The men who built the Islamic Republic are now the ones trying to tear it down. The soldiers who swore to protect the Supreme Leader are now demanding he resign. And the leader himself hasn’t been seen, hasn’t been heard, and according to sources close to his inner circle, is lying in a hidden location, surrounded by doctors, communicating through handwritten notes passed by couriers like it’s the year 1400.
Iran is not under attack from the outside right now. It is eating itself alive from within. To understand how we got here, you have to go back further than the last few weeks. You have to go back to a country that has been slowly suffocating for decades. Sanctions had gutted the economy. The Iranian realale had collapsed so badly that ordinary people needed wheelbarrows of cash to buy basic groceries.
Inflation wasn’t a statistic on a government report. It was the sound of a mother crying in a market because she couldn’t afford bread. It was a father sitting at a kitchen table staring at bills he had no way to pay. It was an entire generation of young Iranians watching their futures dissolve in real time while the men in power preached sacrifice and resistance from their palaces and protected compounds.
The people of Iran had heard the promises for 47 years. They had been told that the revolution would deliver justice, dignity, and sovereignty. What they got instead was poverty, repression, and a government more concerned with projecting power across the Middle East than with keeping its own people fed.
So when the final straw came on the 28th of December, 2025, it didn’t come in the form of a political manifesto or a military coup. It came from shopkeepers, ordinary men and women who ran small businesses, who had watched their savings turn to dust, who had watched the government spend billions funding militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
While they struggled to keep the lights on, they closed their shops and walked into the streets. And within days, they were joined by students, by factory workers, by teachers, by doctors, by people from every corner of Iranian society who had simply had enough. The protests spread to more than 200 cities.
That number alone should stop you in your tracks. Not 10 cities, not 50. More than 200 cities across a country of 87 million people stood up at the same time and said, “No more.” The regime’s response was what it has always been, brutality. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was still alive at that point, stood before the cameras and called the protesters rioters.
He said, and these are his words, “Rioters must be put in their place.”
That language wasn’t a slip, it was an instruction. And the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, the most powerful military force in the country, the organization that had always been the iron fist behind the regime’s velvet glove, they carried it out.
Security forces took up positions on rooftops. They fired into crowds. They used rifles loaded with metal pellets and aimed not at legs or arms, but at heads and torsos. Witnesses described snipers. Doctors in Tehran hospitals reported that the wounds they were treating were not the wounds of crowd control. They were the wounds of execution.
People were being shot to kill. The internet went dark on January 8th of 2026. The regime didn’t want the world to see what it was doing. And more importantly, it didn’t want Iranians to see each other doing it. Because when you cut communication, you cut coordination. You make every protester feel alone. But even through the blackout, the evidence leaked out.
Videos smuggled on USB drives. Testimonies from doctors who risked everything to speak. Our reports from human rights organizations who pieced together the scale of what happened from fragments of information flowing out of a country that was bleeding. The UN special rapporteur on Iran in a media interview said that at least 5,000 people had been killed. 5,000.
And she added carefully and chillingly that medical sources were suggesting the number could be as high as 20,000. The Iranian government itself, in a moment of shocking candor, later acknowledged through its own Supreme National Security Council that over 3,000 people had died. When a regime admits to 3,000 deaths, the truth is almost always far worse.
Tens of thousands more were arrested, not just protesters. Journalists were taken from their homes in the middle of the night. Human rights lawyers were dragged out of their offices. University students disappeared. Children were detained. The authorities refused to tell families where their loved ones were being held, which under international law constitutes enforced disappearance, a crime against humanity.
Iran wasn’t just suppressing a protest. It was committing a massacre and then trying to erase the evidence. But here is where the story takes a turn that nobody predicted. Because while the regime was busy killing its own people, something was happening on a much larger stage that would change everything. The war. On the 28th of February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated military operation against Iran.
The strikes were devastating. They targeted leadership compounds. They targeted military infrastructure. And one of those strikes killed Ali Khamenei himself, the Supreme Leader who had ruled Iran for over three decades. The man who had been the face and the foundation of the Islamic Republic since 1989, gone in a single night.
And in that same strike, his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who had been groomed in the shadows for years and was seen by many as his father’s chosen successor, was severely wounded. Multiple severe injuries, three surgeries on one leg, waiting for a prosthetic limb. The man who would be handed the most powerful position in the Islamic Republic was taken from a burning building and hidden away from the public, from cameras, from the world.
Within days, Iran’s assembly of experts rushed to fill the vacuum and selected Mojtaba as the new Supreme Leader. A decision driven not by theological consensus or democratic process, but by the IRGC commanders who pushed hard for a successor they believed they could control. As one analyst at Chatham House put it, “Mojtaba is not yet in full command. He is largely presented with decisions already made by others, decisions made by generals.”
Since that day in March, Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public, not once. There’s been no video, no audio. His messages to the nation have been read out loud on state television by others. Words on paper attributed to a man nobody can verify is even coherent, let alone in control.
The New York Times citing interviews with current and former Iranian officials and members of the IRGC reported that access to Khamenei is in their words, “Extremely difficult and limited.”
He is surrounded mostly by a team of doctors and medical staff. Senior officials do not visit him for fear of being targeted. He communicates exclusively through sealed handwritten notes passed through a courier system. A courier system because he cannot trust electronic communications. The leader of one of the most significant nations in the Middle East is running the country through handwritten notes delivered by hand across Tehran’s roads like a medieval king in a besieged castle.
Into that vacuum stepped the IRGC. And what they have done since is nothing short of a slow motion military coup. IRGC Commander Ahmed Vahidi, one of the most hardline figures in the Iranian military establishment, made a statement that if it had been made in any Western country, would have been called a declaration of intent to overthrow the government.
He said, “Under wartime conditions, all critical and sensitive positions must be chosen and managed directly by the revolutionary guard.”
Read that again. The military telling the civilian government, the elected president, the foreign minister, the parliament that they, the military, will decide who holds every important position in the country.
President Masoud Pezeshkian, who had been elected on a platform of moderation and economic reform, found himself unable to even appoint his own intelligence minister. He reportedly sought urgent meetings with the new supreme leader and was denied. Not delayed, denied. A military council of senior IRGC officers had erected what sources describe as a security cordon around the center of power, intercepting all communications between the president and the supreme leader.
The elected president of Iran was effectively locked out of his own government. Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War and US intelligence assessments both pointed to the same conclusion. A three-person IRGC committee, Vahidi, Zolghadr, and Mohsen Rezaee was now making the decisions that mattered.
Foreign policy, wartime strategy, the Strait of Hormuz, the ceasefire negotiations with the United States. All of it flowing through generals, not elected officials. The clerics who had built the theological foundation of the Islamic Republic and the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, the rule of the jurist, were watching their authority be stripped from them in real time.
The “Islamic” in Islamic Republic was becoming window dressing. The generals had taken over and they were not hiding it. This is where the Strait of Hormuz becomes the match that lit the powder keg. The Strait of Hormuz is not just a waterway. It is Iran’s most powerful card in any negotiation with the West. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through that narrow stretch of water between Iran and Oman.
If Iran closes it, global energy markets convulse, fuel prices spike, supply chains break. It is the kind of leverage that turns a regional power into a global threat. The IRGC had been using that leverage throughout the war, controlling which ships could pass and under what conditions, demanding coordination with the IRGC Navy for any vessel wanting to transit.
It was a statement of power. It was proof that despite the air strikes, despite the deaths of commanders, despite the collapse of proxy networks across the region, Iran still held something the world could not ignore. Then came April 17th. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who had been leading diplomatic back channels with the United States, posted a statement announcing that the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened to commercial shipping.
He and the Trump administration both claimed the passage was now open. Whether that was a genuine diplomatic agreement, a misrepresentation, or a deliberate attempt to project stability is still being debated. What is not debated is what happened next. The IRGC went ballistic. State media outlets aligned with the Revolutionary Guard immediately pushed back, describing the foreign minister’s statement as creating confusion and ambiguity.
Pro-regime channels were furious. The Iranian armed forces, separately from the civilian government, declared the strait was still closed. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the man who had led the actual negotiations with the United States in Islamabad, came out and said that whatever the foreign minister said, whatever President Trump was saying, none of it counted without the military’s sign-off.
In one afternoon, the entire facade of unified Iranian leadership shattered in public. The foreign minister said one thing, the military said another. The parliament speaker tried to walk it back. And out in Tehran’s streets, something extraordinary happened. Crowds gathered not to protest the regime in the way that had been happening for months.
These were regime supporters, people who had backed the Islamic Republic, who believed in the resistance narrative, who had spent their lives defending the idea that Iran would never bow to America. And they were furious, not at America, at their own leaders, at the men they believed had surrendered, at the diplomats who, in their eyes, had handed away Iran’s most powerful weapon for nothing.
They were calling for the Supreme Leader to come out and make a statement, to show himself, to say something, anything, because the silence was now indistinguishable from defeat. And the Supreme Leader said nothing because the Supreme Leader cannot say anything. He is in a hidden location. He is recovering from injuries. He is surrounded by doctors.
He communicates through handwritten notes delivered by couriers. The man at the center of Iran’s power structure, the man the entire system is theoretically built around, is invisible. And in his invisibility, the system is collapsing into competing factions. Each one trying to grab as much authority as possible before the whole structure falls.
The fracture lines are now visible to everyone. There’s the fracture between the IRGC and the civilian government. President Pezeshkian in a private conversation that leaked and was reported internationally reportedly said, “I feel useless.”
That is the president of Iran describing himself as useless because that is what he is under the current arrangement. The military has sidelined him completely. Then there is the fracture between the IRGC hardliners and the diplomatic faction. Araghchi and Ghalibaf despite being closely associated with the IRGC themselves are seen by the most extreme elements within the revolutionary guard as having gone too far in their talks with Washington.
Hardliners aligned with the so-called Paydari front, the steadfastness front—a group of ideologues deeply committed to the original principles of the 1979 revolution—have been attacking the negotiations publicly and demanding a return to maximum confrontation. They are not a fringe. They’re woven into the institutions of the Islamic Republic at every level.
Then there is the fracture within the IRGC’s own inner circle. Ali Asghar Hejazi, a powerful security official who had been part of the elder Khamenei’s inner circle and who survived the February air strikes, had for months been warning that selecting Mojtaba as supreme leader would effectively hand the country to the Revolutionary Guard permanently.
He said, “Mojtaba lacks the qualifications.”
He warned that hereditary succession violated the founding principles of the republic. He was right on every count. And now, according to reports, he is being pushed out by associates of Mojtaba who want the last voice of caution removed from the room. What you are witnessing is not simply political turbulence.
It is the simultaneous collapse of three pillars that have held the Islamic Republic upright for nearly half a century. The first pillar is theological legitimacy. The entire system was built on the concept that a supreme religious jurist, a Marja, a scholar of unquestioned Islamic learning and moral authority, sits at the top of the political structure and provides divine legitimacy to government decisions.
Mojtaba Khamenei is not that. He has never been elected. He has never held public office. He does not have the religious credentials of his father. He was appointed because the IRGC wanted him appointed. And every Iranian who understands the founding ideology of their republic knows this is a betrayal of it. The clerics know it. The religious scholars know it.
Even some within the IRGC know it. The theological foundation of the Islamic Republic has been replaced with a military junta that uses religious language as cover. The second pillar is the narrative of resistance. For 47 years, the Islamic Republic sold its people a story. The story went like this: “Yes, there are sanctions. Yes, there is poverty. Yes, there is suffering. But it is all worth it because Iran is standing up to the global powers. Iran is the resistance. Iran will never bow.”
That story required sacrifice. And people sacrificed. They accepted lower living standards. They accepted restrictions. They accepted the costs of isolation because they believed in the cause. April 17th destroyed that narrative in a single tweet. When the foreign minister announced that the Strait of Hormuz was open and that Iran had agreed to terms with the United States, the regime’s own base felt betrayed.
The sacrifice had been for nothing. The resistance had ended not with victory but with a negotiated surrender to the very power they had been told to resist. The ideological core of the Islamic Republic, the reason millions of Iranians had endured 47 years of hardship, had been surrendered by a diplomat on social media.
The third pillar is the monopoly on force. The IRGC was supposed to be the unbreakable instrument of the Supreme Leader’s will. It was supposed to enforce order, suppress dissent, and guarantee the survival of the Islamic Republic against all threats. But when the IRGC turns its institutional weight not against foreign enemies but against the civilian government, when its commanders start issuing statements that contradict the elected leadership, when its media mouthpieces openly attack the foreign minister, the monopoly on force becomes a weapon pointed inward.
The instrument of control has become the instrument of chaos. What comes next is the question that every intelligence analyst, every regional expert, every government watching the situation is asking. And the honest answer is that nobody knows. There are several scenarios being discussed. The first is that the IRGC consolidates power completely.
Mojtaba becomes a figurehead with no real authority and Iran transitions into an openly military-run state. Still ideologically committed to resistance but now making decisions through a junta rather than a religious supreme leader. That scenario keeps the Islamic Republic alive in structure but kills its founding ideology.
The second scenario is that the contradictions become too large to manage, that the ceasefire breaks down, that internal infighting spills into open conflict between factions, that the civilian government and the military establishment reach a point where they cannot coexist. That scenario leads somewhere nobody has mapped.
The third scenario, the one that millions of Iranians on the streets have been risking their lives to bring about, is genuine systemic change. Not a coup from within, but a collapse from within followed by something new. What that new thing would look like, nobody can say. The monarchists chanting “Long live the Shah” in the streets of Tehran represent one vision.
The reformists represent another. The secular democrats represent a third. Iran is not a monolith of opposition. It is a country with deep fractures, not just at the top, but throughout society. What we can say is this: The Islamic Republic is not the Islamic Republic it was 12 months ago. Ali Khamenei is dead. The IRGC has suffered devastating losses of commanders and infrastructure.
The proxy network across the region—Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq and Syria—has been severely degraded by years of Israeli and American military action. The economy has been shattered. The people have been massacred. The new Supreme Leader is hidden, injured, and communicating by handwritten notes.
The elected president feels useless. The foreign minister’s statements are being overruled by generals. And regime supporters are in the streets of Tehran demanding answers from a leadership that cannot give them.
