The rule of the Ayatollahs is broken. What happens now? |
Charlie Gammell has narrated this article for you to listen to.
‘Help is on the way,’ promised Donald Trump to the people of Iran defying the Islamic Republic. In the same social media post, the US President, characteristically light on detail, also urged Iranian protestors to take over the institutions of the Islamic Republic (presumably by force) and to keep a note of the names and numbers of their oppressors for retribution’s sake. Whatever these words presage – be it air strikes on Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij facilities, or cyberattacks on Iran’s intelligence agencies, to blind the regime as the regime has blinded protestors by shutting down the internet – it remains to be seen if such an intervention will tip the balance in favour of the regime, the protestors, or simply chaos.
Iran is a proud nation for whom independence from foreign interference is almost an article of faith, at least publicly. Yet Tehran relies on Chinese money, Russian hardware and Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi muscle to keep the show on the road. Likewise, today’s protestors seek and need US (and perhaps even Israeli) help in their battle against the Islamic Republic. A Trumpian endorsement and American bombs may well harm the nationalist credentials of those who have taken to the streets, but without the menacing pressure that only the US can provide (with Israeli capabilities hovering in the shadows), the protests are unlikely to withstand the onslaught of the regime.
There should be little doubt that even if their fall doesn’t come immediately, the rule of the Ayatollahs is broken beyond repair. Supreme Leader Khamenei and his henchmen have only exemplary violence left as the means to regain control. Despite the numbers of protestors being lower than previous outbursts of popular unrest in Iran (2009 and 2022/23 in particular), the death toll today far outstrips anything we have seen since the early, bloody days of the 1979 revolution when the Islamic Republic went on a killing spree.
Hospitals are filled with bodies, cemeteries in Tehran are overwhelmed with the sheer number of corpses, and there are stories of the authorities charging families exorbitant rates to release their dead loved ones from the morgue. Such reports give us an indication of just how brutal this latest round of repression has really been. Sensible estimates take the death count to well over 10,000 Iranian civilians, with many more to be executed as the regime’s judiciary fast-tracks its victims to the hangman.
This violence simply cannot sustain Ayatollah Khamenei indefinitely, no matter how united the Islamic Republic’s military and security forces might appear. Today we talk in terms of protestors and government forces, but........