Ending Iran’s regime won’t be easy |
Protests have rocked the Islamic Republic of Iran with increasing frequency for the past quarter-century, but the closure of the Tehran bazaar on Dec. 28, 2025, was different. The market in central Tehran traditionally represents the financial lungs of the Iranian economy. It is not a tourist market as are the souks in Cairo, Jerusalem, or Istanbul, but rather a dense labyrinth of shops and stalls spread out over more than 6 miles of streets and alleys. Outside a few sanitized areas where foreign tourists visit, the dense area is characterized by tin roofs, crumbling brick, and gerrymandered wiring.
Its importance in Iranian history is outsize. In 1905, Iran’s Constitutional Revolution began with a strike at the Tehran bazaar. In 1952 and 1953, strikes in the Tehran bazaar marked the struggle for power between the shah and Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. In 1978, the Islamic Revolution began when the Tehran bazaar shuttered in protest of an article mocking Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the main state newspaper. While previous protests centered on Iranian elites — students, soccer fans, environmentalists, or women — the Tehran bazaaris are traditionally religious and conservative. They attend mosque. Their sons or brothers join the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They should be Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s most loyal base. But the regime’s mismanagement of the economy, the collapse of Iran’s currency, and rising inflation are too much for even loyalists to bear.
In many ways, it is a crisis for which Khamenei and the Guard have long prepared. Khomeini created the Guard because he did not trust the Iranian army. He had reason to be suspicious. As revolutionary protests grew in 1978 and 1979, the shah’s army sat on the fence, seeing which way the wind would blow. It only defected to the revolution once its outcome became certain.
While the army remained important for territorial defense, the founding statutes of the Guard define its mission as defense of the revolution, meaning enemies can be either external or internal. In 2007, Mohammad Ali Jafari assumed the Guard leadership and concluded that, with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein dead and the Taliban pushed back, the threats facing the Islamic Republic would primarily be internal. He reorganized the Guard to put one unit in every province, and two in Tehran.
By ensuring that members were not native to the provinces in which they served, Khamenei could remove the chance that they would face family members or school friends among protesters, which could lead them to stand down. Most of the Guard units operating in Kurdish areas, for example, are ethnic Azeris, the Iranian equivalent of putting Germans in Poland or Russians in Ukraine. In recent years, the Guard created a failsafe by importing foreign proxies — Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi hashd al shaabi, Afghan Liwa Fatemiyoun, and even, reportedly, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan peshmerga — to fire on crowds.
Even if security forces begin to defect, whether out of disgust with the violence perpetrated on fellow Iranians or because they believe the regime will fall, the structure of the Guard presents another problem.
Every Guard unit has its own quartermaster-general and its own arms depots. If Iranian protesters overrun individual Guard facilities or if the broader Guard collapses, there could be a mad scramble for Guard arms. While many Iranians may hope for democracy to emerge immediately, Iranian history provides little reason for comfort. A far likelier scenario is that rival Guard units may defect or local power brokers will seek to assert regional power even as they lay claim to national authority. There is precedent here in the early 20th century, before Reza Khan, the leader of the Russian-trained Persian Cossack Brigade, declared himself shah after gaining popularity by subduing tribes and crushing regional autonomy movements.
The fall of dictatorships in Libya and Iraq is also instructive on this scenario. In October 2004, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, then the Democratic nominee for president, made allegations that........