In the final weeks before his death, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei cast the mounting hostility of U.S. President Donald Trump in religious and explicitly Shiite terms. Rejecting calls for capitulation, he invoked the example of Imam Hussein—the third imam, or spiritual leader, of the Shiites—refusing to pledge allegiance to Yazid, the Umayyad ruler widely associated in Shiite memory with tyranny and injustice. Defiance, in this light, was not simply a strategic imperative but a value rooted in history and identity.

That framing did not disappear with Khamenei’s death. Instead, Shiite political figures, clerics, and communities across the region have taken up this rhetoric and symbolism, a measure of their growing disquiet and sense of vulnerability. In Lebanon, the weakening in recent years of the Shiite political and military movement Hezbollah had already altered the country’s sectarian balance. Aggressive Israeli operations in Shiite-populated areas over the past month have only reinforced perceptions that Israel and its ally the United States are bent on subjecting Shiites to collective punishment. In Iraq, repeated U.S. and Israeli strikes on the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF)—a coalition of armed groups that are at once inside and outside the formal state security forces—have made it harder for factions that had largely avoided entanglement in recent upheavals to stay out of the fray. And beyond the Arab core, reactions to Khamenei’s killing among Shiite populations in places such as Pakistan underscore how the conflict is being interpreted through a broader communal and religious lens.

The war is heightening the salience of Shiite identity across multiple arenas at once and, in doing so, reshaping how political and military actors assess both their interests and their risks. Groups that might otherwise have remained on the sidelines are becoming more likely to get involved in the strife, and those already fighting face growing pressure to escalate.

The consequence is a feedback loop: actions driven by fears of marginalization provoke responses that alarm more and more people, expanding the social base for Shiite mobilization. The “axis of resistance,” Iran’s network of nonstate allies and proxies across the region, has endured numerous setbacks since 2023. But ongoing U.S. and Israeli military actions may lead to its reconstitution, not through the orchestration of Tehran but rather as a result of the altogether more organic impetus of an embattled Shiite identity.

THE MAKING OF SHIITE ANXIETY

Khamenei’s killing was not simply a political event inside Iran. It reverberated across Shiite communities well beyond the country’s borders, underscoring the extent to which his authority had significance in the wider region. In Pakistan, his death triggered protests among Shiite groups, some of which turned violent, with participants explicitly referring to him as a religious guide. In Bahrain, which has a majority Shiite population even though it is ruled by a Sunni royal family and is home to a key U.S. military base, Shiite protesters clashed with security forces and demonstrators expressed support for the Islamic Republic of Iran. These reactions were not uniform, but they revealed how people across the region interpreted developments in Iran through a sense of shared religious identity and collective fate.

Khamenei’s death also........

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