“This is the big one. You hear that Bashar? I’m coming to join you!” Hold that thought.

Every Iranian province, or nearly all of them anyway, is experiencing some type of domestic unrest more than a week into the most intense anti-government protests since 2019.

That’s according to an apolitical, non-governmental human rights organization which also said the death toll from the protests is now approaching 30. Arrests exceed 1,200, the same group said.

“Analysis of collected and verified data shows that despite an increasingly securitized environment, the expanded presence of law enforcement and security forces, ongoing street-level confrontations and the use of live ammunition in some areas, the geographic scope of the protests has not diminished,” a report published Tuesday read. “Quite the contrary.”

I have no way to verify that assessment but I see no reason to doubt it. A quick scroll through Iran-focused social media suggests the unrest is indeed ongoing and Fars claims scores of security personnel, including nearly four-dozen Basij members, have been injured.

The protests began late last month when the rial abruptly plunged to a new record of something like 145 million to the dollar. Masoud Pezeshkian sought to placate the demonstrators, whose grievances he described as “legitimate.”

But subsequent attempts to pacify the irritable masses including — and try to not laugh, because it’s sad on all sorts of levels — a $7 per month, non-cash credit which Iranians can use at state-approved grocery stores did little to quell the turmoil.

As The New York Times noted, the stipend “would cover the equivalent of around 100 eggs, a kilogram of red meat or a few kilograms of rice or chicken.” That’s great if you’re dirt poor — “We’re havin’ eggs and chicken tonight! Allahu Akbaaaar!!!!” — but if you count yourself a middle-class Iranian, it’s insulting, and could very well be viewed as unserious.

But it is serious, and that’s the trouble: Palliative pittances are all the government can muster. Whatever hard currency they’re allowed to raise under heavy international sanctions has to be used for critical imports. They don’t have real money to dole out.

It’s true that there’s no organized political, let alone armed, resistance in Iran, but it’s a big country with a lot of people in it. If a meaningful share of those people decide they’ve had enough, there’s not much that even the IRGC can do. Stylized: Guns matter when a couple of thousand people try to storm the gates. Not so much when a couple of million start scaling the walls.

And do note that if there were any doubts last Friday when Donald Trump said the US was “locked and loaded” to intervene in the event Iran begins to systematically shoot protesters, those doubts were put to bed on Saturday when US special forces rousted Nicolas Maduro and his wife from a Caracas slumber for a couples cruise to New York Harbor.

In a message broadcast on state television over the weekend, Khamenei said the government would talk to protestors, but not to rioters who “must be put in their place.” As usual, he blamed a foreign conspiracy for the crisis. “A bunch of people incited or hired by the enemy are getting behind the shopkeepers,” he mused. (Again: It’d be funny if the situation weren’t so dire for everyday Iranians.)

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times, citing Beni Sabti, a former Israeli intelligence officer who left Iran in the 1980s, said Khamenei has a plan to flee the country with a coterie of close advisors and family in the event things take a turn for the Damascus.

“Khamenei plans to escape Tehran should he see that the army and security called on to quell the unrest are deserting, defecting or failing to follow orders,” the linked article reads, adding that the exit strategy involves “gathering assets, properties abroad and cash to facilitate safe passage.” You can be sure “cash” means US dollars.

And that brings us full circle. Khamenei’s “plan B” would of course find him exiled to Russia. As Sabti put it, “there’s no other place for him.”