From Tehran to Tabriz, from Los Angeles to London, Iranians are in collective shock, even traumatized by the Islamic Republic’s lethal suppression of recent protests that has claimed thousands of lives. But the profound shock and trauma must not make us oblivious to reality or leave us paralyzed by wishful thinking.
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What unfolded in Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 will be remembered as the moment when the Islamic Republic made a lethal choice. What began as peaceful demonstrations devolved into violence in several places as the regime severed internet access and its forces opened fire on crowds. The sequence of events leads to a singular conclusion: orders were issued—presumably directly—by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to crush the protests by any means necessary, and the security forces did so without hesitation, without restraint, without pity.
Khamenei has spent years being indecisive on countless matters of state policy: whether to build a nuclear weapon, whether to engage and negotiate with Washington, whether to permit even modest reforms. He has been resolute on a single question: the preservation of the Islamic Republic, no matter the cost. He learned that lesson watching Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi hesitate over that very same question during the revolution of 1979—and lose his throne.
Contesting claims are bound to follow significant violence. The Iranian regime has promoted a narrative claiming its security forces—police, Basij and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—opened fire only after armed rioters, paid and recruited by foreign forces, attacked them, and torched buildings, buses and mosques. Protesters in the country, analysts, and activists in the diaspora insist that the security forces carried out killings on an unprecedented scale, deploying snipers who fired indiscriminately at civilians in the streets and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns that cut down demonstrators. Hundreds of body bags were counted in morgues and hospitals, and estimates of the death toll range anywhere from 3,117 to as many as 30,000.
Political persuasions might sway who you believe but it doesn’t really matter. What horrifies us Iranians, what traumatizes us, is the knowledge that Iranians killed other Iranians on a scale never witnessed before—not even during the revolution of 1979. Not a single senior official in the security forces stopped himself and said, “Enough!” Not a single officer seemingly refused to give the order to shoot. The Iranian security forces, unlike in 1979, apparently had no qualms about injuring and killing their fellow citizens. This is what makes our trauma, as Iranians, so acute.
After the massacres, protests have almost completely subsided despite feckless calls by Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran—from the comfort of Washington—for the people to continue their revolution, presumably to bring him to power. I was able to speak to some of my family members in Iran soon after the crackdown, who said few people were venturing out at night in the face of a heavy security presence on the streets. They see security forces still manning the streets but in comparatively smaller numbers. Many Iranians are returning to work during the day but are anxious about the possibility of a war.
The Islamic Republic is unlikely to collapse anytime soon unless the United States launches a significant military intervention. The regime will most likely survive this crisis and perhaps even limited military strikes by the Trump Administration.
The day after in Tehran
What are the realistic possibilities for the future of the Islamic Republic of Iran? Some analysts have speculated about a coup by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals to seize control of the country, while others have suggested that the Supreme Leader—viewed as the main obstacle to what would be a humiliating deal with the U.S.—must be removed for the system to survive. Neither scenario appears plausible, at least in the short term.
The regime has closed ranks. Even prominent reformists, such as Hassan Khomeini—a grandson of the founder of the Islamic Republic and a potential contender to succeed Khamenei as supreme leader—have been calling for calm, peace and dialogue. Khamenei may have lost some support among his base, which is estimated at 10 to 20 million diehard followers, motivated by both religious and political reasons. But his top generals and his cadre of Basij militiamen and other security forces remain loyal. Until that loyalty shows signs of fracturing, Khamenei will almost certainly remain in control.
There is another, often, overlooked factor underwriting the resilience of the Iranian regime: the absence of a unified, organized opposition possessing any genuine credibility or legitimacy within the country’s borders. Despite his assurances, Reza Pahlavi has failed to demonstrate widespread support inside Iran. Some protesters did chant his name but he has no shadow infrastructure ready to assume governance should a revolution succeed in collapsing the state.
Pahlavi’s claim that some 50,000 members of the Iranian security forces were prepared to defect after the American and Israeli strikes on Iran last June proved hollow. Moreover, his supporters in the West have threatened the regime’s shock troops and bureaucrats with the same fate that befell the Shah’s loyalists after the 1979 revolution: mass execution. Such rhetoric would hardly incentivize the regime’s security apparatus and civil servants to switch sides.
The other main opposition figure in exile offers no viable alternative. Maryam Rajavi leads the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a group despised by the vast majority of Iranians. While her agents on the ground retain the capacity to commit isolated acts of terror against regime officials, they possess neither the political capital nor the popular mandate to foment a revolution in her favour.
The fire next time
Yet Iran isn’t immune to change. The last year was marked by war, the destruction of its nuclear facilities, and economic collapse. January already portends another grim year. For some time, Iranians will neither sense normality nor muster the energy for a revolution for some time as they mourn their dead and nurse a wounded society.
The nezam—the regime if you will—must retrench and devise a solution to the underlying crisis that sparked the protests in the first place. That will require negotiations with the Trump Administration to ensure that the U.S. lifts some of the most crippling economic sanctions on Iran. President Donald Trump has focused his demands on the nuclear issue and on stopping the killings by the Iranian regime. Whether the solution would involve capitulation to Trump’s maximalist demands or a more face-saving deal (struck either before he decides to attack Iran or in the immediate aftermath of a symbolic military strike) is impossible to predict.
Hectic diplomacy by Iran’s neighbours in recent days—aimed at brokering some form of détente with the U.S. and averting a military strike, or worse—has opened a narrow window for compromise. There are signs that Iran and the U.S. are serious about deescalating the tensions between them. The U.S. and Iran have agreed to hold talks on Friday in Oman despite differences on their scope: Tehran wants to limit the talks to its nuclear program while Washington insists on including Iran’s missile arsenal in the negotiations.
Iran is unlikely to accept restrictions on its missile program or limits on the range of its ballistic missiles: a serious degradation of the most vital element of its defense doctrine. But Tehran might conceivably agree to halt uranium enrichment if its right to enrich is formally recognized—language which was absent from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Washington has allowed enrichment in Iran and other countries but maintains that the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed, does not grant enrichment as a right to its signatories. The Trump administration is unlikely to reverse that position and set a precedent for Iran’s Arab neighbors.
Iran could also agree to having its stockpile of highly enriched uranium diluted or removed from the country, and permit the return of IAEA inspectors to sites they monitored before the 12-day conflict last summer. Negotiating a longer-term deal would take time and could include creating an enrichment consortium that would include Iran’s neighbours as partners—an idea that was discussed publicly during the earlier rounds of negotiations between Iran, the U.S. and Europe.
Yet without a viable solution, Iranians—both the government and the people—surely recognize that the tinder of discontent still smoulders. For years, analysts, pundits, Congressmen, monarchists, assorted revolutionaries and armchair warriors have promoted the wishful thinking that a pro-Western democracy would emerge in Iran if the regime is toppled through a military intervention or collapses after an uprising.
The fire next time might engulf the entire leadership. The chaos—economic, social and political—or even civil war that could follow a collapse of the regime with no viable alternative is something no Iranian should wish for.