Tens of thousands took to the streets of Tehran last week to attend state-sponsored rallies and proclaim their support for the beleaguered Islamic Republic. ‘Death to Israel! Death to America’, they cried, chanting the very slogans that have come to characterise the regime’s aggressive sabre-rattling. Officials who addressed the crowds were equally incendiary. ‘We have heard that you threatened Iran’, said Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, speaker of the Iranian Parliament, addressing President Trump. Characterising him as ‘delusional’ and a ‘gambler’, Qalibaf continued: ‘Iran will teach you a lesson that will never be forgotten. Come, and be burned by the fire of Iran’s defenders.’ Without a hint of irony, he also threatened Trump by invoking the words of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s infamous military commander whom Trump dramatically and unexpectedly assassinated in 2020.

These manicured displays of loyalty are meant to mask the most serious, sustained and widespread unrest that Iran has faced since the 1979 revolution. Protests began on 28 December after the Iranian currency, the rial, slipped dramatically against the US dollar, further accentuating economic difficulties and an already unbearable cost of living. Unrest followed and was confirmed in every one of Iran’s 31 provinces. Some of the Islamic Republic’s most symbolic centres of ideological power were engulfed in protest. There is serious unrest in Mashhad, for example, where the eighth Imam, Ali al-Rida, is buried – the only Imam of the Twelver Shia tradition whose resting place is inside Iran (the others are in Iraq and Saudi Arabia). That makes it hugely important for a state whose claims to legitimacy are predicated on it being a vanguard of Shia Islam. Iran’s embattled Supreme Leader, Ali Khamanei, was also born and raised in the city and completed his religious education there. He later moved to Iran’s most religiously endowed city and the primary centre of Shia learning, Qom, where he studied under the Islamic Republic’s founder and first Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini. Considered the heartland of Iran’s clerical class, videos posted online now show protesters there chanting, ‘the Mullahs must get lost’. We’ve been here before. Iran has suffered periodic bouts of unrest since 1999, when the first meaningful challenge to the state emerged. Back then, after authorities had shuttered Salam, a reformist student newspaper which had exposed government involvement in a campaign of targeted killings and harassment against liberal intellectuals, members of Tehran University protested the move. Things escalated that night when police and paramilitary forces, known as the Basij, raided student dorms and beat the protesters in their sleep. Four were killed and hundreds injured in the assault, sparking much wider protests the following day. In the event, however, the regime reasserted control and the moment passed.

The next significant moment of dissent came almost exactly a decade later, during the Green Movement, when millions of protesters swarmed the streets of Tehran to dispute the outcome of the 2009 presidential elections. Angered by apparent corruption and vote rigging, supporters of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Moussavi took to the streets under the banner of ‘where’s my vote?’. Again, through a mixture of repression and dogged persistence, the regime weathered ten months of popular protest, although it was bruised by the experience. A leaked video of General Mohammad Ali Jafari, then leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), revealed how the protests had recast the contours of power in the Islamic Republic. ‘It was a blow that weakened the fundamental pillars of the regime,’ he said, addressing other IRGC commanders. ‘Anyone who refuses to understand these new conditions will not be successful.’

Much has happened in the intervening years. Iran has continued to suffer sporadic bouts of unrest, mostly centred around economic concerns and, more recently, women’s rights. In that time, the wider Middle East has also convulsed under a series of febrile and fissiparous protests that began with the Arab Uprisings of 2011. Far from being a passive observer, the Iranian regime has been a direct participant in a number of those events and, more broadly, has studied the pattern of regional unrest to better inform its own efforts at survival. Surveying the historical record of those upheavals, therefore, offers valuable insights on what to expect as the Iranian regime continues to fight for its survival.

One of the most striking features of the current wave of unrest in Iran is just how brutal the regime has been in its willingness to try and suppress the protests. An Iranian government official told Reuters that, as of Tuesday morning, around 2,000 protesters had been killed in the uprising so far. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), which focuses on Iran, broadly corroborates this, saying it can confirm 2,615 deaths along with the arrests of a further 18,470. The London-based Iran International suggests these figures obscure a much higher total, which it suggests could be around 12,000. This is a staggering claim, but one that its editorial board has sought to defend:

Iran International’s editorial board has reviewed – through a rigorous, multi-stage process and in accordance with established professional standards – information received from a source close to the Supreme National Security Council; two sources in the presidential office; accounts from several sources within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the cities of Mashhad, Kermanshah, and Isfahan; testimonies from eyewitnesses and families of those killed; field reports; data linked to medical [sic] centers; and information provided by doctors and nurses in various cities. Based on these reviews, we have concluded that: In the largest killing in Iran’s contemporary history – carried out largely over two consecutive nights, Thursday and Friday, January 8 and 9 – at least 12,000 people were killed.

Although the exact figure will be unclear for some time, several observations can be made about the scale and pace of what is transpiring, and potential pressure points on the state’s security apparatus. Footage corroborated by BBC Verify and BBC Persian confirms the authenticity of a video showing the bodies of at least 200 protesters in a Tehran morgue. Social media shows similar footage from elsewhere, revealing images evocative of the types of unrestrained massacres carried out by President Assad’s forces in the Syrian Civil War, or by Egyptian armed forces in the 2013 Rabaa Square Massacre. Even if the official numbers are taken as accurate, they already eclipse the numbers killed in previous periods of unrest. The killing has also occurred within a much shorter timeframe, giving some insight into just how febrile the current situation is.

Iran’s security apparatus is broadly arranged in three constituent parts: the conventional army (known as the Artesh), the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and the Law Enforcement Command (LEC). As with previous instances of unrest, it is the IRGC and LEC who are primarily tasked with repression, with the IRGC focusing its efforts in the most urgent areas. That much is to be expected from the IRGC, whose members constitute a highly ideological and fervent Praetorian guard around the principles of the 1979 revolution. For its part, the LEC is far from a politically independent, inert, or politically dispassionate policing body of the kind typically found in the West. Its leader, Ahmad-Reza Radan, was personally appointed by Khomeini and first rose up through the ranks of Iran’s security establishment as a member of the IRGC and Basij. He has overseen many of its efforts aimed at policing women’s dress codes and has doggedly pursued so-called ‘public morality’ initiatives.

One of the most critical factors in deciding the fortunes of Arab governments looking to suppress their populations in 2011 related to the willingness of their security apparatus to act. In Egypt, for example, Defence Minister General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi declared his forces would not use force against the tens of thousands who occupied Tahrir Square in central Cairo. In doing so, he said that the army acknowledged and respected the ‘legitimate rights of the people’. It was the beginning of the end for Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak. The next day, he tried to pacify protesters by announcing that he would retire in September, when presidential elections were due to take place. His efforts failed and, ten days later, he was effectively removed, with Tantawi serving as caretaker president until elections were held the following year.

Similar events transpired in Tunisia, where the then Chief of Army Staff, Rachid Ammar, defied orders from Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to fire on protesters. Although police brutality resulted in hundreds of deaths, the army’s lack of participation was critical in triggering the sequence of events that undermined the regime there.

Armed elements of the state are already actively suppressing the protest movement in Iran, so there is no question of a refusal to fire taking place. Instead, the thing to watch for is whether defections will take place. This occurred in Syria several months after Bashar al-Assad launched his brutal repression of the protest movement, with military officers beginning to defect. The first significant defector, General Hermosh Hussein, moved to Turkey and announced the creation of the Free Officers Brigade. The following month, Colonel Riad al-Assaad, also defected and helped establish the Free Syrian Army which became a major and enduring part of the opposition.

Syria’s structural circumstances were different from Iran’s, however, suggesting that a similar pattern is unlikely there. Power in the Syrian armed forces was tightly organised around sectarian lines, and concentrated in the hands of Alawites – the heterodox branch of Shia Islam to which the Assad family belongs. Its most elite units, such as the Republican Guard, were almost exclusively formed of Alawites. The Fourth Armoured Division, which did the bulk of the fighting in many of the civil war’s most contentious arenas, was also heavily stacked with Alawites and was led by Bashar’s brother, Maher. The same was true for the 14th Special Forces Division and the notorious Air Force Intelligence. The bulk of ordinary rank and file soldiers were Sunni and failed to identify with the state’s battle for survival. They defected in droves whenever the opportunity presented itself.

This caused serious problems for Assad during the incipient phases of the revolution and threatened to topple his government before Iran offered its full-throated supported. Every branch of the Iranian armed forces – the Artesh, IRGC, and LEC – served in Syria alongside Tehran’s most prized proxy, Hezbollah. In contrast to Syria, where the regime had to fall back on minority sectarianism, the Islamic Republic can draw on larger cadres of committed troops. Indeed, both the IRGC and LEC are deeply invested partisans in the Islamic Republic’s soteriological project, and both have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to assert the state’s dominance since the student protests of 1999.

All this suggests that the Iranian state’s coercive apparatus is unlikely to turn against it. There are suggestions the Artesh could break with the government and declare its support for the people, although this is unlikely. It is true the conventional army condemned the IRGC and Basij for the heavy-handedness of their response to the 2009 uprising, particularly over the killing of civilian protesters. Viewed in context, however, this was more an expression of solidarity with those voicing their concerns over electoral irregularities during the presidential election and the return of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office. Put another way, it was a straightforward political disagreement, not an expression of discontent with the mission of the Islamic Republic. In the years since, Artesh leaders have been replaced, and its units have been used to suppress internal dissent in places like Mashhad in 2019. Its influence has also been checked by an ever-growing allocation of resources being diverted to the IRGC.

The announcement of Hosni Mubarak’s ouster by the Egyptian vice president, Omar Suleiman, in February 2011 came as a hammer blow to Mubarak’s powerful allies in the Gulf monarchies, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Both feared the prospect of revolutionary contagion to their own people and, more pointedly, worried about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, who eventually won elections and whose presidential candidate, Mohammed Morsi, took office in 2012. Consequently, the anti-Brotherhood Gulf monarchies worked intensely behind the scenes to support then Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, fomenting anti-government protests while simultaneously encouraging the army to act. These manoeuvres eventually prompted a counter-revolutionary coup in 2013, just 13 months after the Brotherhood came to power.

Egypt was finally restored to safe hands. Sisi was well known in Saudi, where he had previously served as military attaché. Indeed, King Abdullah endorsed his coup within just two hours of it taking place. Saudi also partnered with Kuwait and the UAE to pledge a $12 billion economic aid package to bolster Sisi’s nascent administration. Angered by these events, supporters of the Brotherhood began occupying two public spaces: Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda. After a six-week standoff and escalating tensions, Sisi’s patience ran out in July 2013, when he emphatically asserted the army’s control by opening fire on those who refused to leave. It was a breathtaking assault in terms of ferocity. More than 1,000 people were killed in a single day, prompting Human Rights Watch to brand the event ‘one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history’. The counter-revolutionary snapback was complete and Egypt’s revolutionary momentum eroded permanently. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE applauded Sisi for suppressing what they described as a terrorist threat. The entire episode confirmed another of their anxieties: not to concede an inch to popular protest. In the eyes of Sisi and his Gulf patrons, Tantawi had been foolish in 2011, offering concessions to Egypt’s protesters, only to then find the Brotherhood taking office.

This wasn’t the only case where Gulf countries bolstered anti-revolutionary forces. When protests broke out among Bahrain’s mostly Shia population in March 2011, a seismic psychological barrier had been crossed for the Gulf monarchies. The popular sentiment sweeping across North Africa and the Levant had now produced protests among one of their own. Within hours of demonstrations breaking out, the Gulf Cooperation Council authorised the deployment of the Peninsula Shield Force (now known as the Unified Military Command), a joint military organisation coordinating resources from GCC countries. Both Saudi Arabia and UAE deployed 2,000 troops between them to suppress the protest movement.

The Gulf’s calculus with regards to the survival of the Iranian regime has shifted from where it might have been just three years ago. Today, Saudi Arabia, along with Qatar and Oman, is leading efforts to lobby President Trump against toppling Khamenei. They fear that foreign intervention could provoke Iranian military action in the Straits of Hormuz, the shipping channel through which 20 per cent of global oil and gas reserves flow – vital export commodities for Saudi and Qatar. Both also house US military bases, with America’s largest and most significant regional base located just outside Doha. Iran targeted the facility last June after President Trump struck Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

Saudi Arabia also signed a détente with Iran in March 2023, cooling tensions between the two countries, which had severed all diplomatic ties after the Saudi embassy in Tehran was attacked in 2016, following the execution of a Shia cleric. Beijing brokered the rapprochement with Omani help, providing a breakthrough for Saudi’s ambitious Crown Prince, and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, who sees regional stability as being crucial to the success of Vision 2030 – a vast programme designed to transform Saudi Arabia and diversify its economy away from dependence on oil.

Fallout from the October 7 atrocities in Israel also features in the Gulf’s calculus now. Israel has smashed Iran’s most prized proxy, Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon and curbed its reach into Yemen and Gaza. The downfall of Assad has also removed Syria from Tehran’s orbit and realigned it with Riyadh. When Israel then attacked Iran last July, it further exposed the frailty of Tehran’s military and intelligence capabilities, with their strikes killing six leading generals and five nuclear scientists. It came as a significant blow to Iran’s chain of command and removed institutional memory from core parts of the state’s apparatus. A neutered and boxed-in Iran consumed by internal affairs serves the Gulf perfectly.

This reveals another area where Iran differs from regional governments which were overthrown following the Arab Spring. In the cases of Libya and Syria, their neighbours committed themselves to helping armed opposition groups resist government repression. The UAE, for example, worked with Egypt to supply elements of Libya’s National Liberation Army (NLA) with weapons. They also provided extensive diplomatic support, alongside Qatar, to promote a NATO-led no-fly zone over the country, and ultimately participated in its enforcement.

A similar picture prevailed in Syria where Turkey, along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, doggedly supported the opposition over a 14-year campaign. As with Egyptian support for rebel forces operating in eastern Libya, the Syrian government identified the porousness of Turkey’s southern border as being the primary means by which men, money and munitions flowed into the country. Without their cooperation, he insisted, the revolution would have been unsustainable. Indeed, Hezbollah had already secured the Syrian-Lebanese border, depriving the revolution’s original hotbeds of armed resistance such as Homs with access to weapons. Yet Turkey’s ongoing support finally proved to be crucial to Assad’s eventual unravelling.

Again, such precedents work in Iran’s favour for now, offering the regime some respite. Unlike in the Libyan and Syrian scenarios, substantial external support has not been forthcoming. However, this may not be the case forever.

External military intervention would easily topple Khamenei, as demonstrated by the Israel-Iran confrontation last July. Iran’s once lauded air defence systems were shown to be threadbare, as was the IRGC’s ability to protect the country in any meaningful way against Israeli assault. Only US restraint has kept the current government in place, and that could yet give way to action. The example of Libya also shows just how quickly regime change can occur. Although NATO did not target Gaddafi directly, preferring instead to support rebels on the ground with airstrikes, the operation took just seven months to unseat him.

Trump would almost certainly eschew such a protracted effort and, if he decided to go for regime change in Tehran, would likely seek quick results by directly targeting leadership figures. This is very much in keeping with his previous military engagements, which have produced short, sharp bursts of high-impact activity. This includes the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the cratering of Syrian airstrips after Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and military raids against terrorist leaders such as the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Now, amid one of the greatest crises ever faced by the Islamic Republic, the Iranian regime has captured the US president’s attention. Trump commented on the protests in Iran just five days after they began, warning the government against launching a draconian crackdown on protesters. ‘The United States of America will come to their rescue’, he cautioned on Truth Social. ‘We are locked and loaded and ready to go.’ Iranian officials might have been forgiven for dismissing Trump’s warnings as bluster, or anticipating that he would launch limited strikes against military facilities of the kind which targeted their nuclear facilities last summer. Anything larger was inconceivable.

Yet, 23 hours after posting his warning, Trump stunned the world with another social media post. ‘The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela’, he wrote. ‘President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country.’ All of Trump’s enemies, not least those in Tehran, will have taken note.

After footage of Iranian suppression tactics finally made it to the outside world, following the imposition of a claustrophobic internet ban on the country, the extent of the regime’s brutality became partially illuminated. Trump was incensed. ‘Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers’, he wrote on Truth Social. ‘HELP IS ON ITS WAY.’ Those words found their way to beleaguered Iranians who harbour uneven feelings. ‘Most people I speak to believe Trump will do something. No one knows what. There is hope, but there is more fear’, reads an anonymous letter from someone inside Tehran, published by Iran International. It continues:

What if the blow only bruises the beast and makes it more savage, many ask. What if parts of the system refuse to give in and keep fighting and killing? We have seen this before […] Everyone I see is angry and helpless. Often both at once. People are conflicted. You want the butchers to be beaten. You want pressure from outside. But you do not want your country attacked. You do not want war.

It seems that Trump will not act, for now. ‘We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping’, he told journalists in the White House. ‘There’s no plan for executions, or an execution, or execution – so I’ve been told that on good authority.’ This is the direct result of Gulf mediation efforts, with Saudi officials claiming credit for having persuaded Trump to change course.

It is worth noting this is not the first time Trump has made overtures to Iranian protesters. ‘Such respect for the people of Iran as they try to take back their corrupt government’, he tweeted in January 2018. ‘You will see great support from the United States at the appropriate time!’ Nothing came of it at the time, but Trump’s engagement in the region has grown exponentially since then, with highly successful military interventions in Syria, Iraq and Iran having followed in the interim.

Saudi’s current efforts offer Trump an opportunity to avoid comparisons with George Bush Senior, when he called on Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War in February 1991. Many interpreted this as a promise of US support, prompting widespread unrest among Shias in the south and Kurds in the north. In the event, Bush did nothing – in part because of lobbying from Gulf states – who feared the ‘Lebanonisation’ of Iraq with protracted strife fracturing along sectarian and ethnic lines. It was a deeply embarrassing moment for American power in the region, resulting in Saddam’s forces ultimately killing tens of thousands as he sought to reassert control.

Trump will not abide any comparable humiliation. An examination of his first term in office and start of his second reveals his willingness to quickly, and dramatically, change course if new realities present themselves. Iran’s leaders will be well aware of this and have thus made an easy concession, reversing their decision to stage public executions of protest leaders. Responding to Fox News reports about this development, Trump said: ‘This is good news. Hopefully, it will continue!’

In this context, Israel’s options are severely limited, too. Having been severely chastised by Trump for targeting Hamas leaders in Qatar last September, a move which provoked universal outrage across the Gulf, Netanyahu will not want to break step with the president again. They might look to bolster the Kurds with arms and intelligence, but Turkey is watching closely and is hypersensitive about anything which will further empower Kurdish self-governance.

To avoid a Trump strike, Iran is therefore likely to change course towards less obviously public forms of repression. It will move towards a strategy of mass incarceration, arbitrarily detaining and disappearing dissidents into subterranean torture chambers where their plight is obscured from public view. There is precedent for this in the Arab states, too. Algeria’s Hirak protest movement in 2019 succeeded in unseating President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, but was then unpicked by an authoritarian crackdown that severely curtailed free expression and assembly through a campaign of mass arrests. This approach of strategic repression, rather than extrajudicial killing, succeeded in quietly suffocating the movement.

Footage of market traders from Tehran’s Aladdin Bazaar and Grand Bazaar chanting anti-government slogans captures the frustration of ordinary Iranians struggling under a spiral of economic, social and political desperation. Videos show them chanting ‘Don’t be afraid, we’re all together’, and ‘Bazaar merchants may die, but won’t accept humiliation’, are evocative of protest movements in Egypt, Libya and Syria 15 years ago, with their rallying cry of ‘the people want the fall of the regime’. What made these movements so potent was that the nature of their chants fundamentally challenged the very premise on which the region’s autocracies are based: the maintenance of a barrier of fear. With that eroded, the state’s power becomes much harder to sustain.

This was the tipping point in Syria in 2011, as activists reasoned the state – despite its best efforts – could not kill or arrest them all. Indeed, one of the uprising’s popular refrains demonstrated just how committed they had become with the slogan, ‘to paradise we go, martyrs in the millions’. That almost fatalist resignation to a dichotomous outcome of either victory or death proved impossible for Assad to manage. A poignant tweet from one the revolution’s early figureheads, Bassel Khartabil, illustrates this perfectly. A web developer credited with bringing open internet access to Syria’s artistic communities, he was an established member of open-source communities associated with initiatives such as Wikipedia, Mozilla and Creative Commons. In late 2011 he tweeted ‘They can’t stop us #Syria’, before disappearing shortly afterwards and being executed in prison. His defiance galvanised the opposition and resounded throughout the revolution. As rebels surrounded Damascus and prepared their final assault in 2024, Qutaiba Idlibi, himself a survivor of torture in Assad’s prisons before becoming a refugee in the United States, retweeted Khartabil’s original message with a comment: ’13 years later, they still can’t.’ Idlibi now heads the ‘American Affairs’ department within Syria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

For Assad, the dam burst quickly. Wherever he tried to assert himself, he found defiance. Sisi, by contrast, was able to re-establish Egypt’s barrier of fear due to a combination of regional support and international indifference to his oppression, because it was initially focused on repressing the Muslim Brotherhood (which the US State Department recently designated as terrorist movement). Khamenei will have no such luck. Trump’s intervention means the regime will have little room for manoeuvre, although much of the damage is already done. It has already carried out its massacres without restoring control. What will likely emerge, therefore, is a zombie state akin to the situation in which Syria found itself after 2019. Ideologically exhausted, the state will no longer be able to provide any effective narrative about itself, purpose, or legitimacy beyond a limited core of supporters. In Iran’s case, that is particularly crippling, because the state was constructed on the revolutionary ideals of 1979. Now, it will have to maintain control by pointing to its iron fist instead. Faced with an ever greater need to fuel its security apparatus, the government will also have to divert its already modest resources to its internal coercive architecture. The civic nomenclature of a healthy society – its infrastructure, health, education – will all decay even faster than they already are. As the population becomes ever more emotionally detached from the regime, simply running through the motions to survive but otherwise withdrawing from civic space, the state’s apparatus can only grow more paranoid. Every move could provide the spark for renewed unrest.

Time will further complicate matters. Khamenei turns 87 soon and will not be around for much longer. His story, perhaps even more so than Ayatollah Khomeini’s, is the story of Iran’s revolution. He succeeded his mentor as Supreme Leader just ten years after the revolution and has ruled ever since and has shaped the country’s theological purpose in his own vision. There is no publicly announced successor for whenever he dies and, under the constitution, an assembly of clerical experts will be charged with finding a successor. Just how smooth that process will be is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, the rial will continue crumbling as living costs continue rising. Against that backdrop, more families will continue to question how, or why, the government mortgaged their futures to the fanciful and fanatical endeavours of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Indeed, the underlying structural issues driving the current wave of protests will not just persist but will become even more pronounced. This is what ultimately heralded Assad’s demise. When the rebels launched their operation – codenamed Deterrence of Aggression – in November 2024, they found themselves pushing against a Potemkin village. Yes, the burnished, haunting spectre of the Baathist state continued to glisten over the horizon, but it took little more than a stiff breeze to push it over. Neither the architects of the November initiative nor the commanders of Syria’s security apparatus realised just how hollowed out everything had become until they actually tested it. Then they were in Damascus.