By Kayah Life Staff
The Islamic Republic has launched a campaign known as “Jan Fada” (meaning martyrdom) to assert its legitimacy and to promote a sense of sacrifice among the people. Yet its claims of success are being disputed.
In the aftermath of the U.S.-Israeli attacks on the Islamic Republic of Iran in December 2025, the regime has been seeking to feed on anti-war sentiment and reinforce its popular support base.
Among these efforts has been the introduction, last month, of the “Jan-Fada” initiative, whose website invites citizens to register their willingness to “defend and protect Iran,” and give legitimacy to the government.
The homepage of the “Jan-Fada” website explains that the campaign was launched “to declare the readiness of the Iranian people to play an effective role in confronting the American-Zionist enemy and defending Islamic Iran.”
The homepage also features a quote attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei — the third Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, who succeeded his father Ali Khamenei after the latter’s assassination by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28 — which emphasizes the “people’s” participation in the “field.” (More than a month since Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment, no audio or visual recordings of him have been released; only a few written messages attributed to him have appeared in the domestic media.)
Although state media outlets have engaged in a coordinated effort to present the campaign as “popular,” the participation of government officials — from Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, head of Iran’s Judiciary, to Government Spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani — as well as widespread media coverage indicate that this is predominantly a government-led initiative.
On April 23, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) announced that 30 million people had joined the “Jan-Fada” campaign. The website also reported that by the morning of April 24, more than 30.1 million individuals had registered.
The circumstances of the “Jan-Fada” registration cast doubt on the accuracy of those figures.
The registration criteria allow children aged 12 or older to join the campaign. Allowing children over 12 to register indicates that some registrants could be minors participating without parental consent, who are likely to have been influenced by the government’s extensive propaganda efforts.
The legitimacy of the registration process is further undermined by the fact that it does not require a full name or a national identification number, relying instead on mobile phone numbers. This method mirrors those used in certain opinion polls and voting systems, including votes conducted on state-run television, which often produce questionable outcomes.
Registering via mobile phone numbers also allows individuals with multiple phones to register multiple times, or to register using relatives’ mobile numbers. A legitimate campaign to rally war volunteers should ideally require verified real identities through national ID numbers or birth certificates.
State television and other government media outlets claimed yesterday that the number of registrants demonstrated that more than one-third of Iran’s population had joined the initiative — in other words, that they had given their backing to the Islamic Republic.
However, statistics from early 2023 indicate that there were more than 145 million active mobile phone subscriptions in Iran — a figure that has likely increased over the last three years.
Since the campaign uses mobile phone numbers rather than actual verified individuals, the proportion of active mobile numbers actually engaged in the campaign suggests that the government has mobilized only about one-fifth, or 20 percent, of active mobile phone numbers.
A post on X by Ali Sharifi Zarchi (@SharifiZarch) on April 25 stated: “The actual number of people registered in the ‘Jan-Fada’ campaign is fewer than 4 million. The Islamic Republic attempted to present its supporters as numbering more than 30 million. However, a careless programming error exposed the truth: when displaying comments on the website, the user IDs — each of which is a number under 4 million — are visible. The pattern of these IDs, their intervals, and the examination of new IDs following each new registration leave no doubt that the total number of registered users is fewer than 4 million.”
“To verify this, simply run the following command in the terminal: curl -s ‘https://janfadaa.ir/ajax‘ –data-raw ‘action=getComments’ | jq,” the post added.
