In a wide-ranging television interview, Ahmadreza Radan, commander of Iran's Law Enforcement Command (FARAJA), used the occasion of a presidential school-opening ceremony to deliver what amounted to a full accounting of Iranian policing in the aftermath of the country's recent war with Israel — the conflict he repeatedly calls "the third war." The conversation ranged from a newly built "intelligent" police boarding school to car-theft statistics, cyber-fraud recovery rates, narcotics seizures, currency-smuggling cases, and the dismantling of a blackmail network called "Baj News." Running through all of it was a single argument: that even under bombardment, with police stations and border posts directly targeted, the force not only held the line but expanded its reach, its data systems, and its claim on public loyalty.

The interview matters less for any single disclosure than for what it reveals about how Iran's internal security establishment is narrating the war's aftermath — emphasizing continuity of services, record-keeping precision down to the decimal point, and a long-term institutional project, a data platform called "DANA," meant to fuse every police database into one system. Radan's numbers are impossible to independently verify, but as a statement of official priorities and self-image, the transcript is a rich document.

A "Smart" Boarding School Born of a Battlefield Idea

Radan traces the new police boarding school — inaugurated with the president in attendance — to a conversation with the late Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, General Mohammad Bagheri, who he says first proposed reviving military-style boarding schools, including for the police. "He said, 'issue the order, we'll go and do it,'" Radan recalls. The project's groundbreaking, performed by Bagheri's daughter, was publicly announced by another senior commander, General Amir Mousavi — both men killed in the recent war, a fact Radan invokes as a kind of institutional memorial. He also credits the Khatam al-Anbia construction headquarters and its commander, identified as General Abdollahi, with building the facility. The scale of construction is presented as itself a kind of achievement: roughly 25,000 square metres completed in 200 days, which Radan compares to the earlier record of building 1,500 housing units in a similarly compressed timeframe. He insists the school — with capacity for 1,200 boarding students, smart classrooms, laboratories, a library, a swimming pool, shooting range, wrestling and gym halls, and an amphitheatre — is "without equal" in its category anywhere in the region, and "probably second in the world," a claim he says Iran arrived at by benchmarking against other countries' police schools.

Recruiting in the Shadow of Bombed-Out Precincts

The most striking passage concerns recruitment, which was launched in the middle of the war, when police facilities themselves had just been struck. "People saw you get hit," Radan says bluntly. "They saw your ruined buildings as they drove past." Many around him doubted families would want to send teenage children into the police system under such conditions. Instead, he says, roughly 2,250 applicants came forward for an intake capped at 453 places — and of those admitted, 286 had an academic average of 20 out of 20 or close to it, with the overall cohort averaging 18.68. For Radan this is proof of what he calls "the social capital of the police among the people." Notably, he insists standards were non-negotiable regardless of volume: "even if only fifty people had applied, we would not have lowered our criteria by one point." The school for now admits only boys, though Radan says a parallel institution for girls is planned "within a year or two," and the model is slated for expansion into seven provinces — Sistan-Baluchestan (Zahedan), Khorasan Razavi (Mashhad), Mazandaran (Sari), East Azerbaijan (Tabriz), Hamedan, Isfahan and Fars. He frames the whole venture, together with a 1,500-unit (soon 800 more) organizational-housing project built with a private contractor, as evidence that public-private partnership — rather than state cash advanced up front — can compress construction timelines from years to six months, limiting losses from inflation and delay. "We are today one of that company's biggest debtors," he says, "but we are certain this model can be carried forward," including, he suggests, as a template for national housing policy.

Theft, Deterrence, and the "Three Rings"

Turning to ordinary crime, Radan outlines what he calls the three "rings" of any theft — the thief, the victim's unprotected property, and the buyer of stolen goods — arguing that weakening any one ring undermines the whole chain. He appeals directly to citizens to improve home security, noting that detectives examining crime scenes increasingly find insecure windows and doors that effectively "invite" burglars in. On enforcement, he reports that security forces have "stopped," i.e. shot, more than 500 suspects resisting arrest since the war began, wounding around 450 and killing 56 who drew weapons on officers. Smart forensic "Agahi" labs and roughly 250 live detective patrol units have been rolled out nationwide, driving car-theft detection to what he calls 99 percent. He credits manufacturers' new parts-numbering and safety standards with cutting annual car thefts from about 4,000 in 2019 to fewer than 100 in the first six months of the current year. For resource allocation, police use what he terms the "3-70 formula" — identifying the three provinces responsible for 70 percent of national theft, then the three districts within each responsible for 70 percent of that province's crime, concentrating patrols accordingly. The current national rate, he says, stands at 770 thefts per 100,000 people, which the force aims to reduce further.

Cyber Fraud, Scams, and the "Baj News" Network

Radan claims a 100 percent clearance rate on murder cases since the start of the war and an 89.5 percent clearance rate for cybercrime. Most strikingly, he says police cyber-emergency units recovered 601 billion tomans of victims' money from online scams, acting within the roughly 15-to-20-minute window fraudsters typically need to move stolen funds before victims can report the crime. A dedicated four-digit hotline is planned, eventually to be merged with the existing 110 emergency line. His underlying warning to the public is blunt: citizens trust unfamiliar phone calls and messages far too readily, and this misplaced trust is precisely what scammers exploit. He also discusses the takedown of "Baj News," a surveillance-and-blackmail operation he says was linked to contacts abroad and fed by international networks. Operators allegedly hacked into the phones and apps of family members of economic officials, extracted compromising images, and then extorted victims for payment. "Nearly the entire network has been dismantled," Radan says, "apart from a few who are fugitives, some of them abroad."

Border Guards, Narcotics, and the War Economy of Smuggling

Border units, Radan says, were directly targeted during the war — down to brigade command posts, outposts, and the border guard commander himself — which he reads as evidence of a deliberate enemy strategy against the state's territorial control. He describes guards enduring winter nights under 10 to 15 centimetres of snow in solitary bunkers to keep posts manned. Despite wartime disruption, he reports roughly 230 tons of narcotics seized since the war began, a 24 percent increase year-on-year, alongside continued efforts to clear urban "open drug scenes" of visible addiction. On smuggling more broadly, he describes coordinated operations spanning border guards, regular police and economic-security police, pursuing contraband "from the border to the capital." Seizures of hunting weapons rose 12 percent and of "war weapons" 10 percent — a trend he frames not merely as an economic problem but a direct security threat. Separately, raids on hoarding warehouses recovered tons of contraband including medicine and medical equipment. Economic-security police pursued 299 cases of unmet currency-repatriation obligations, recovering what Radan describes as $4.2 billion in foreign exchange returned to the banking system, alongside a crackdown on "shouti" — unsafe or illegally modified vehicles he links to roughly 1,500 traffic deaths annually. A separate case in Hormozgan province uncovered solar panels hoarded for years whose output, he says, would have equaled the electricity needs of an entire city.

Wartime Services, "Traitors," and the DANA Platform

Radan frames much of the interview around a claimed enemy strategy of fomenting internal chaos by striking police command infrastructure, hoping normal services — Nowruz travel, the Arbaeen pilgrimage that drew over 3.4 million travelers, passport issuance exceeding 2.2 million documents — would collapse and embolden domestic "collaborators." None of this happened, he insists, and roughly 6,000 people have been arrested for cooperating with the enemy or inciting unrest, including three alleged plotters detained just the night before the interview. "We will not forgive them," he says, "unless they come forward, repent and show remorse." Finally, Radan previews "DANA," a unified intelligence-data platform meant to consolidate the police's various smart systems — narcotics, criminal investigation, and general intelligence — into what he calls "a world-revealing cup" (jam-e jahan-nama), still in its research phase but intended to give every branch of the force shared, real-time analytical capability.

Context

This interview was conducted against the backdrop of Iran's June 2025 war with Israel, which killed senior military commanders and struck security infrastructure directly — a trauma Radan invokes repeatedly to explain both the symbolism of the new police school and the urgency behind his claimed statistics. None of the figures cited — crime rates, seizure volumes, recovered currency — can be independently verified; they are presented here as the self-reported record of a security institution eager to project resilience, modernization and uninterrupted control after a destabilizing war, at a moment when the Iranian state has strong incentives to demonstrate exactly that.

#iran #war #geopolitics #news #translatednews #economics