Ask an Iranian in Tehran these days how the war is going and you might get this response: Which war? The on-again, off-again war on Iran by U.S. President Donald Trump? Or the war inside Iran by a regime whose new fear campaign against its people appears to be backfiring?
Since January, when Iran saw the largest unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, executions of political dissenters have surged. In late July, the regime escalated its intimidation tactics by holding the first public executions since 2022 – but not before a large crowd tried to stop the construction of gallows in a public square.
Videos on social media show security forces in the central city of Isfahan chasing protesters before two young men were hanged. “The protests on [July 28] clearly demonstrate that the relative calm on Iran’s streets since the January massacre, and amid the war, should not be mistaken for reconciliation with the government,” Bahar Ghandehari, director of advocacy for the Center for Human Rights in Iran, told The New Arab.
Those acts of defiance, as well as frequent protests by retirees against worsening livelihoods, have helped shatter the narrative that Iranians are united behind their country’s war against the United States and Israel.
While a nationwide uprising is unlikely – such as the one in January in which thousands were killed – “the biggest threat to the Islamic Republic is not the US and Israeli military operations,” former United Nations prosecutor and professor Payam Akhavan told Iran International. “It is the Iranian people first and foremost.”
An opinion survey in June showed at least one-quarter of Iranians participated in January’s protests. Dissatisfaction with the regime is running at 71%, according to the poll by the Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran.
Perhaps more important, 59% oppose Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. If the U.S. is playing the long game on preventing a nuclear Iran, it might better count less on American bombs than on the Iranian people.
“Absent a dramatic change of conditions in the country – much improved economy, fewer social restrictions, stabilised security situation – a new window for large-scale popular unrest will eventually open,” Farzan Sabet, an Iran expert at the Geneva Graduate Institute, told The New Arab.
Or as three political prisoners wrote in a statement released last month: No government can achieve legitimacy or security by “the accumulation of corpses and a fear production line.”