In securing its survival through slaughter, the Iranian regime has sacrificed its tenuous remaining claims to legitimacy.
In securing its survival through slaughter, the Iranian regime has sacrificed its tenuous remaining claims to legitimacy.
T here can be no doubt that the Iranian regime and the thugs in its control brazenly disregarded Donald Trump’s warning of the consequences that would follow the slaughter of anti-establishment protesters. Even when Trump tried to give regime officials an out — claiming that Tehran had declined to go through with the scheduled executions of political dissenters — Iranian prosecutors insisted that the president was wrong. The tempo of repression and brutality, the regime’s officials maintained, would not slacken.
With information flowing out of the Islamic Republic slowing to a crawl after the regime shut down digital and telephonic communications with the outside world, the scale of the massacre the clerisy had engineered was unknowable. But as the regime has gradually loosened those restrictions amid its newfound confidence in its survival, the scope of the carnage is coming into view.
According to details compiled by international Iranian dissident networks, the number of dead Iranian civilians can be measured in the tens of thousands. The ranks of the injured extend well into the hundreds of thousands.
“It is understood that at least 16,500 people have been killed by security forces,” the British broadcaster LBC reported, “however there are fears that accurate figures far surpass this, but are being veiled by Tehran.” Indeed. The opposition-backed news outlet Iran International believes that more than 36,000 were killed at the height of the protests this month. Basing their assessment on “classified documents, field reports, and accounts from medical staff, witnesses, and victims’ families,” including unnamed Iranian regime officials, the activist network accuses the regime of executing a campaign of mass murder — one that culminated in the summary execution of protesters in their hospital beds as they recovered from the injuries meted out by Iran’s security services.
The International Center for Human Rights in Iran believes the number of fatalities is greater still. Based on interviews, field research, and a forensic analysis of the images and videos of the carnage that escaped Iran’s digital lockdown, “at least 43,000 people have so far been killed by agents of the Islamic Republic during the recent protests on the streets of Iran,” the organization reported. In addition, about 35,000 demonstrators were injured amid the crackdown, some permanently. The ICHRI believes almost all the deaths took place over the course of just 48 hours — butchery preceded and made possible by the regime’s internet blackout.
An accurate account of the number of dead may never be known. The regime certainly has an active interest in preserving whatever ambiguity persists. What can be fairly assessed at this point is that Iranian officials perpetrated one of the worst massacres of civilians in modern history. The Western world’s reaction to it has been woefully inadequate.
For context, by the summer of 2024, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry — an appendage of the terrorist organization that made no distinction between the deaths of terrorist combatants and civilians when tallying fatalities — put the number of dead amid Israel’s post-10/7 operations at just over 37,000. Those figures inspired an international protest movement (which Joe Biden’s administration admitted was at least partly funded by the Iranian regime) that was often violent in its hostility toward Israeli actions. Demonstrators shut down airports, bridges, and major thoroughfares. They shut down parades and civic gatherings, and they routinely clashed with police and campus security. They targeted American lawmakers with violence — rewarding the Democratic Party’s appeals to them and the nobility of their emotional response to Israeli actions with more violence. And that was just in the United States. In Canada, Australia, and Europe, the anti-Israel movement catalyzed by the Jewish State’s defensive military priorities was even more disruptive and, often, more violent.
The lethargy that the massacre of Iranian civilians has inspired in the professional protester class stands in marked contrast with the hyperactivity supposedly instigated by Israel’s actions. Beyond the activists, European political culture seems unmoved by the massacre. Although the European Parliament banned Iranian diplomats from its facilities earlier this month, “Not one European country has expelled the Islamic Republic of Iran ambassador,” the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy’s Mark Dubowitz observed. Moreover, “France, Spain, and Italy are blocking the EU from listing the IRGC as a terrorist organization.” That torpor diverges from the alacrity some of these governments displayed in rushing to establish Palestinian statehood, not to reward terrorism or even acknowledge a sovereignty that exists in all but name but only (and sometimes explicitly) to punish Israel.
But for all the West’s indolence, the massacre seems to have shaken something loose inside Iran. The Economist’s dispatch detailing the discomfort the government’s conduct has inspired among regime stakeholders is eye-opening:
Officials and hangers-on speak of “huge chatter” within the elite, says a frequent traveler in touch with people close to Iran’s leaders. “A line has been crossed. The status quo is unsustainable.” The clerics have drowned in their people’s blood, says a pistachio farmer who is close to some officials; they have dug their own graves. On the streets, shock is hardening into anger. Cries of “Death to Khamenei!” echo again — from funerals by day and rooftops by night. Inside and outside Iran, Iranians sketch out possible transitions.
“We expect the supreme leader to exit within three to 12 months,” one investor still actively trading in Iran told reporters. What that transition looks like or what it would produce remains the subject of quiet debate. And the threat of U.S. military action against regime targets looms large. No one quite knows what the consequences of such an action would be, although those who fear a rally-round-the-flag effect must contend with the absence of such a reaction to the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer. Indeed, the Economist related a joke circulating among Iranian civil servants. “We used to worry we’d become Venezuela,” it went. “Now, we worry we won’t.”
Without question, in securing its survival through slaughter, the Iranian regime has sacrificed its tenuous remaining claims to legitimacy. That is obvious to the Iranian people. It is only gradually dawning on the professional political and activist class in the West. The belated horror some quarters are only now beginning to evince cannot be explained by the lack of verifiable information emanating in real time from the conflict zone. That didn’t stop anyone from condemning Israel’s alleged “genocide.” The anti-colonialist narratives that supposedly justify the Islamic Republic’s existence — a line that has prevailed since days of the “red-green alliance” — still seem to provide Iran’s clerics with special dispensation. Those narratives will persevere, it appears, even long after the Iranian people themselves want nothing to do with them.