On February 28 Israeli warplanes assassinated Ali Khamenei, Iran’s leader, by dropping thirty bombs on his compound in Tehran. It was the opening salvo of the US and Israel’s joint war of choice. Within a day missile attacks and aircraft sorties had done grave damage across the country: in southern Iran airstrikes hit a girls school, killing at least 175 people, most of them children between seven and twelve. Mostly lost in the unrelenting news cycle were reports that the US and Israel had also bombed the historic center of Tehran, which houses the nineteenth-century Golestan Palace and the entrance to the city’s Grand Bazaar. A brief video clip of the aftermath showed a few disoriented men milling around, caught up in the fog of war.

Nine weeks earlier that bazaar had been at the center of a very different upheaval. In late December shopkeepers, moneylenders, and merchants there took to the streets, igniting an immense wave of protests against the regime that was brutally repressed by Iran’s security apparatus. When they unleashed this week’s violence, the US and Israel at once obscured the memory of that uprising and capitalized on it. In his eight-minute Truth Social video announcing the war, which has no legal sanction from the US Congress or the UN, Trump referred back to the Dey protests—named after the Persian month in which they took place—and called on Iranians to again confront their rulers by taking to the streets: “The hour of your freedom is at hand…When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

Back in January, before the hellfire of war and rubble, and before the blood on the streets had even dried, Mohammad Maljoo, an economist and progressive commentator in Iran, warned of the challenge ahead. The regime, he argued, “wanted to buy silence with violence.” But “violence did not speak just from the side of the state. Calls for revenge, for attacks, for a violent response to the prevailing violence also echoed throughout the public sphere.” During and after the Dey uprising many protesters and opposition groups—from a former prime minister under house arrest to mothers whose children were killed in earlier waves of repression—insisted on the need for a social revolution from within Iran itself; others felt desperate enough to call for US military action to open the way beyond the Islamic Republic or even to the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy. Two paths lay open for Iranian society, Maljoo wrote: “transforming suffering into a conscious collective force,” or “slipping into a cycle that recognizes blood as the sole language of politics.”

By launching this war Trump and Netanyahu have steered Iran—not to mention the entire Middle East—firmly onto the latter path. The besieged Islamic Republic now finds itself having to fight a multifront war, navigate a transition to a new leader (for whom Israel has already issued a death sentence), and maintain control over a restive and polarized society. Still reeling from January’s crackdown, Iranian citizens must wonder if they have any say in what comes next—if this is a war for regime change or state collapse. With the war’s instigators trying to bend the Dey protests to their own purpose, it has become all the more urgent to understand the uprising’s causes and legacy.

This is not an easy task. It is too soon to collect the necessary information for an anatomy of the 2025–2026 protests and too early to move beyond the dread and trauma. The death toll itself remains a matter of pitched debate. Iranian officials place the total number of dead at 3,117 and claim that most of them are “martyrs” killed by “rioters,” “foreign agents,” and “terrorists.” A reputable Washington-based organization, the Human Rights Activists News Agency, sets the figure to at least seven thousand, of which a little over two hundred were security personnel. Trump, in his speech announcing the attack, put the total at “tens of thousands,” echoing the claims of some diasporic opposition groups. But by any measure far more people were killed during the Dey protests than in any earlier cycle of protest in the country, including the entire thirteen months of the 1979 revolution. At the peak of the uprising on January 8 and 9 the clashes between well-armed security forces and large crowds of mostly peaceful protesters consumed several city centers, from Tehran to Mashhad, in the country’s northeast. Beyond the murdered thousands, many more were injured, imprisoned, interrogated, or condemned to Iran’s already long death row.

When a full account of the uprising is written, it will be in relation to a war that will forever change the region. But January’s protests were not just the prelude to a geopolitical contest. They offer a window into the fortunes of Iran’s citizens, the changing structure of its state, and the trajectory of the regime the US now seeks to obliterate.

*

Authoritarian regimes born out of revolutions—as opposed to coups or foreign interventions—tend to be durable.¹ From China to Cuba, such social-revolutionary regimes have developed cohesive ruling elites and loyal apparatuses of coercion. Iran has been no exception.

Soon after the 1979 revolution that toppled the Pahlavi monarchy, forces loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini fought a civil war against dissident members of the revolutionary coalition as well as an eight-year war with Iraq. Winning those early political struggles—and withstanding the bloodletting that followed Iraq’s invasion—brought considerable power to Khomeini’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its associated voluntary paramilitary force, the basij, whose members now number approximately 800,000 across provincial and local levels. Over time they and the country’s conventional standing military have been augmented with counterterrorism, anti-narcotic, and policing units. In the past quarter-century the shadow of war with the US and Israel—as well as Iran’s own regional adventurism in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—has helped the regime continuously recharge the ranks of its loyal troops, including building a Fatemiyoun division composed primarily of Afghan refugees living in Iran. This dynamic persists to this day: that in recent months the monarchists and their social media warriors opposing the state often resorted to a vocabulary of revenge, war, and Pahlavi restoration further encouraged the security forces to remain tightly aligned with the political establishment. 

But the Islamic Republic managed this vast, dependable security force without a ruling party. Iran has no equivalent to, say, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) founded in Mexico after its 1920 revolution—let alone to the Chinese Communist Party. Here power has been far more diffuse, coalitional, and prone to factionalism. The executive level is itself divided between an unelected leader—the rahbar—and an elected president and parliament. The balance of power between them has never been equal: the leader oversees the IRGC, the court system, and other crucial parts of the repressive apparatus; he and the councils under his tutelage also have various ways of engineering elections, including by vetting and rejecting candidates. Khomeini, the regime’s first leader, and Khamenei, his successor, frequently used their office to balance different factions and defuse rivalries. Iranians have come to refer to the president and his cabinet as the government (dowlat), and the parallel web-like set of organizations under the leader’s informal, discretionary authority as the state (hukoumat) or regime (nezam).

In the past two decades the nezam consolidated more power than ever before. Over the late 1990s and early 2000s pragmatists and reformists were able to use election campaigns, newspapers, and civil society organizations to garner extensive popular support for protecting civil liberties and making gradual legal changes to the constitutional order. The regime, for its part, wielded a range of tools to block their ambitions, including using the judiciary to shut down newspapers and arresting civil society and labor activists. Political concessions, Khamenei insisted, were a sign of weakness that would only embolden the regime’s internal critics and foreign enemies.

The struggles between these factions came to a head in 2009, when the leader-aligned incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was declared victorious after a hotly contested election that drew over 85 precent of the electorate to the ballot box. Supporters of the reformist candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, disputed the results, initiating widespread protests in Tehran and other urban centers across the next several months, in what became known as the Green Movement. The state mobilized its own base and suppressed the demonstrations by force: more than a hundred people were killed in the ten months after the election.

Afterward reformist leaders found themselves increasingly sidelined from formal politics, and many Iranians concluded that reformism was hardly an effective strategy. During the years that followed the minoritarian institutions of the regime did everything they could to block dissident voices from accessing official political channels: zealous judges banned more newspapers and NGOs, Khamenei’s Guardian Council engineered elections more vigorously, and the basij harassed activists of all stripes. The nezam strove to keep society disorganized, and a wide range of Iranians came to feel disenchanted with institutional politics. The reformists never regained the same footing: tellingly, although they played no part in the Dey protests this past January, many of their leading spokespeople found themselves questioned and detained by the judiciary all the same.

*

Meanwhilea less noted transformation was underway. At a moment when most global attention had turned to Iran’s nuclear program and the US and other countries were ratcheting up sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial system, including its central bank, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad were busy restructuring the country’s political economy.

Since the heady days of revolution and war Iran had built up state bureaucracies that enjoyed regulatory oversight over the economy and society. Much of this new professional class had supported the pragmatist turn of the 1990s and the reformist agenda it inspired. But conservative forces—including younger members of the nezam—feared that these technocrats would restrict the power of the parastatal organizations under the leader’s authority, such as religious foundations and security units. Over time those forces grew increasingly suspicious of the bureaucracy, and to an extent of expertise itself.

Embodying this populist current, between 2005 and 2013 Ahmadinejad presided over a DOGE-like process of dismantling the regulatory apparatus. Among other things, he reduced the independent auditing powers of Iran’s long-established development agency, the Plan and Budget Organization; abolished and merged several ministries; and restructured the governance of Iran’s oil sector by drafting new laws and dismissing veteran managers. From decaying infrastructure to poor ecological management, Iranians have been living with the effects of a hollowed-out state ever since.

At the same time Khamenei sanctioned what he called an “economic revolution.” The nationalization or transfer of factories, land, and companies had been a crucial way for the state to redistribute wealth since 1979. Shortly after Ahmadinejad’s first election victory, the leader issued a directive reinterpreting the constitution to give more leeway to private entities in economic domains previously reserved for the public sector, such as banking, energy, and heavy industry. Ostensibly designed to introduce competition, improve efficiency, generate jobs, and encourage exports, privatization had the initial support of reformist politicians and neoliberal economists, who imagined that economic freedoms would in turn catalyze political liberty.

Instead it allowed unaccountable branches of the state to acquire a new measure of control over major public assets and vast swaths of the economy. During Ahmadinejad’s eight years in office hundreds of businesses, from mines and petrochemical companies to telecommunications and financial firms, fell into the hands of what scholars have come to call a “non-governmental public sector,” eligible for subsidized water, electricity, and hard currency but free from the oversight of ministries or parliamentarians. They were taken over by religious endowments, welfare and retirement funds, revolutionary foundations instituted in 1979 to manage confiscated assets, and conglomerates directly and indirectly dominated by the IRGC and basij—all major pillars of the nezam. In total close to $150 billion worth of shares in state-owned enterprises were “privatized” in this way, in effect bringing them more closely under the leader’s oversight.²

This system supercharged corruption, mismanagement, and the rise of oligarchies. Last year the head of an association of companies active in the water sector explained to Amwaj Media that it was difficult for his industry to address the water crisis when the state was “simultaneously a policy maker, regulator, provider and seller of water.” As various subcontractors and branches of the nezam profited from this new arrangement, they grew only more loyal to the upper echelons of the regime on which their survival now depended.

*

The US-led sanctions reenforced the most corrosive aspects of this system. As part of their comprehensive restrictions on the country’s finances and trade, they froze Iranian assets abroad, depleted government budgets, and blocked the state from exporting oil and importing industrial equipment vital for local manufacturers. In 2023 Janet Yellen acknowledged that sanctions had yet to achieve their stated goal—changing Iran’s policies.

What they had done instead, she admitted, is “created real economic crisis in the country.” Social provision evaporated: in September 2024 Iran’s Statistical Center revealed that one in three of the country’s households were living under the poverty line. While inequality had been narrowing before the increased sanctions, it widened after them. By 2020, as the economic analyst Esfandyar Batmanghelidj and the sociologist Zep Kalb have noted, “the top 5 percent accounted for…35 percent of total household expenditures.” Iran’s industrial sector shifted away from manufacturing to the extraction of raw materials, while ever more Iranians turned to jobs in the service sector and precarious employment in the gig economy. As the country’s access to global markets narrowed, a grey economy of shell companies and offshore enterprises—often tied to corporations or individuals who reaped the rewards of privatization—assumed an increasingly important part in brokering Iran’s dealings with the rest of the world.

The outcome, Batmanghelidj and Kalb observed, was that “sanctions entrenched and empowered Iran’s elite by halting the economic redistribution that had been underway prior to 2012,” ultimately encouraging “a structural transformation of the Iranian economy that favored those who control capital.” Ida Nikou, who has conducted extensive research on neoliberalism in Iran, put it still more directly: within the country’s “sanctioned political economy,” she recently wrote, “austerity becomes a governing tool, and scarcity generates profit for those with privileged access.”

Throughout this era of economic disempowerment, dissent persisted and even proliferated—but in the form of street politics rather than in the halls of power. Since the early 2000s teachers, nurses, truck drivers, and other blue- and white-collar workers across the country have held near-daily demonstrations demanding better pay and work conditions. Farmers and environmentalists have gathered in front of provincial offices with a litany of ecological concerns. Pensioners and bank depositors have descended on bankrupt financial institutions and social security offices to recoup their savings. These groups have called on ministers, local authorities, and the state at large to protect citizens from the jagged edges of the country’s deteriorating economy and accused them of betraying the revolutionary promises that inspired and united Iranians in 1979.

Because the regime systematically repressed political parties, unions, and other organized social associations, these localized movements struggled to scale up, transcend class lines, or create national organizations or leaders. But they never relented: a leading expert on social movements, Mohammad Ali Kadivar, estimates that between 2015 and 2024 there were at least 6,100 of these sorts of local protests for dignity and survival. Sometimes they would improve salaries and contracts for workers or punish unscrupulous owners, and even when they failed to achieve concrete victories they gave Iran’s combative society a way to denounce the current political class for betraying the revolution’s vision of social justice.

This is a far cry from the image of a passive and despairing citizenry disseminated during these years by Western media outlets. In the US and Europe these protests received scant coverage, generally only attracting notice when they became demonstrations explicitly targeting the regime—and implicitly laying the groundwork for imagining foreign intervention as a necessary savior. At the same time, protests about bread-and-butter issues could and did become outlets for discontent with the regime itself, notably during the 2017–2018 and 2019 demonstrations over the cost of living, and again during the Women, Life, Freedom movement of 2022, which challenged mandatory veiling laws and gender norms. A general sentiment was spreading that the regime was less and less willing or able to address the nation’s demands; with each cycle chants of “death to the dictator, death to Khameini” grew more common.

When he assumed the presidency in 2024, Masoud Pezeshkian announced that he wanted to build a cabinet that crossed factional differences and bring moderate reformists like himself back into the halls of power—what he called a “government of consensus.” It was a timid attempt, during a high-pressure moment of regional war and spiraling economic crisis: by December 2025 inflation was running at over 40 percent, with an annual rate of 72 percent for foodstuffs. In that month alone the rial lost 16 percent of its value.

*

On the eve of the Dey protests, Iranians increasingly turned to the vocabulary of desperation and impasse to describe their lives.On one side was an unaccountable political elite presiding over an austerity economy; on the other was a US hegemon with little to offer the world but threats from its bloated military. Desperate for change, a growing number of the country’s citizens looked to the US war machine as their savior, implicitly or explicitly backing the naïve if not nefarious notion that Trump could bring about regime change without sending in troops. The loudest voices to this effect came from monarchists in the diaspora, who sought the ears of US and Israeli officials and enjoyed special visibility on a Saudi-funded satellite television channel that had been broadcasting into Iran since 2017.

The people that actually did rise up in Iran were not necessarily the ones these regime-change advocates had expected. The steady stream of social protests in the past quarter century had generally not taken place in the country’s main bazaars, where the merchants had grown beholden to IRGC brokers and black markets for access to commodities and hard currency.³ But on December 28, under ever more strain as the rial plummetted, shopkeepers in Tehran’s cell phone and electronics shopping centers launched a demonstration. Soon they were joined by merchants and moneylenders in the nearby Grand Bazaar and wholesale hubs like Shoush square and Yaftabad. Anger at the plunging currency was only deepened by news of a planned austerity budget, which they feared would double taxes and slash subsidized currency rates, benefitting well-connected businesses and feeding a black market in dollars that risked further shrinking their profit margins.

Loosely labeled bazaaris, these traders, moneylenders, and artisans have a rich history of social protest going back to the Constitutional Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, the oil nationalization movement in the mid-century, and the 1979 revolution, in which they provided funding, a social constituency, and physical spaces in which to make claims upon despotic rulers. Although central Tehran’s shops, offices, and workshops are no longer as significant a part of Iran’s economy, and have left behind their former level of political mobilization, the shuttering of these shops still had symbolic significance for Iranians. The merchants’ nationwide networks of credit and commodity distribution also worked to transmit news and grievances. Within a day shopkeepers in other major cities, small provincial towns, and even in the Persian Gulf free trade zone of Qeshm Island joined the protests. By the third day university students back in Tehran and other major cities had swelled the ranks of the demonstrations chanting the now common refrain of “death to the dictator,” along with “women, life, freedom” and newer chants—“long live the shah,” “this is the final battle, Pahlavi will return,” and “man, homeland, prosperity.”

As the protests persisted over the next week social media chatter, including posts by Mike Pompeo and the Mossad itself, intimated that Tel Aviv was providing material support for the demonstrations—not exactly a far-fetched proposition, given the extent to which Israeli intelligence had reportedly infiltrated Iran before the twelve-day June war. These suspicions were only amplified when Trump himself issued a statement on January 2: “If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” he warned. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” The prospect of intervention grew more real the next morning, when, in a predawn operation, the US military kidnapped Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, touting a “more surgical” model of violent regime change.

Popular outrage against the Iranian regime intensified when news spread that security forces had entered a hospital in the predominantly Kurdish provincial town of Ilam to arrest injured protesters. On January 6 the son of Iran’s former shah, Reza Pahlavi, and the leaders of several Kurdish parties called for Iranians to take to the streets at 8 PM on Thursday, January 8. A few days earlier Pahlavi had confidently predicted that “seizing the streets…would significantly accelerate the regime’s fall…. The regime will quickly lose both the capacity and the will to repress.” We may never know to what extent this self-proclaimed “transitional figure” inspired what followed. A similar message from Pahlavi during the twelve-day war was unheeded, and there had already been ten days of popular mobilization in the capital and across many provinces. But the streets did indeed fill with protesters, and mounting chants of “long live the shah” reflected a new political climate.

By this point Pezeshkian’s promise to treat protesters peacefully, made throughout the first week of the demonstrations, had frayed. Members of the judiciary and the security forces were starting to echo Khameini’s distinction between protesters, whom “officials must talk to,” and “rioters,” who had to be “put in their place.” On the fateful Thursday and Friday nights many Iranians, seemingly putting great stock in people power, flooded the streets with their children and elderly relatives. But the security forces dropped any pretense of crowd control and unleashed lethal violence against large gatherings across the country; the regime, meanwhile, shut down the Internet and other lines of communication. Misinformation and rumor obscured the extent of the bloodshed. Much is still vague, but the carnage and cruelty soon became clear. It is unlikely that Iranians will easily shake off the images of snipers atop buildings using military-grade weapons to gun down protesters, militiamen chasing people through the streets with machetes, and family members wandering among scores of body bags as they looked for their loved ones in overflowing morgues.

Iran’s decision-makers had ridden out previous protests with far less repression, making tactical concessions and waiting for social exhaustion and apathy to set in. This time, however, they clearly felt they had too much to lose. What appeared to be a display of the regime’s strength was also a measure of its political weakness.

The regime was already battered both by the June war, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, and Israel’s destruction of Tehran’s allies in Lebanon and Palestine. Trump’s decision to enter the fray by bombing Iran’s nuclear installations on the eleventh day of the summer war had crossed yet another red line in the almost half-century of animosity between Washington and Iran. The vocal public support for Pahlavi across several strata of Iranian society—and his strategic alignment with the most militaristic forces in Tel Aviv and Washington—was likely a bridge too far for some of the regime’s inner circle. The violence may also, to some extent, have been yet another example of militarism abroad feeding militarism at home: since 2003 Iran’s armed forces had entered civil wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen; the tactics the security forces had developed for confronting ISIS they now deployed in the streets of Iran’s cities.

The international situation was also exceedingly permissive. The US and its close allies’ indifference to violations of international law and bloodbaths in the past three years—in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, and Congo—has made civilians more vulnerable around the world, including in Iran. But another part of the explanation surely lies in the intertwined political and economic transformations that had been underway over the past two decades. Over time those shifts had narrowed and radicalized the regime’s base of support, giving certain factions of the IRGC a reason to defend the state by any means necessary and leaving the government ill-equipped to respond to mass public dissent with anything other than naked violence.

*

The war the Pentagon has named “Epic Fury” seems to be based on a number of profound misreadings. Trump and his advisers appear to think the Iranian government is significantly more vulnerable than it is—not to mention that they trust that aerial bombing can lead to regime change in the first place. The country’s spiraling economy and the protests launched by its determined citizens have exposed the limitations of the Islamic Republic’s current structure, and it may ultimately be overwhelmed by the most powerful military that the world has ever seen. But it was not a state splintering and on the verge of collapse. It was never going to fall along with the leader in a single strike, and the US might well mistake the workings of its networked councils and military units for a loss of command and control. It is almost impossible to decipher what the expressed goal of the US–Israeli mission is, but if it is in fact regime change, then the Islamic Republic has no compromise option; it has to choose between committing suicide or raising the costs of war for the US through military endurance. Unsurprisingly, it has opted for the latter.

Uprising and war have forever transformed the Islamic Republic. The polarization of Iranian society now feels even more complete: a day after scattered crowds danced and cheered at the death of the octogenarian who embodied the country’s uncompromising political system, long rows of mourners filled the streets. Although they may be in the minority, the Islamic Republic’s supporters have a high degree of discipline and organization. The regime’s decentralized, weblike structure anchors it in many different parts of society, including employees of the various regime-controlled organizations and their families, giving a significant number of Iranians a stake in its survival. But their dedication needs to weather an uncertain, contentious transitional moment. Meanwhile the majority of the country’s people, who have been chafing under the clerical–security establishment, now also have to contend with what Pete Hegseth has plainly called “death and destruction from the sky.” An increasing number of those who until now supported foreign intervention may find themselves reconsidering: politics rooted in desperation rather than conviction tend to be brittle.

The bombing prompted the regime to shut down communications once more, silencing voices in civil society, like Mohammad Maljoo, who have been warning against the cycle of bloodletting and seeking to carve a peaceful democratic path through Iran’s accumulated crises. Even before the start of the war, real, positive change—freeing Iran’s political prisoners, addressing social justice demands, holding the perpetrators of January’s violence accountable, negotiating a constitutional referendum with broad democratic support—would have taken disciplined nonviolent mobilization. Now that the political conditions necessary for this sort of action have been obliterated, along with so many lives, all those aspirations seem further off than ever. Having exhibited great resilience over the decades, now Iranians will have to show it again, whatever lies ahead for them and the world.