The decline of the Islamic Republic of Iran is now terminal. The periodic waves of mass popular unrest the country has experienced since the 1979 revolution, increasing in frequency and severity, will probably be seen by history as a steady chipping away at the foundations of the regime’s political, economic and ideological legitimacy. Now, all that is left is a crumbling edifice bolstered by violence and brutality alone.
The news trickling out of Iran throughout five days of almost total internet and communications blackout has been shocking in the extreme. Under the cover of darkness, the clips and images which have made it out show horrifying scenes of bodies piling up in morgues, on pavements and in the backs of trucks. Fatality numbers are impossible to verify, but the dead are expected to number in the many thousands.
Many killed have been young people, even children. More still have been arrested, and a wave of executions is expected. The regime had already scheduled the hanging of one protester, 26-year-old Erfan Soltani, for Wednesday. He was arrested just six days earlier, on January 8.
The current protest movement feels different to that which immediately preceded it. The Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022-2023 was triggered by the death in custody of Mahsa Jina Amini, and women removed their hijabs en masse across the country while calling for gender equality and, ultimately, the downfall of the regime.
Where Woman, Life, Freedom was characterised by a sense of hope, Iran’s current uprising is animated by a strong undercurrent of desperation.
The vibe shift runs both ways. The protesters have had enough – many of them are struggling to make ends meet and put food on the table as the regime’s corruption, graft and economic mismanagement hits new lows. Many are willing to literally stand in the line of fire because they feel they no longer have anything to lose.
But the regime itself, and its shrinking cadre of loyal supporters, are desperate too. Such people have nothing to gain and everything to lose should the Islamic Republic fall. They are therefore rallying to defend it to the very last bullet, regardless of how many innocent, unarmed fellow citizens die in the process.
This desperation and sense that the regime is fighting for its very survival has played out in the crackdown itself. In protests past, security forces made liberal use of tried-and-tested crowd control measures, such as tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets. People still died – more than 500 protesters were killed during the months’ long unrest of 2022-2023. The Revolutionary Guard and its affiliated Basij militia are thought to have killed more than that number in just the past few days, having swiftly graduated to deploying live fire, snipers and military-grade weapons against the unarmed protest movement.
The Islamic Republic’s vulnerability is deep-rooted, but recent miscalculations by its 86-year-old Supreme Leader have arguably hastened what could be the gravest challenge to clerical rule since the country’s 1979 revolution.
Ayatollah Khamenei was the only world leader to publicly support the horrific massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023, which was carried out by Hamas, one of Iran’s terror proxies. Like the immolation of Tunisian fruit-seller Mohamed Bouazizi in 2010, which set in train events that led to the fall of dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and, ultimately, Iran’s client state headed by Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the October 7 terror attack appears to be one of those history-shaping events whose aftershocks flow across borders, reshape alliances and affect geopolitics in unexpected ways years into the future.
The fall of Assad, who had fought a brutal war of survival against his own people for 14 years, was complete in less than 11 days. It took Israel less than two months to comprehensively rout Hezbollah, a long-feared enemy thought to have been perched atop its northern border with more than 100,000 rockets. Hamas and Iran’s proxy militias in Iraq have also been cowed, for now. In this post-October 7 world might the Islamic Republic itself, which sits at the head of its so-called “Axis of Resistance” in the Middle East, be the next to crumble?
Khamenei’s longstanding refusal to implement any meaningful reforms to Iran’s highly repressive system of government, his inability to crack down on rampant corruption, and his rejection of genuine attempts to negotiate offered by both the Trump and Biden administrations primed the Islamic Republic for the current existential collapse in support of its populace. Iran’s ill-advised 12-day war with Israel of June 2025, which led to the humiliating destruction of Khamenei’s prized nuclear program and the assassinations of dozens of senior military, scientific and political figures, revealed the regime to be a paper tiger.
Iran was a powder keg in search of a spark, and on December 28, when merchants and currency traders in Tehran’s bazaars went on strike, it found one.
Will extreme violence yield a temporary reprieve for a regime that has revealed itself to be in terminal decline? The catastrophic collapse of Iran’s economy, coupled with widespread outrage at the unimaginable cruelty of the brutal crackdown on citizens voicing what President Masoud Pezeshkian had earlier acknowledged were “legitimate demands”, almost guarantees another round of protest.
The Islamic Republic is moribund. The question is not if it will fall, but when, and in what manner. And, most tragically of all, how many brave and innocent lives will it destroy on the way out?
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.
