"But the scale of the protests that have engulfed the country in recent weeks, and the brutal killings Iran's security forces have perpetrated in response - which likely number in the thousands - are unprecedented in the 47-year history of the Islamic Republic. Critics of the regime have been predicting its downfall ever since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah and ushered Ayatollah Khomeini into power."
"I've not been able to reach anybody inside Iran as of about a week ago. I've definitely felt that this thing had so much momentum that it was going to end quite quickly, one way or another. To me, the big question mark of whether it was going to succeed was the rank-and-file military guys out on the front lines - were they going to get tired of shooting people? And it sounds like maybe they haven't."
Major uprisings occurred in Iran in 2009, 2019-20, and 2022. Recent protests have reached an unprecedented scale, with security-force killings likely numbering in the thousands. Iran's supreme leader, now elderly, presides over a regionally isolated country with proven military vulnerabilities and a broken economy fueling mass unrest. Regime downfall remains uncertain because Iran's powerful elite have shown resilience and credible opposition leadership has been scarce. Uncertainty is heightened by limited reliable information from inside Iran and doubts about whether rank-and-file security personnel will refuse orders to fire on protesters.
Read at Intelligencer
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