\n In September 2022, protests erupted<\/a> across Iran after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, was detained by the country\u2019s morality police for allegedly violating Iran\u2019s strict dress code by showing her hair. She died in custody. Mahsa\u2019s death ignited a nationwide uprising not only against compulsory hijab laws, but against the Islamic Republic itself.\n <\/p>\n \n The United States and its allies publicly backed the protesters. The Biden administration moved to expand access to internet services, including satellite connectivity and virtual private networks. Congress passed the Mahsa Amini Human Rights and Accountability Act. New sanctions targeted Iranian officials and institutions involved in repression.\n <\/p>\n \n None of it was enough. According to a subsequent United Nations investigation, Iranian security forces killed more than 500 people and detained roughly 20,000 during the crackdown. The protests were eventually smothered by months of violence, fear and exhaustion.\n <\/p>\n Poverty, corruption and rising prices<\/p>\n \n The current protests reportedly started in and around Iran\u2019s Grand Bazaar, historically the heart of Iran\u2019s merchant class. That matters. The unrest that led to Iran\u2019s 1979 revolution began there. Iran\u2019s merchants are not revolutionaries, preferring the stability of order to the uncertainty of rapid change. But Iran\u2019s economic misrule, with inflation at 50 percent, together with a crisis in basic services, has forged economic grievances together with longstanding political and moral demands for regime change.\n <\/p>\n \n The protests sparked in Tehran quickly spread across the country, now reportedly present in all of Iran\u2019s 31 provinces.\n <\/p>\n \n Supreme Leader Khamenei responded on the thirteenth day of unrest with familiar rhetoric, dismissing protesters as hirelings of foreign powers and enemies of the state. The language signaled that a crackdown could follow, just as it did in 2022. By this past weekend, the country was under a communications blackout and reports emerged again of rising casualties.\n <\/p>\n \n On the surface, the stage appears set for a grim replay: protests, repression, survival of the system. But three factors make this moment different. They may not lead to an immediate collapse but they are certain to shape the coming days and weeks in Iran.\n <\/p>\n \n Iran\u2019s leadership made a fateful decision after October 7, 2023, when it chose to support and then join a regional war against Israel. Khamenei is the only world leader to openly praise Hamas\u2019s massacres in Israel on that day, and he soon authorized Iran\u2019s proxies across the Middle East to support Hamas\u2019s maximalist demands and then attack Israel \u2014 as well as Americans.\n <\/p>\n \n This regional dimension of the crisis does not dismiss the horrors in Gaza following the war that Hamas unleashed. But the situation today cannot be understood without it. Iran chose at a moment of horror to join the mayhem. It did nothing to support negotiations to end the crisis \u2014 and chose instead to escalate it. Its proxies targeted Americans in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, inflicting American casualties. Eight months into the crisis, Khamenei said Israel was at a \u201cdead end\u201d and had \u201ccompletely misjudged the capabilities of the resistance front\u201d led by Iran.\n <\/p>\n \n He was wrong about that. By the time Joe Biden left office, Iran\u2019s proxies had been shattered. Iran had no air defenses. Its missiles had been defeated in two attacks. And hostages were finally coming out of Gaza. President Trump sought to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran but when those talks stalled, and the Gaza war started again in March, the United States joined Israel in a military campaign that significantly degraded Iran\u2019s leadership and war making capacity.\n <\/p>\n \n The combined US and Israeli strikes into Iran shattered Iran\u2019s sense of strength and deterrence, and left it vulnerable to new strikes. This is not where Iran had aimed to be when Khamenei chose to join with Hamas in a broader war instead of pressing Hamas to release hostages and end the war. That was a choice for Khamenei to make, and he chose poorly.\n <\/p>\n \n Khamenei is 86 and in his fourth decade of power. During the June war, he was conspicuously absent from public view. In a system built around the myth of an omnipresent Supreme Leader with claimed religious authority to rule over 90 million Iranians, this absence continues to resonate.\n <\/p>\n \n With the loss of many of Khamenei\u2019s top lieutenants during the war last summer, the cohesiveness of Iran\u2019s decision-making apparatus is now being tested \u2014 as factional rivalries jockey for position awaiting the moment Khamenei passes from the scene. Even without the popular unrest, Iran is at the precipice of systemic change. One potential outcome is its evolution from an Islamic theocracy ruled by clerics to a hardline nationalist state ruled by it security structures.\n <\/p>\n \n The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (the IRGC) and the Basij militias inside the country have ample experience suppressing popular demands with mass violence. There have been no signs yet that those structures are fracturing with defections. But the looming succession crisis, together with a new sense of vulnerability and widening popular unrest combine to create unique conditions for revolutionary change, with some parallels to the revolt that swept Iran 47 years ago and led to the Islamic Republic.\n <\/p>\n \n Trump has publicly warned that the United States will carry out military strikes if Iran responds to the protests with violence. In the past, Iranian leaders may have dismissed such threats as bluster, but after the US bombed its nuclear facilities<\/a> last summer, they can no longer do so. Many of those Iranian leaders were killed, and their replacements will be thinking about their own survival.\n <\/p>\n \n Targets exist. Israeli strikes in June reportedly targeted the Basij militia\u2014one of the primary tools of internal repression. The US might also choose to target leaders responsible for the massacres. However, unlike the US strikes in June against Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities, which had been rehearsed for many years, these operations would be more dynamic and uncertain.\n <\/p>\n \n Beyond military action, Trump could tighten sanctions enforcement against Iran, which is currently exporting nearly 2 million barrels per day despite a US policy announced last year to \u201cdrive Iran\u2019s oil exports to zero.\u201d This should be done regardless. He can also work with leading American technology companies to support measures that might allow Iranians to overcome the regime\u2019s communications blackout, while also encouraging allies to join US sanctions against Iran\u2019s repressive structures such as the IRGC.\n <\/p>\n \n At this hour, three forces are now converging in Iran and in Washington:\n <\/p>\n \n 1. The protestors. The courage of Iranians risking their lives to overturn a system that oppresses them and exports terrorism abroad is inspiring and should be supported in any way possible. Despite early reports of a brutal crackdown, the protests have not stopped and are likely to continued even if in smaller numbers.\n <\/p>\n \n 2. The repressive state. The Islamic Republic\u2019s coercive apparatus is gearing up with the only playbook it knows \u2014 suppressing its own people with mass violence, snipers from roofs, Basij militias on the streets with live ammunition, mass roundups and executions.\n <\/p>\n![\"People](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/c-gettyimages-1243408219.jpg\")
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