Weeks after Israeli warplanes pounded Iran’s capital last June, the country’s top generals stood in their socks at the entrance of a mosque in northern Tehran, mourning the men who had been killed in the strikes — leaders they would now replace.

The strikes had caused the greatest single blow to Iran’s military in decades, wiping out the top leadership of the Revolutionary Guard, the feared praetorian guard to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Now the question was how this new generation of leaders, catapulted to the top, would guide the country through a singularly challenging period, including growing economic stress, the prospect of new international sanctions and regular threats of yet more military strikes from President Donald Trump and Israel.

A Bloody Answer to a Moment of Reckoning

The answer came in recent weeks when those new leaders responded to nationwide protests with breathtaking brutality, opening fire on unarmed protesters and massacring thousands of people. At least one Iranian human rights group based in the United States said it had confirmed 5,002 deaths, including 207 members of the security forces, during the protests from Dec. 28 to mid-January. In their first official toll Wednesday, Iranian authorities said that 3,117 people had died.

On the surface, the bloody crackdown affirmed the unity of Iran’s ruling system — centered on the ayatollah and the Revolutionary Guard, estimated to number about 150,000 — and its willingness to take ruthless action to ensure its survival. But Iran experts said the bloody response was also a sign of the system’s growing weakness, exposing the limits of Khamenei’s 37-year rule as he wrestles with surging domestic unrest and intense foreign pressure at the same time.

On Thursday, Trump said that a U.S. “armada” was heading toward Iran but that he hoped he would not have to use it. He again warned the Iranian government against killing protesters or restarting its nuclear program.

That combination of factors put the ruling system under immense strain, said Afshon Ostovar, an Iran expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in California and the author of “Vanguard of the Imam,” a history of the Revolutionary Guard. “Right off the bat, they saw the protests as an existential threat,” he said. “They turned to live fire really quickly because their weakness was acute, and they knew it.”

With the ayatollah’s legitimacy under open challenge, the Revolutionary Guard is emerging as the core of the system. “You have this aging theocrat whose days are numbered,” Ostovar said. “And you have security forces that are taking an increasingly aggressive response to any threat to the regime.”

The upheaval has renewed comparisons between the Islamic Republic and the Soviet Union in the 1980s, before it collapsed.

A Regime Running Out of Time

Iran has seldom faced a greater array of challenges. Its network of regional proxies, including Hezbollah and Hamas, is in tatters. Its contentious nuclear program, estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars, failed to bring deterrence. Supplies of water and electricity are running low. Edicts forcing Iranian women to wear headscarves, a symbolic totem of the ayatollah’s conservative rule, are being openly flouted.

“The regime is ideologically bankrupt, economically at a dead end and unable to rescue itself,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, a research body. “But it still has the will and a fearsome capacity for repression.”

The ayatollah, who promised to strengthen the Islamic Republic after he came to power in 1989, has led the country into this predicament, critics say. His intransigence, rooted in resistance to the United States and Israel but also in opposition to change at home, was once a pillar of his iron rule.

But that approach is seen by some as a mark of vulnerability, even by some of his own supporters, and analysts say his authority is at its lowest in decades.

The U.S. and Israeli airstrikes in June initially provoked a nationalist surge inside Iran as people across the political spectrum united against foreign aggression.

“All these stupid attacks by the Zionists have brought Iranians together,” Abdulkarim Alizadeh, a retired commander with the Revolutionary Guard, said last summer as he left the mosque in northern Tehran.

Iran’s enemies had “miscalculated” if they hoped the attacks would provoke a popular uprising, Kamal Kharazi, a senior adviser to the supreme leader, told The New York Times in July. “On the contrary,” he said, “the war led to national unity.”

“We are prepared for all scenarios,” he added.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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By Declan Walsh
c.2026 The New York Times Company