Something is collapsing right now inside one of the most secretive and powerful regimes on Earth. And what is happening is not just another protest. It is not another round of tear gas and angry crowds that disappear after a few days. What is happening inside Iran right now is something that the Islamic Republic has never faced in its entire 47-year history.
The very organization that was built to protect the supreme leader is now turning against him. Let that sink in for a second. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most feared military force in the Middle East, the organization that has crushed every protest, silenced every critic, and executed thousands of people who dared to speak against the regime.
That same organization is now publicly questioning the man at the very top. And the streets of Iran are on fire. Not metaphorically, literally. Cities across the country are burning. Protesters are dying. Security forces are shooting into crowds. Behind closed doors in places where the world cannot see, a power struggle is underway that could determine not just the future of Iran, but the future of the entire Middle East.
But here is the part that nobody is talking about. The situation inside Iran right now is far more dangerous, far more unstable, and far more consequential than anything the outside world is being told. And it all began with a number. The number was the exchange rate of the Iranian rial. In December of 2025, the Iranian currency collapsed to its lowest point in history.
The rial, which had already been battered for years by international sanctions, simply fell apart. Overnight, prices for basic goods skyrocketed. Bread became expensive. Cooking oil disappeared from shelves. Families who had been scraping by suddenly found that their savings were worth almost nothing.
This was not just an economic problem. This was a humiliation. Iran is a country sitting on some of the largest oil and gas reserves on the planet. It has a young, educated population of over 90 million people. It has ancient cities, rich culture, and centuries of history. And yet its citizens could not afford to buy eggs. For years, Iranians have been told to endure.
The sanctions were America’s fault. The hardships were Israel’s fault. The sacrifices were necessary for the Islamic revolution to survive. But by late December 2025, a critical mass of people had simply stopped believing that story. On December 28th, 2025, the Bazaar of Tehran went silent. Shop owners pulled down their shutters.
Traders refused to open. Market workers who had once been the backbone of the 1979 revolution that brought the Islamic Republic to power were now the first to shut it down. The Grand Bazaar of Tehran, one of the oldest and largest markets in the world, went on strike. And then the streets filled with people. Within hours, protests had spread to Isfahan, then Shiraz, then Mashhad, then Hamadan, then Qom, the holiest city in Iran, a city of mosques and religious seminaries, a city that had always been considered loyal to the clerical regime. Even Qom was rising.
By December 31st, protests had reached more than 200 cities across Iran. In the city of Kuhdasht, a 21-year-old man named Amir Hesam Khodaeifar, joined a crowd of peaceful protesters marching toward the city square. They were chanting. They were carrying nothing. And then a plainclothes security agent raised a weapon and shot him in the head. He died that night.
His father confirmed to reporters that his son was not a militant. He was not a foreign agent. He was not a rioter. He was a young Iranian man who was angry about the price of bread. And what happened at his funeral would set off a chain of events that no one inside the regime was prepared for. When mourners gathered to bury Amir Hesam Khodaeifar, security forces arrived to control the crowd.
What happened next changed everything. The mourners chased them away. Not with weapons, not with military force, with stones and their bare hands and the raw, uncontrollable fury of people who had nothing left to lose. They chanted,
“Death to Khamenei.”
As they buried a young man killed by Khamenei’s forces. This scene repeated itself across Iran. Funerals became protests. Protests became uprisings. And uprisings began to spread to places that had never seen unrest before. But most people don’t realize what was happening simultaneously in another part of Tehran. Inside government offices, inside military command centers, inside the sealed corridors of power, something unprecedented was quietly building.
Senior officials were watching the same footage that protesters were uploading online. They were watching the same videos of crowds chanting for the downfall of the Islamic Republic. And a growing number of them were beginning to ask a question that had never been asked openly before.
Is the supreme leader the problem? By the first days of January 2026, the protests had grown into the largest uprising Iran had seen since the 1979 revolution that created the Islamic Republic. Intelligence analysts, veteran Iran watchers, and international journalists were all saying the same thing. This was bigger than the Green Movement of 2009.
This was bigger than the nationwide protests of 2019. This was bigger than the Mahsa Amini protests of 2022. This was something new, something the regime had not planned for. And then Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei made a decision that would push everything over the edge. On January 3rd, 2026, security forces killed at least 11 protesters in a single day.
That same day, Khamenei appeared before cameras. And what he said left the watching world stunned. He said that rioters should be put in their place, not mourned, not understood, not negotiated with. Put in their place. On the same day, the IRGC’s provincial commander in Lorestan province declared that the period of tolerance was over.
His forces would target, and these are his exact words,
“Rioters, organizers, and leaders of anti-security movements without leniency.”
Two days later, the head of Iran’s judiciary ordered prosecutors to show no leniency to protesters and to rush their trials. What happened next was something that would be described weeks later as the largest massacre in modern Iranian history.
On the nights of January 8th and 9th, 2026, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps moved into the streets of Iran in organized, coordinated, deliberate military operations against their own people. They came with Kalashnikov rifles. They came with handguns. They came with heavy DShK machine guns, the kind designed for use in battlefield warfare.
They came with snipers positioned on elevated locations that, according to a former Ministry of Interior official, had been marked and identified for exactly this purpose years in advance. Since 2022, the regime had been quietly preparing for this moment. The orders, according to multiple sources with direct access to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and the Presidential Office, came from the very top, Ali Khamenei himself.
The orders given to security forces were, according to the New York Times, to shoot to kill and to show no mercy. By January 13th, investigators from Iran International, working through a multi-stage investigation using government sources, eyewitness accounts, field reports, hospital data, and testimony from Iranian doctors and nurses, reached a conclusion that shocked the world.
At least 12,000 civilians had been killed in the crackdown. 12,000 in 2 days. A Tehran doctor told journalists that security forces were shooting to kill. A surviving protester described watching people fall in the streets around her. Human rights organizations verified video footage of bodies in hospital corridors, families searching through piles of the dead.
And yet, even as this was happening, even as the massacre was underway, something was shifting inside the most powerful institution in Iran. The IRGC was created for one purpose, to protect the Islamic Revolution, to serve as the supreme leader’s most loyal and most lethal instrument of power. Since 1979, it had grown from a small paramilitary force into a massive organization with hundreds of thousands of fighters, control over Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, dominance over large parts of the Iranian economy, and deep roots inside every branch of government.
It was, in every practical sense, the backbone of the Islamic Republic. And now, for the first time in 47 years, cracks were appearing inside it. Reports began to emerge from inside the IRGC that senior commanders were deeply uncomfortable with what they were being ordered to do, not because they were suddenly committed to democracy or human rights, but because they understood something that Khamenei insulated in his compound seemed not to grasp.
Not in a battle, not in a single confrontation, but in the longer, slower, more existential war for legitimacy, the more the IRGC fired on protesters, the more the protest spread. The more bodies that appeared in the streets, the more Iranians who had stayed home decided to join. The killings were not stopping the uprising, they were fueling it.
And there was something else, something far more dangerous for the IRGC’s own interests. The international response was unprecedented. The European Union, which had long been cautious about confronting Tehran, moved to officially designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization. The United States Treasury announced it would track senior Iranian officials transferring their personal wealth out of the country, a signal that even the regime’s inner circle was preparing for the possibility that the government might fall.
The US Treasury Secretary stated publicly that some Iranian officials appeared to be preparing to flee. Within Iran, a Ministry of Interior official sent an anonymous audio message to media outlets saying he had defected, that he had witnessed security forces firing on protesters, and that he had stayed home from work in solidarity with the uprising.
IRGC commanders were watching all of this and doing the math. If the regime fell in chaos, they would lose everything. Their businesses, their properties, their power. Some of them, the ones most responsible for massacres, would face justice. The exiled Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi, had already promised fair trials for those who stepped down peacefully.
But for those who continued to fire on civilians, no such promise was made. And then came the moment that nobody predicted. Senior commanders inside the IRGC began quietly and carefully to signal that they believed Ali Khamenei needed to step aside. This was not a public announcement. In Iran, you do not make public announcements that challenge the supreme leader and then go home for dinner.
People who say the wrong thing in Iran disappear. They face execution. Their families face punishment. But the signals were there for those who knew how to read them. Military officials who had always publicly praised Khamenei began to conspicuously avoid doing so. Statements that should have come from senior commanders expressing loyalty did not come.
Meetings that should have taken place were delayed or canceled. And in the background, according to reporting from multiple international outlets, discussions were taking place at the highest levels of the IRGC about a transition of power. The question being asked was no longer whether Khamenei could survive this crisis.
The question was what comes after him and how the IRGC could manage that transition in a way that preserve their own power and prevented the kind of revolutionary collapse that would drag them all down with it. This is where things take a serious turn because the IRGC has two options and both of them are terrifying for the people of Iran.
The first option is to continue backing Khamenei, continue the massacres, continue the crackdown, and hope that brute force eventually extinguishes the uprising in the way it did in 2019 when security forces killed at least 150 to 200 people in just a few days and the country went silent. That strategy worked once.
But in 2025 and 2026, the conditions are dramatically different. The economy is in far worse shape. The protests are far larger. The international pressure is far greater. And critically, the IRGC itself is more fractured than it was in 2019. The second option is to allow a controlled transition, to push Khamenei aside, install a successor from within the existing power structure, and present this to both the Iranian public and the international community as a kind of reform, a fresh start, a new chapter.
But here’s the problem with that plan. The protesters are not asking for a new supreme leader. They are asking for no supreme leader. The chance in the streets of Iran in January 2026 were not chance asking for better governance or economic reform. They were chance calling for the complete and total overthrow of the Islamic Republic.
In Isfahan, crowds chanted,
“Don’t be afraid. We are all together.”
In Tehran, retirees marched and chanted,
“Our enemy is right here. They lie and say it’s America.”
In Deloran, in Bagh-e Malek, in cities across the country, protesters shouted for Reza Pahlavi. They shouted,
“Javid Shah! Long live the Shah!”
The phrase of the monarchy that the Islamic Revolution had destroyed in 1979. They were not just angry. They were reaching back across 47 years of history to reclaim something they felt had been stolen from them. The movement was led this time not just by young women, though they were there. Young men played a larger role than in any previous uprising. Retirees marched in the streets. Oil workers in the Persian Gulf joined strikes.
Telecommunications workers held coordinated demonstrations in seven cities simultaneously. Market traders who had been the engine of the 1979 Revolution were now using their economic power to try to end it. This was not a protest. It was a revolution. And Khamenei responded to it the only way he knew how. On January 17th, 2026, the Supreme Leader appeared publicly and stated that thousands of people had been killed.
His framing was extraordinary. He attributed responsibility for the deaths to the United States and Israel. He called the protesters harmful individuals for the country. He posted on social media,
“We will not surrender to the enemy.”
A statement that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, publicly mocked on the same platform.
And then, 1 week later, Khamenei disappeared. On January 24th, 2026, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the man who had ruled with absolute authority for 35 years, went into hiding in an underground bunker. The leader of Iran was hiding from his own people. Within hours, Iranians on social media gave him a new nickname.
They called him Mush Ali, Rat Ali. And outside the bunker, the streets were still burning. What most people don’t realize is that the story of what happened next is not just a story about Iran. It is a story about the entire architecture of power in the Middle East. Because for decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran had been the central pillar of a network of influence that stretched from Tehran to Baghdad to Beirut to Gaza and beyond.
The IRGC’s Quds Force had built and funded Hezbollah in Lebanon. It had supported Hamas in Gaza. It had armed and trained Houthi forces in Yemen. It had embedded itself so deeply into the political structures of Iraq that it effectively functioned as a shadow government. All of that was now at risk. Because if the Islamic Republic fell, or even if it was seriously weakened, the entire network of proxy forces and allied militias that Iran had built over four decades would be without their primary sponsor, their weapon supplier, and their strategic coordinator, and the region knew it.
Israel, which had fought a brutal 12-day war against Iran just months earlier in June 2025, a conflict in which Israeli forces targeted IRGC headquarters, missile sites, and nuclear facilities, was watching the protests with intense interest. The Israeli Defense Forces had already received messages from Iranians, including some identifying themselves as members of Iranian security institutions, expressing opposition to the government.
The United States, under President Trump, was watching, too. The exiled Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi, had directly appealed to Trump to support the protesters, and Trump had made statements sympathetic to the uprising. The US Treasury was tracking the movement of Iranian officials’ money. Russia and China, long-time backers of the Iranian government, were pushing for calm.
Moscow and Beijing understood that a collapsed Iran would be a vacuum, and vacuums in the Middle East are never filled cleanly. The entire world was holding its breath. Inside Iran, the crackdown continued, but it was changing in a way that revealed the regime’s desperation. In March 2026, the IRGC issued a stark public warning.
If protests restarted, the crackdown would be bigger than the one in January. But this warning was different from previous ones. Previous warnings had been issued from a position of strength, the voice of a state that was firmly in control and confident in its power. This warning had a different quality. It sounded like a threat issued by an institution that was afraid.
And fear in authoritarian regimes does something dangerous. It makes them unpredictable. Security forces began shooting people at checkpoints. In July, two young men named Medi Abaei and Alireza Karbasi were killed near Hamadan while on a hiking trip. They were not protesters. They were simply in the wrong place when IRGC forces encountered them.
Their deaths were reported by official media with no explanation. In July, Basij militia forces shot and killed a family driving past a checkpoint. The family included a baby girl named Raha, a baby. The exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi wrote that these killings showed the regime was taking revenge for its humiliation by murdering children.
That sentence was not political rhetoric. It was an accurate description of what was happening. The regime that had promised to protect the Islamic revolution was now shooting babies at checkpoints. But what happened next changed everything in a way that almost no one predicted. Inside the highest levels of the Iranian government, a fracture appeared that the regime could no longer hide.
An IRIB television channel director was fired after a reporter appeared to say,
“Death to Khamenei.”
live on state television during the Iranian Revolution Anniversary rally. While state television, Iran’s most tightly controlled media institution, had allowed an act of open defiance to go out on air before anyone could stop it.
The live broadcast of President Peseschkian was cut mid-speech by the same network. The information architecture of the Islamic Republic was breaking down from the inside. A former IRGC detainee, identified only as Kazem to protect his identity, gave testimony to journalists about what the nights of January 8th and 9th had looked like from inside the IRGC’s operations.
On the afternoon of January 7th, he had been ordered to report to the IRGC Vali-e-Asr Garrison at 10:00 in the morning on January 8th. At the morning meeting, 50 to 60 men were given authorizations to use Kalashnikov rifles, handguns, and ammunition. They were told what to do. They were told who to shoot. This testimony was not the story of soldiers following legal orders in a war.
This was the story of a regime dispatching armed men to kill civilians in their own streets on the personal orders of a supreme leader hiding in a bunker. And more and more people inside the system were willing to say so. The Ministry of Interior official who had defected, the IRGC reporter who had spoken on air, the IRGC members who were quietly communicating with Israeli and American officials, the growing number of commanders who were signaling that Khamenei had to go.
The dam was cracking. The question that everyone watching the situation was asking was not whether the Islamic Republic was in crisis. That was obvious. The question was whether it could survive. And the answer depends on something that no outside analyst can fully know. It depends on what the IRGC ultimately decides.
Here is the brutal reality of power in Iran. The IRGC is not just a military organization. It is a state within a state. It controls vast economic interests. It owns companies, construction firms, import businesses, and financial networks that make it one of the most powerful economic actors in Iran. Its senior commanders have accumulated enormous personal wealth.
They have as much to lose from chaos as Khamenei does, but they also have more options than Khamenei. A supreme leader who has ordered the massacre of 12,000 of his own people has very few good options. He cannot negotiate his way out. He cannot reform his way out. He cannot simply announce that things will be different now and expect anyone to believe him.
His only tools are the tools he has already used: violence, intimidation, imprisonment, and execution. The IRGC, on the other hand, has a choice. It can present itself as the institution that removed a leader who had gone too far, that stepped in to prevent Iran from descending into complete chaos, that opened a door, however narrow, to some kind of transition.
That version of events would not satisfy the protesters who want the entire Islamic Republic dismantled, but it might be enough to stop the bleeding, to create a pause, to buy time. This is exactly the kind of calculation that military institutions make when they decide to remove the civilian leader they were supposed to serve.
And the history of the Middle East is full of exactly this kind of transition. The man who had been positioned for years as Khamenei’s successor is Mojtaba Khamenei, the Supreme Leader’s own son. After Ali Khamenei’s eventual removal from power, the government announced Mojtaba as the new Supreme Leader. The response from the streets was immediate.
Protesters chanted
“Death to Mojtaba”
in residential neighborhoods across Iran. In neighborhoods where raising your voice against the regime meant risking your life, people opened their windows and chanted from their rooftops, an act that had become a form of resistance and solidarity.
The regime had tried to hand power from father to son as if the Islamic Republic were a monarchy, as if the revolution of 1979 had replaced a king only to create another dynasty. And the people of Iran, who had been chanting “Death to the dictator” for months, saw exactly what was happening. The opposition figure Reza Pahlavi urged Iranians to remain in their homes while continuing rooftop chants as a sign of unity, a tactic that was both safe and profoundly symbolic.
You could not shoot everyone who chanted from a rooftop. You could not arrest every window in every apartment building in every city in Iran. The regime had run out of walls to put people against, and internationally, the pressure was becoming impossible to ignore. Sanctions were tightening. The European Union had listed the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
The United States was publicly tracking the movement of Iranian officials’ personal wealth. Australia was sanctioning specific IRGC commanders by name. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi was calling for international action against IRGC leadership. The world which had watched previous Iranian uprisings with sympathy and done very little was this time being forced into a corner.
The scale of the killings was too large to ignore. 12,000 civilians, many of them children, shot in the streets by their own government on the direct orders of their Supreme Leader. This was not a statistic. This was a historical crime. And yet, in the middle of all of this, a darker possibility lurked beneath the surface. What if the IRGC does not allow a transition?
What if the commanders who privately questioned Khamenei’s judgment decide that the risk of change is greater than the risk of staying the course? What if they look at the chaos of post-Gaddafi Libya or the collapse of the Soviet Union or the fragmentation of Syria and decide that any transition, however badly needed, is too dangerous to risk?
The IRGC’s new deputy commander, Ahmad Vahidi, is a man with a very specific history. He was one of the figures named by Argentine prosecutors in connection with the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.
He has an active Interpol red notice. He was specifically appointed because of his loyalty to Khamenei and his willingness to use harsher methods. His appointment at the exact moment when the IRGC needed to soften its image to survive was either a sign that Khamenei still had enough control to insist on loyalty over pragmatism or it was a move by hardliners inside the IRGC to prevent the kind of internal reform that might lead to accountability for the massacres.
Either way, it was not a sign that the regime was preparing to open its fists and the protesters knew it. This is where things stand right now. The people in the streets of Iran are not backing down. They are not dispersing. They have watched thousands of their fellow citizens die. They have buried sons and daughters and neighbors and strangers.
They have watched their currency become worthless, their savings evaporate, their leaders hide in bunkers. They have, in the deepest possible sense, nothing left to lose and that is the most dangerous kind of person that any government can face. There’s a phrase that appears in every serious analysis of revolutionary moments.
A phrase that historians use to describe the point at which a regime’s collapse becomes inevitable, not because the government is overthrown from outside, but because it loses the will to maintain itself from within. And what is happening inside Iran right now is precisely that. The television journalist who said, “Death to Khamenei” on live state television, the Ministry of Interior official who defected and stayed home from work, the IRGC commanders who are quietly signaling that the leader must go, the soldiers who were ordered to shoot and who are now giving testimony about what they did, the government officials who are moving their money out of the country.
These are not isolated acts of individual courage. These are symptoms of an institution that is starting to believe that the regime it serves will not survive. And that survival requires choosing a different side before it is too late.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has survived for 47 years by convincing enough of its own people that the alternative to obedience was worse than obedience itself. It has survived sanctions, wars, assassinations, and uprisings. It has survived because the IRGC always at the decisive moment chose to defend it. What is different now? What makes this moment unlike any that has come before? Is that the IRGC is no longer sure that defending the regime is the same thing as defending itself.
And when an institution that powerful starts asking that question, but the answer, when it comes, tends to come very fast. The final piece of the story has not yet been written. As of right now, Iran remains in a state of violent unresolved crisis. The protests have continued in waves. The crackdowns have continued.
People are still dying. The economy is still in freefall. The supreme leader, whoever holds that title now, commands a security apparatus that is visibly fracturing. The world is watching, as it has watched before, with a mixture of sympathy, caution, and calculated self-interest. The United States is watching and calculating what it wants from an Iran in transition.
Israel is watching and wondering whether a weakened Iran means a safer Middle East or a more chaotic one. Russia and China are watching and trying to ensure that if Iran changes, it changes in a direction they can work with. The 90 million Iranians are watching each other, deciding in real time how much risk they are willing to bear, whether to go back into the streets, whether to stay home, whether to believe that this time things might actually be different.
History does not move in straight lines. Revolutions fail. Regimes that seem on the edge of collapse sometimes find a way to survive. The Islamic Republic has surprised the world before. But something has broken inside Iran that cannot easily be repaired. When a government kills 12,000 of its own citizens in two days and then calls them the enemy, it loses something that no amount of force can restore.
It loses the story it tells itself about why it exists. It loses the claim that it is anything other than a group of people with guns holding onto power for its own sake. And the people of Iran, who have 47 years of practice at surviving exactly that, have decided that they are no longer willing to accept it.
Whether this moment becomes a revolution, or a massacre, or a managed transition, or something that the world does not yet have a name for, is not yet known. But one thing is certain. The final piece of the story has not yet been written. The only question left is what comes next. And that question is being answered right now in the streets of Tehran and Isfahan and Khorashad and Qom by the people who have decided that the answer is worth dying for.
