The violence in Iran could lead to civil war

“A PRINCE OUGHT to inspire fear,” wrote Niccolo Machiavelli, but “he must endeavour only to avoid hatred”, lest it prove his undoing. By that measure Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is failing. As the veil of its internet blackout lifts slightly, the killings unleashed to crush protests are fuelling rage more than fear. Human-rights groups have confirmed the deaths of over 6,500 people in the recent protests and are verifying those of 17,000 more. Iran International, an opposition television channel based in Britain, puts the death toll at over 36,500. Relatives sift through piles of body-bags, then pay for the bullets that killed their kin to recover the corpses.

Eye-witnesses describe the aftermath of the protests and their repression as resembling a battlefield, with torched banks and mosques and overturned security vehicles. One claims that the university museum in Mashhad, Iran’s second city and a stronghold of the clerical regime, is in ruins. “Anything that serves as a means to tyranny and control was destroyed,” says a protester. The regime’s humiliation of the dead is radicalising a public that had already turned violent. Even if America does not intervene against the regime, how can Iran hold together as a country in the aftermath of such bloodshed?

For several hours on January 8th protesters controlled the streets of Tehran and other cities. “You couldn’t drive on the streets. There was fire here and there; debris, bricks, stones, destruction. As we marched, people bent all traffic sign posts, broke many of them and set all garbage bins on fire. All traffic cameras were broken. It was all amazing and beautiful vandalising,” recalls the same protester. According to multiple accounts, masked men armed with knives killed basijis, the regime’s volunteer vigilantes. “It’s already a civil war,” says a young woman in Mashhad. “We’re just not saying it.”

Might horror at the violent unravelling of their country pull Iranians back from the brink? There is little sign of it so far. The divisions in this large, multi-ethnic, multi-religious country are hardening. Iran’s rulers and their opponents accuse the other of hiring mercenaries: Shia militiamen from Iraq, say protesters; Israeli agents, says the regime. Each side threatens more violence. Reza Pahlavi, the last shah’s son, has emphasised Iranians’ right to defend themselves from the regime and has urged America to strike.

The regime, soaked in blood, appears to be uninterested in compromise. Mr Khamenei’s hybrid theocracy-cum-democracy has morphed into a security state. Drones patrol the skies. Spot-checks of mobile phones net those with suspect sympathies. A three-week internet blackout has crippled the digital economy, deepening Iran’s economic isolation and malaise. On January 27th the rial hit a new low, even against a falling dollar.

Initial official expressions of understanding for the protesters’ economic plight have vanished. Now all opponents are “terrorists”. The loyal pro-reform opposition has been neutralised by the election of President Masoud Pezeshkian, one of their number. Braver voices have been silenced. Hassan Rouhani, a former president who challenged both the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the supreme leader, is said to have been under house arrest. His allies are said to be subject to travel bans.

Meanwhile royalists inside and outside Iran increasingly argue that protest is futile against a regime willing to kill on such a scale. Many despair of the possibility of the army or police breaking ranks, as happened when Syria rose up against the Assads. And despite the build-up of American military might, the regime’s opponents question whether Donald Trump will keep his promise to help them. Instead, protesters and exiled opponents increasingly advocate taking up arms to avenge the dead. Elders in Lorestan and Ilam—peripheral provinces where protests erupted, where tribal loyalties are still prevalent and weapons still prized—have taken to social media dressed in military fatigues, brandishing rifles and vowing revenge for the crackdown. “Next time my cousins say they’ll swap Molotov cocktails for machine guns,” worries a student in an eastern city. “For this massacre, every single one of them must be killed,” says a normally urbane protester in Tehran.

Could the protesters morph into armed rebel groups, as happened in response to regime violence in Libya and Syria? Some royalists abroad are wondering how to smuggle arms into Iran and solicit Israel’s help. It seems that little attention is being paid to the decade of civil war, mass displacement and the destruction of what had been middle-income countries that followed the recourse to arms elsewhere in the Middle East in the Arab spring of 2010-12.

In the past, protesters in Iran tended to be middle-class. But poverty has eroded their numbers and now more typically they come from the sectors the regime used to consider its backbone. Many supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former hardline and populist president, now back Mr Pahlavi, claims an Iranian journalist exiled in Britain. They are ditching religious symbols for royalist ones—the lion and sun—and their chants and hashtags are openly anti-Islamic. “One mullah per lamppost,” runs one. “Burn the Quran,” is another.

In all of this the voices of those who led earlier peaceful protests and hold fast to a struggle for representation dating back to Iran’s constitutional revolution of 1906 are being drowned out. Reformists’ and opposition calls to free political prisoners—many of whom favour a democratic republic—have faded. Opposition satellite channels based abroad ignored the call from Mir Hossein Moussavi, a former presidential candidate held under house arrest for 15 years, for Mr Khamenei and his henchmen to step down. Hecklers denounce anyone seeking reform, or even democracy instead of a monarch. “They don’t want anyone but Pahlavi,” says a teacher who took part in the women-led protests against compulsory veiling in 2022. “They don’t let us speak.” Fear of revenge killings is spreading. Many predict capital and physical flight. Turkey says it is considering setting up a buffer zone to guard against an influx of refugees.

Could Mr Trump break the stand-off? His armada is massing off Iran’s coast. Mr Khamenei is said to have moved to a fortified bunker in anticipation of an American strike. Western countries have managed to oust Iranian leaders before. Between them Britain and America helped orchestrate three coups in the 20th century; in 1921, 1941 and 1953.

But anger at those coups partly fuelled the revolution in 1979. The fallout from outsiders’ interventions is unpredictable. The mayhem that followed the Western toppling of tyrants in Iraq and Libya also offers a cautionary tale. Nor is the exit of Mr Khamenei likely to be enough to satisfy the regime’s opponents; they want the edifice he built to fall with him. Meanwhile Iran’s rulers have seen the consequences of eviscerating the ruling class, as happened in Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow in 2003. In Iran, too, expect them to fight to retain their power and assets. Either way, chaos looms. ■