Hundreds of organised protests show resilience of Iranian regime, experts say | Iran

Research reveals that the Iranian regime has staged more than 850 public demonstrations in support of the government since the start of the war and launched a sustained crackdown on unrest, leading to the detention of at least 1,400 people.

Experts said the pro-regime rallies and rising number of detentions underlined the Islamic Republic’s resilience despite a month of intense US and Israeli airstrikes.

The war began with a surprise Israeli attack that killed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many senior officials. Israel has continued to assassinate senior commanders since then; most recently Alireza Tangsiri, the naval commander of the Revolutionary Guard, who died in the attack on the port city of Bandar Abbas on Thursday.

“The US-Israeli strategy of decapitation could not have been more successful, and it continues to be so… but the regime has not disintegrated and there are no schisms. The message inside Iran is how they won, and that is constant and consistent,” said its president, Clionadh Raleigh. AcledAn independent conflict monitor that maintains a database of protest events and violence during the month-long conflict.

The Acled study also shows that the number of US and Israeli attacks on Iran has remained steady at between 47 and 102 per day, resulting in “significant” civilian casualties.

In a research note shared with the Guardian, Acled said Tehran’s retaliation was largely ineffective, causing only 70 deaths during the war, while 1,157 people died in Iran, 341 of whom were civilians.

Acled uses Iranian, regional and international media and social media, as well as its own resources in the field, to cross-check and verify reports of violence, then log and categorize them.

Donald Trump he said earlier this week While he said that the United States had already achieved “regime change” in Iran, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their leaders. Many experts and officials in the US and Israel believe this early predictions But a mass rebellion turned out to be misguided.

The third week of the conflict saw the longest wave of mass public demonstrations in support of the regime in Iran. From February 28 to March 6, Acled counted 195 pro-regime demonstrations focused on mourning Khamenei and condemning Israel and the United States, followed by 158 the following week, and nearly 300 from March 13 to 19, with Mojtaba celebrating Khamenei’s accession to the throne. Most occurred in Tehran, but some were recorded in the northeast and southwest.

“Wave of protests [in Iran] is run by the regime – [of] 845 protests, 99.2% [are] pro-regime. The transition from mourning to inheritance approval appears to be planned. The only anti-regime protest on March 25 was met with lethal force [with] 10 killed [and] It “shows the cost of dissent,” Acled said.

Researchers noted that 99.2 percent of the protests were pro-regime. “The almost complete absence of anti-regime protests indicates either genuine nationalist consolidation under external attack, heavy self-censorship, or effective preemptive pressure through an arrest campaign,” they wrote.

“The arrest campaign is the regime’s primary internal tool – [with approximately] More than 1,465 people were detained in 27 days. “As the conflict progressed, accusations escalated from ‘filming damage’ to ‘espionage’ and ‘mercenary’.”

Details of such crackdowns are difficult to obtain, but recent incidents include the deaths of 10 people when the Revolutionary Guard opened fire on anti-regime demonstrators and shot into apartment windows in Tehran on March 25, and the killing of three people in Chabahar on March 18 as detainees protested food stamp cuts at a prison. Acled said that security forces intervened in the demonstrations in Fardis and four districts of Tehran on March 17 after the demonstrators shouted anti-government slogans.

“You actually saw a small level of anti-regime activism on the first night of Ali Khamenei’s death. Since then, there has been a coordinated effort to organize pro-Iran or anti-war protests,” Raleigh said.

Alia Brahimi, a regional expert at the Atlantic Council think tank, said none of the pro-regime protests would be spontaneous and cited how leadership structures in Iran resisted the joint US-Israeli offensive.

“It has long been accepted that leaders will be killed, and ideological conditioning has been in place for decades to prepare Iranians to digest the deaths of senior commanders,” Brahimi said.

“This moral effort has an organizational counterpart, building resilience by ensuring that everyone who holds a senior post is replaced by more than one person and, more recently, by decentralizing decision-making. This is part of the Islamic Republic’s unique system and worldview.”

Estimates of civilian casualties vary. More than 1,900 people have died and at least 20,000 have been injured in Iran since the start of US and Israeli attacks, María Martinez of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said on Friday, citing figures provided by the Iranian Red Crescent.

The US-based Human Rights Activists news agency (HRANA) said on Wednesday that 3,300 people have been killed since the war began. It was stated that 1,464 of them were civilians, including at least 217 children.

Major protests across Iran in January were bloodily suppressed. 7,000 were killed by security forces, according to HRANA. Three men accused of killing police officers during protests were publicly hanged earlier this month.

The unrest was the most serious domestic threat to Iran’s religious extremist regime in more than 45 years.

Since the start of the war a month ago, security forces have set up checkpoints in major cities and cut off the internet; This is one of the longest and largest outages on record. Senior officials said on March 16 that 500 “spies” were arrested.

National police commander Ahmad-Reza Radan said, “If anyone comes forward in line with the wishes of the enemy, we will no longer see them as just a protester, but as an enemy… And we will do to them the same thing we do to an enemy.”