, and Eslamabad-e Gharb, and reached within 34 kilometers of Kermanshah.”
The panic reached the highest echelons of power. Former regime president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who at the time was acting as the commander-in-chief, personally relocated to Kermanshah to manage the defense, while the regime’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a desperate order via radio to his IRGC commanders to “fight meter by meter.” The threat was so existential that regime MP Ismail Kowsari, a commander during the war, recently admitted, “If the Basij had not been formed by the leader’s order, the Mojahedin might have reached Azadi Square [in Tehran].”
A strategic victory that secured the resistance’s future
While the PMOI and its National Liberation Army had successfully forced Khomeini to drink the “poison” of the UN ceasefire after the bloody eight-year war, the regime intended to use the ensuing peace to annihilate the opposition. Operation Eternal Light was a brilliant strategic counter-move. With Operation Eternal Light, the Iranian Resistance disrupted the table that the regime had set. The regime wanted to undercut the NLA with a supposed peace, whose banner the Iranian Resistance had raised in the first place. Eternal Light proved that the Iranian Resistance cannot be undermined with such maneuvers.
This sentiment was shared by prominent figures like Dr. Manouchehr Hezarkhani, who wrote in a September 1988 essay for the National Council of Resistance of Iran that Operation Eternal Light was “a brilliant display of the competence, pride, and honor of the Iranian nation” that will “remain forever in history.”
The unbroken banner of resistance
Thirty-seven years later, the banner of overthrowing the anti-Iranian regime, raised with immense courage, blood, and sacrifice during Eternal Light, continues to fly. The regime’s fear is not just historical; it is a direct response to the fact that this banner is now carried by a new generation of Resistance Units across Iran, amplified by the very digital tools the mullahs now desperately seek to control.
The battleground may have evolved from the plains of Kermanshah to the “virtual Chaharzebar Pass,” but the objective remains the same. The regime’s panic is the ultimate proof that the spirit of Eternal Light is alive, well, and continues to be the force for change in Iran.