Bereft of legitimacy, the reeling regime in Iran massacres its own people

AFTER more than two weeks of unrest, parts of Iran began to feel like a war zone. Snipers fired into crowds as surveillance drones buzzed overhead. Families crowded into morgues in desperate search for their loved ones. Ordinary people were afraid to venture out. Looming in the background were threats of a military strike by Donald Trump, the American president.

The Islamic Republic has weathered bouts of turmoil in the past, from the rigged election of 2009 to the women-led protests of 2022. Each time, optimists predicted the regime’s imminent downfall; each time, it muddled through. But the protests that began on December 28th are likely to prove more pivotal, even though, as The Economist went to press, they seemed to have ebbed.

They followed an annus horribilis that brought economic collapse, environmental crisis and a 12-day war with Israel. The social contract has ruptured: Iran can neither protect its citizens from external threats nor provide for their basic needs. Unable to placate protesters, the regime has adopted the logic of Bashar al-Assad, its one-time ally in Syria, whose goons chanted “Assad or we burn the country”. It may linger for a time, but change seems inevitable. The question is what sort, and how much chaos it leaves in its wake.

When shopkeepers in Tehran went on strike last month, it did not seem they would give birth to a movement so big or so consequential. Protests simmered for almost two weeks, persistent but far smaller than those in 2022—until January 8th, when Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the deposed shah, urged Iranians to take to the streets en masse. Many of his countrymen had long dismissed the self-styled crown prince as a dilettante. But his call this time seemed to resonate.

The protests that followed were big. How big is hard to say, because the regime shut off the internet (it remains disabled). With Iran isolated from the world, its security forces embarked on a vicious crackdown. Human-rights activists have so far confirmed the deaths of more than 2,400 protesters. The real toll is no doubt far higher. Tens of thousands more have been detained. The head of the judiciary vowed swift executions (Mr Trump claims these have since been suspended).

This is probably the worst bout of state violence in the regime’s 47-year history. It dwarfs the killings during the protests in 2022, when around 550 people died in two months. Even the mass executions of 1988, when thousands of prisoners were sent to the gallows, may pale in comparison.

Some protesters have fought back with knives and hunting rifles. The authorities like to exaggerate the count of their own dead to fuel a narrative that the opposition is being armed by foreign powers. Still, even opposition groups have tallied around 150 security men killed.

The regime resorted to such violence because it had nothing to offer an angry people. By the time Tehran’s shopkeepers took to the streets, the economy was in freefall. Since July the rial has plunged by 40% and hit an all-time low, which sent the price of imports soaring. Annual inflation is nearly 50%. Almost one-third of Iranians live in poverty. Professionals linger outside butchers hoping for scraps. Just a third of working-age adults are employed, says the World Bank. Iran’s economy was forecast to slump by 1.7% in 2025. And that was unevenly distributed. The service sector, which employs half the workforce, is shrinking, as is agriculture. Construction, mostly carried out by military firms, grew.

Some of this misery stems from American sanctions, particularly those on the oil industry, which Mr Trump reimposed when he abandoned the nuclear deal in 2018. The government-sanctioned middlemen who oversee the illicit oil trade, known in Iran as “trustees”, prefer to keep their proceeds abroad. Officials are reportedly investigating $7bn in missing oil revenues.

Misrule deepens the crisis. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s praetorian guard, controls a big chunk of the economy. Everything from oil to medicine and manufacturing passes through a vast network of firms run by the irgc. Conglomerates controlled by clerics and commanders routinely secure loans without collateral or oversight. In October Ayandeh, a major bank, collapsed under the weight of insider lending, including to the failed Iran Mall project, billed as the world’s largest shopping centre. No one has been held to account.

All this has drawn Iranians to the streets. The regime’s brutality has sent them back home—for now. In the popular imagination, revolutions are linear: protests swell to a crescendo, then the dictator flees. Reality is often messier. The ebb in demonstrations does not mean the unrest is over, as Iran’s own history shows. At the start of the Islamic revolution in 1978, protests grew in the spring, dwindled in the summer and roared back in the autumn.

One big difference now is the prospect of foreign intervention. Mr Trump spent weeks promising to “rescue” protesters and make the regime “pay hell” for killing them. Yet his first tangible actions were meagre. On January 12th he announced a scheme to levy tariffs of 25% on countries that trade with Iran. The next day he “cancelled all meetings” with Iranian officials, rebuffing an offer from Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, who had proposed reviving the defunct negotiations over his country’s nuclear programme.

Such steps hardly seemed to match the soaring death toll. Mr Trump is under pressure to make good on his threats. On January 13th his advisers huddled to discuss their options. The next day America started withdrawing some personnel from al-Udeid air base in Qatar, which hosts the regional headquarters of its central command, and from Bahrain, home to the navy’s Fifth Fleet. That seemed to imply a strike was imminent. Yet Mr Trump later suggested that an attack may no longer be necessary: “We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping,” he said.

Having bolstered its forces in the Caribbean, the Pentagon has no aircraft-carriers deployed in the Persian Gulf (though one is now en route). Nor will Gulf states allow it to conduct sorties from bases on their soil. It could still launch cruise missiles from destroyers and submarines, or strategic bombers could conduct long-range strikes. Targets could include the IRGC; crucial economic infrastructure, such as the oil terminals on Kharg island in the Gulf; and key officials, perhaps even the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The speaker of Iran’s parliament has warned that his country will hit American bases in the region in response to any attack.

Whatever Mr Trump decides, it is doubtful that any strike would compel the regime to stop killing people. Nor is it clear that military action would galvanise further protests. The opposition still lacks a clear path to changing the regime. Mr Pahlavi promises to lead a transition. His office is busy tweeting out PowerPoint slides about his plans to stabilise the currency and confiscate regime assets. But his clout beyond social media is unclear. Last year he claimed that 50,000 officials from the government and the security forces were ready to defect. But after weeks of unrest, not one has broken ranks.

Some Iranians muse about the “Venezuela model”: replacing Mr Khamenei with a less doctrinaire figure. That seems too pat. The ayatollah sits atop a factious system, one that he has managed to corral by dint of his longevity and religious stature. His replacement may not be able to.

Two gloomier outcomes seem likely. The first is that the IRGC and the Basij, its paramilitary brownshirts, will consolidate power. They could ditch the clerics and transform Iran into something closer to Egypt or Pakistan. Yet they cannot solve Iran’s economic problems unless they can secure a deal to lift American sanctions. That would require shutting down or seriously curtailing their nuclear programme and ending their support for militias across the region.

The opposing view is that even the IRGC lacks the capacity to deal with a full-blown uprising across the country. With no clear alternative to the regime, Iran would fall into chaos. Far-flung provinces might seek to go their own way. Iran is a diverse country: there are Azeris and Kurds in the north-west, Arabs in the south-west and Baluchis in the south-east, all of whom have a record of violent insurgency. This scenario evinces deep concern on the other side of the Persian Gulf, where Arab states fear a fragmented Iran would lose control of its arsenal of missiles and drones and send out waves of refugees.

Almost half a century after it felled the shah, the Islamic Republic has reproduced the pathologies that led to his downfall: an economy plagued by corruption and inflation; a repressive, hated security apparatus; an ailing, out-of-touch leader. The shah’s demise seemed implausible at the time but inevitable in hindsight. The same may prove true of the Islamic Republic. ■