The Islamic Republic of Iran’s deep security vulnerabilities were on full show last month with the assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, mere hours after the killing of Hezbollah’s second-in-command, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut.
In what may have appeared more plausible on an episode of the Israeli spy thriller Tehran, an explosive device was detonated in Haniyeh’s bedroom at an official government residence in Tehran, while the Doha-based Hamasnik was in town for the presidential inauguration of Masoud Pezeshkian.
Iran and its leading proxy group, Hezbollah, have vowed to respond to these twin killings with a major attack on Israel unless US-led attempts for a ceasefire in Gaza are successful.
The regime’s security-intelligence apparatus has clearly been infiltrated, with Israel’s ability to strike its adversaries no doubt causing paranoia among Tehran’s gerontocratic elite. That has been the case for some time now, with the United States’ elimination of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike near Baghdad airport in Iraq in January 2020; leading Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh being gunned down by a remote-controlled weapon later that same year; or Mossad operatives raiding an Iranian facility in Tehran in 2018 to steal half a ton of valuable nuclear files.
Yet, while these actions certainly hurt the leadership capabilities and resources of the Islamic Republic and its proxies, they hardly represent an existential threat to the regime. In fact, the only time – in its 45-year history – that the regime’s survival was threatened was when its own people rose up in mass revolt.
As the past decades have shown, vast swathes of the Iranian population despise their government – or have, at best, lost confidence in its ability to prioritize domestic socioeconomic concerns over a foreign policy centered on sowing regional unrest and financing a web of terror proxies.
When a popular reformist opposition leader lost the presidential election to hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, in what was widely seen as a rigged contest, millions of Iranians nationwide protested for months, chanting “Where is my vote?”
More recently, just 40% of eligible Iranian voters took part in the presidential election to decide who would succeed the ultraconservative Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May. That’s the lowest turnout on record since the 1979 revolution, highlighting the plummeting political engagement and deep frustrations felt by Iranians who have had enough.
Iranian inflation rises
Inflation in Iran continues to reach dizzying heights, soaring from around 10% in 2016 to nearly 50% in 2023. Unemployment remains high, while close to one-third of Iranians live in extreme poverty.
History has shown that, when pushed, Iranians revolt, just as they did in September 2022 when a 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman, Mahsa “Jina” Amini, was killed in police custody after being arrested by the country’s “morality police” for wearing her hijab improperly. What followed was a nationwide mass revolt of unprecedented scope, intensity, and duration, jolting the very foundations of the Islamic Republic. For months, and despite a violent crackdown by the regime, Iranians of all ages, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds protested in the streets, calling for an end to the regime.
Their message was clear: The Islamic Revolution of 1979 had failed and the regime it spawned was approaching an acrimonious demise. Western governments and celebrities joined in voicing support for the Iranian protesters.
Women inside Iran and abroad ripped off their hijabs and cut off locks of their hair in defiance of a regime that had for decades sought to govern their every move. So widespread was the Woman, Life, Freedom movement set off by Amini’s death that talks about regime change in Iran seemed less a possibility than an inevitability. “The Question Is No Longer Whether Iranians Will Topple the Ayatollah” was the title of an op-ed in The New York Times in December 2022. The protest movement in Iran has since subsided, in part because of the regime’s brutal campaign of arrests and executions – and waning international support for the protesters – but the revolutionary spirit lives strong among Iranians as shown by the meager turnout in the last presidential election.
Sounder US and Israeli foreign policies might focus on empowering and supporting the people of Iran as much as on precision strikes against key Islamic Republic assets and figures.
The writer is the author of the forthcoming book Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomenLifeFreedom Revolt.