As large anti-government protests continue in Iran, Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of the country's old monarchy, on the 16th (local time) predicted the collapse of Iran's theocratic system and said he intends to return home.
According to AFP and others that day, the former crown prince held a press conference in Washington, D.C., and said, "The Islamic Republic of Iran (the Islamic regime) will collapse," adding, "I will return to Iran."
Pahlavi is the son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the former king who ruled Iran from the 1940s. He was the last crown prince of the Pahlavi dynasty. He was undergoing fighter pilot training in the United States during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when the Pahlavi dynasty fell, and has since lived in exile in the United States.
Pahlavi said that "the Islamic Republic is not the government of Iran but a hostile occupying force that has seized our homeland," and argued that "the Islamic Republic invaded five neighboring countries to sow regional chaos, then mobilized foreign terrorists such as Hezbollah fighters, Iraqi militias, and other mercenaries to invade Iran itself and massacre Iranians."
He said Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, committed crimes against his own people like Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Syria's Bashar al-Assad. He added, "The battle unfolding in Iran is not a contest between reform and revolution but between occupation and liberation." He also urged the international community to fight together by targeting the leadership of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).