On January 15, someone identifying herself as the daughter of a senior commander within the “repressive forces” of the Iranian regime called the studio of the Persian-language satellite television station Manoto, a dissident channel based abroad that broadcasts into Iran via satellite. Using the pseudonym Fatemeh, the woman cried as she described what it was like to grow up at the heart of the Islamic Republic regime, with a father whose crimes she had witnessed firsthand, including “ordering to kill”.
Fatemeh described fake passports and suitcases full of US dollars stashed in her family home. Of her father and other senior officials, she asserted that “if anything will happen they will be the first to run away”.
Fatemeh’s description of life within the bosom of a regime that is reported to have recently massacred at least 12,000 innocent people on the streets is chilling. Her story brings to mind Mohammad Rasoulof’s seminal 2024 film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which explores the inner lives of the wife and daughters of a senior regime prosecutor who is called upon to sign the death sentences of protesters arrested during Iran’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. Like the daughters of Rasoulof’s fictional pro-regime family, Fatemeh describes herself joining the protests, only to be arrested and released following her father’s intervention. “We do not want this,” she asserts tearfully, referring to the bloodshed and violence unleashed by her father and his colleagues.
There is a perception that those Iranians who support the Islamic Republic, estimated at 15 per cent of the population, are locked in behind the regime, no matter the bloodshed or carnage unleashed upon fellow citizens protesting in the streets. Like any other constituency, however, regime supporters, including direct employees and others who benefit from its largesse, are not a monolith.
During my time in prison I got to know more than a dozen female Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) members who served as prison guards, prisoner transfer escorts, interrogation “minders” and English translators. Most owed their jobs to high-ranking fathers, brothers or husbands within the IRGC. While some had wholeheartedly swallowed the regime’s hardline Islamist propaganda, the majority were open-eyed pragmatists. I knew many of them well enough to say that, like Fatemeh, they would not have been on board with the massacre. Like Fatemeh, many will be desperately looking for some kind of way out.
When the current protest movement kicked off in Iran on December 28 the country was scoring highly on all measures of a potential revolutionary situation, bar one. Economic collapse, elite disaffection, a broad social coalition united in its demands and permissive geopolitical conditions all indicated that an uprising was impending. However, as has been the case throughout all of Iran’s recent mass protest movements except 2009, the regime has managed to inoculate itself against internal schisms or splintering. History has shown that defections from the upper echelons are essential if a revolutionary movement is to succeed.
What would it take to cause the Islamic Republic to fracture from within, potentially creating more Fatemehs, or at least providing those Fatemehs who already exist with an off-ramp? And crucially, how many Fatemehs are there within the regime’s various armed factions, including conscripts to the army and IRGC, who might never have signed up to the regime’s revolutionary ideology in the first place?
Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour is fond of saying that, following Iran’s revolution of 1979, the regime was made up of “80 per cent true believers and 20 per cent charlatans”. Now, he estimates, those figures have reversed themselves. This was certainly my experience with the IRGC and various other regime officials. Those who appeared to be rank opportunists certainly outnumbered those whose ideological commitment to Islamist revolutionary ideals appeared rusted on. The challenge is how the opposition can create conditions by which it would be in the interest of these disaffected regime elites to defect.
The academic literature on revolutions provides some clues. Between 1970 and 2013, around 45 per cent of revolutions featured security force defections, which also evidence a strong predictive effect on the success of an attempted revolution. Defections are more likely when revolutionaries are unarmed, and when GDP and economic growth in the country are low. Both these factors animate the current situation in Iran, which is experiencing an unprecedented economic crisis. The reason for the shockingly high casualties during the recent massacre was that the protesters overwhelmingly stood unarmed in the face of military-grade weapons fired by security forces.
To encourage defections, conditions must be created in which both the costs of remaining loyal to the regime, and the prospects for the success of the opposition, are high. Western governments interested in supporting the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people can play a role in enhancing both.
First, much more can be done to impose costs on senior Islamic Republic officials. Western governments should unify their autonomous sanctions regimes, including imposing travel bans on individuals such as the IRGC-aligned Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who, outrageously, was invited to this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos just weeks after the biggest mass killing in Iran’s modern history. Partner countries should follow Australia’s lead in expelling ambassadors and proscribing the IRGC. Cases against Iran and Iranian officials should be brought before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, respectively. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who as head of state has largely avoided sanctions, should not be spared.
Concurrently, incentives and inducements should be offered to regime officials who defect. Following the massacre, a senior member of Iran’s mission to the UN in Geneva is reported to have claimed asylum in Switzerland, along with his family. Pathways should be set up to explicitly encourage others to follow suit.
Boosting the coherence, visibility and effectiveness of the Iranian opposition is also essential. Social media campaigns and pro-monarchy satellite channels have increased the popularity of the son of the deposed Shah, Reza Pahlavi, in recent years. Pahlavi styles himself as a transitional figure ready to assist a post-revolutionary shift to democracy, and indeed he could play a positive role in this process. However, he is unlikely to be accepted as the sole leader of the opposition as there are prominent movements both within and outside Iran which oppose any attempt to resurrect the monarchy.
Western governments could help provide legitimacy to a transitional council of Iranian opposition forces based outside the country, and assist in the formation of a broad-based and durable opposition which could position itself as a viable alternative to the Islamic Republic, ready to step in should the regime fall. Given the hopelessly divided nature of Iranian diaspora opposition groups, they may need some prodding and pushing from friendly governments to unite against their common enemy.
What is certain is that for Iran, the January 2026 uprising won’t be the last. The unprecedented massacre of unarmed and peaceful protesters shows that for Ayatollah Khamenei, the fight to cling to power is now existential. Those who want to free Iran from the Islamic Republic should focus their energies on bringing the regime down from within.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert is an academic in Middle Eastern political science at Macquarie University, the author of memoir The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison and a regular columnist.
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Kylie Moore-Gilbert is an academic in Middle Eastern political science at Macquarie University, the author of memoir The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison and a regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
