All the Mullahs Have Left Is War on Their Own People

The latest reports emerging from Iran suggest that the Islamic regime is now launched on a path of drowning the growing uprising against it in a sea of its own blood. The rulers of Iran have evidently understood the stakes. Well versed in the grammar and logic of revolutions, they understand that events in Iran have reached a critical juncture. From its point of view, the regime has grasped that turning back would mean its own destruction. It is therefore moving forward to crush its domestic enemies.

The details of this are emerging, despite the static imposed by the regime’s near total shutdown of the internet since January 8.

The opposition-linked Iran International media network, which has extensive sources within the country, is now citing as a ‘conservative estimate’ the figure of 2000 people slaughtered by the regime in its crackdown over the past days.

The network quotes a doctor in the northern Iranian city of Rasht who testified that more than 70 bodies had arrived at a single hospital in the area. Scenes of intense violence were reported in other parts of the country, in parts of Teheran, Khermanshah, Ilam, Karaj and elsewhere.

There are also now indications of sporadic armed resistance on the part of the opposition. In this, predictably, pre-existing armed networks emerging from Iran’s ethnic minority communities are prominent.

In Lorestan Province, on January 9, fighters from an organisation calling itself the Kurdistan National Army attacked a position of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The Kurdish force appears to be linked to a Kurdish nationalist group called the Kurdistan Freedom Party, which maintains its fighters at positions across the mountains in Kurdish northern Iraq.

So where are things heading? It’s important to place the current events in Iran within the framework of the last dramatic two years in the Middle East. Until roughly mid-2024, the Islamic Republic of Iran had enjoyed a slow but seemingly inexorable quarter-century march forward across the Middle East.

Its prototype proxy organisation Hizballah in Lebanon had fought a successful insurgency against Israel in southern Lebanon in the 1985-2000 period. Teheran had made clients of the two main Palestinian Islamist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad and then set them loose against the Jewish state in a bloody terror campaign between 2000-4. It had turned the Assad regime in Syria from an ally under Hafez Assad into a dependent satrapy under his hapless son, Bashar. Iran had emerged as the main beneficiary of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Through the agency of its proxy Shia militias, Iran achieved the political domination of its neighbor. In Yemen, the client Ansar Allah (Houthis) militia seized the capital and a section of the coastline in 2014.

Two years of war against Israel and its allies in the region have reversed the Iranian advance, and rolled the regime and its Islamic revolutionary project back — while not yet delivering the final blow. Hamas is decimated, its leaders killed, its presence reduced to a small enclave in Gaza. Hizballah too has been crippled, its historic leaders removed, its capacities in ruins. Assad is gone. Iran itself suffered vast damage as a result of its ill considered decision to enter the war against Israel in April, 2024.

The current unrest represents the mullahs’ chickens coming home to roost. Having isolated Iran economically and subjected it to sanctions to serve their ideological project of building Islamist power across the Middle East, they now find the power building project in ruins, and their own people furiously demanding an accounting for the years of waste.

What remains to the regime? The answer is extreme violence, now directed against its own people. Will it work? Comparison to similar revolutionary situations elsewhere suggests that it might, at least for a while.

In the distant days of the ‘Arab Spring,’ in Syria, the Assad regime in 2012 sought for a few months to offer concessions in the face of mass demonstrations against it. Then, in the summer months of that year, it switched to tactics of bloody repression, using live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators as the Teheran regime is doing now. The Assad regime eventually fell in late 2024, but 12 years of bloody civil war filled the intervening period.

The regime in Teheran increasingly resembles that of Assad in its decrepitude and hollowness. But a few things should be borne in mind. The protests remain disparate, and lacking a revolutionary leadership inside the country. Evidence suggests that Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi possesses growing legitimacy among the demonstrators. Many of those now chanting his name do not come from the narrow circles of long standing support for the monarchy. But this is no substitute for a real revolutionary organisation, possessing structures and a chain of command.

No less importantly, there is very little evidence of significant cracks emerging from within the regime’s own instruments of repression. The regime may lack popular legitimacy, but it possesses still a near monopoly of the means of violence. This means that it will be in imminent danger only if a significant element of those tasked with using force on its behalf either refuse to do so, or more importantly, go over to the side of the opposition. As of now, there are few signs that this is happening.

What all this means is that with the forces balanced as they currently appear to be, this could run on for quite a while. Contrary to some reports in international media, this regime will almost certainly not simply make provision for hoarding its stolen wealth and then flee. Its DNA remains that of a revolutionary Islamist regime.

The variable which could tip things in favor of the protestors would be external intervention, whether of the immediate, kinetic kind, or through efforts to keep the opposition in the game through the provision of assistance – weapons, medical supplies, means of communication, money. A combination of both short and long term intervention and assistance would be the most judicious path. Absent this, the Islamic regime in Iran could limp on for a while, to the extreme detriment of Iran’s people, and the wider Middle East region.

Published originally on January 11, 2026.