What is actually happening in Iran right now?

Iran has seen a surge in anti-government protests, which started in late December, with demonstrations reported across all 31 provinces and in major cities, including the capital, Tehran. Since 8 January the authorities have imposed a near-total internet shutdown, making it harder for protesters to coordinate and harder for outsiders to verify events in real time. Some current estimates are that at least 12 000 people have been murdered by   state security forces in the crackdown.

What kind of state are Iranians protesting?
Iran is a Shia Islamist theocracy, not a conventional republic. Ultimate power does not rest with voters, parliament, or an elected leader, but instead with religious authorities, headed by a Supreme Leader, known as the Ayatollah, who stands above all elected institutions. This system is built around the belief that senior religious leaders should govern society until the return of the hidden Imam, a core doctrine of Shia Islam. When challenged, the state relies openly on coercion. Arrests, torture, and executions are not aberrations, but regular tools of rule. Public executions, including hangings carried out as spectacles of intimidation, are intended to demonstrate that dissent carries a fatal cost.

Why do protests keep happening even after harsh crackdowns?

The regime has proven highly capable of repression, but repression does not solve the problems driving unrest. Years of economic mismanagement, corruption, inflation, and international isolation have steadily eroded living standards. At the same time, strict social controls, especially those governing women’s behaviour and personal freedom, have become increasingly intolerable to large segments of society. Crackdowns restore order temporarily, but they deepen anger and delegitimise the state further, ensuring that unrest resurfaces.

Why is Iran at odds with many of its Sunni neighbours?

Iran’s Shia Islamist identity sets it at odds with many Sunni-led states in the Middle East because the split is both a religious disagreement and a political fault line. In simple terms, Sunnis and Shia share the same core faith but differ over a seventh-century succession dispute after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, with Sunnis holding that leadership should have been chosen by the community and Shia holding that it should have stayed within the Prophet’s family through Ali, the Prophet’s adopted son.

Over time, those rival ideas hardened into different religious traditions and networks of clerics, schools, and political loyalties. In today’s region, many Sunni governments see Tehran not merely as a competitor but as an expansionist power using a religious banner to build influence beyond its borders. Iran, in turn, presents itself as the vanguard of Islamic resistance against Western influence and Sunni monarchies, a narrative that repeatedly collides with the interests of its neighbours.

How does Iran project power beyond its borders?

Iran’s rulers do not just use diplomacy to gain influence. They fund, arm, and direct Shia Islamist militias in neighbouring countries, and those groups carry out terrorist actions, including bombings, assassinations, rocket attacks, and kidnappings. This allows Tehran to attack rivals and intimidate governments without always sending Iranian troops, while still denying direct responsibility when it suits them.

In effect, the Iranian regime behaves like a murderous colonial power. It seeks to dominate its neighbours by planting armed religious militias inside their societies, turning local politics into an extension of Tehran’s agenda. It then accuses the West of colonialism, even as it uses coercion, proxy violence, and sectarian control to build its own regional empire through fear rather than consent.

It is part of the absurdity of the international system that Iran has been able to hold roles inside the United Nations (UN) human rights machinery. In 2023, an Iranian diplomat chaired a UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, even as the same regime was executing protesters and using public hangings as a tool of intimidation. The effect is not just reputational. Tehran uses access to UN platforms to launder its story, portray itself as the victim, and accuse others of abuses while it brutalises its own people and fuels violence across the region.

Why has the regime not collapsed if opposition is so widespread?

The Iranian system is designed for survival. Power is concentrated in security institutions that are ideologically loyal and materially dependent on the regime. The Iranian security forces are not a single entity, but several different ones. Those forces include the regular military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Basij, a militia-style organisation built for internal repression.

The IRGC sits at the centre of regime defence.  It combines armed capacity with intelligence reach, patronage, and institutional influence that ties elite survival to the system’s survival.

In plain terms, the IRGC is a parallel army inside Iran, loyal only to the ruling class. It is better armed and better trained than most other forces in the country, and it has its own ground troops, its own air force, and its own navy. Its loyalty is to the mullahs and the system they run, not to ordinary Iranians. When protests spread, the clerical leadership leans on the IRGC because it is willing to use lethal force and to detain people on a large scale. Human rights groups have long accused Iran’s security forces of torture and of killing protesters, and the IRGC is widely seen as central to that coercive machine.

The regime does not rely only on guns. It also relies on a pipeline of believers and loyalists. Clerical networks and religious schools train and select people who accept the idea that senior clerics should rule. From there, groups such as the Basij recruit through mosques and local neighbourhood structures, offering rewards for loyalty, jobs, money, and protection, and punishment for disloyalty. That is why the system can stay standing even when it is widely hated, because it does not need most people to support it. It needs the people at the top to stay united and to fund the men with weapons to keep following orders, and for now they still do.