Unhappy New Year

Out now: latest MBN Iran Briefing podcast. I was joined by Leila Bazzi and Matthew Kaminski. Listen here or watch here.

This week, an urgent question: What does the Iranian leadership actually look like now? Three weeks in, the answer is more complicated than the body count suggests.

Share your thoughts, analysis and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded this newsletter, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here, or on the flagship MBN Arabic-language and English-language news sites.

Quote of the Week

“The demand of the masses of the people is the continuation of an effective defense that the enemy will live to regret.”

— Statement published online and attributed to supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei

TOP OF THE NEWS

Happy Persian New Year’s Eve, aka “Nowruz.”

It’s by far the biggest event of the year in Persian culture, and normally the celebrations last for thirteen days.

As Iranians ring in the year 1405, this Nowruz matters more than ever.

Here’s what’s very different this year:

No supreme leader’s Nowruz address. Every year without exception, Iran’s supreme leader delivers a televised Nowruz address to the nation on the first day of the new year. It’s one of the most watched broadcasts of the year and a key instrument of regime legitimacy. Mojtaba Khamenei has not appeared in public, on video, or in audio since his appointment on March 8. If no Nowruz address appears from him tomorrow, or if it is again read by a television anchor over a still photograph, it will be the most visible sign yet that the new supreme leader is either incapacitated or in hiding.

It’s … awkward. Celebrating Nowruz in a wartime setting is complicated enough. But there are two factors that will make it even trickier for the regime. 

First, the regime has declared 40 days of national mourning for the late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war. The regime is actively trying to suppress public celebrations and redirect social energy into pro-regime mourning events. It regards any public festivity as disrespect for the martyred supreme leader and a gift to the enemy.

Second, Nowruz is a complex affair in the ideology of the Islamic Republic. Like much of Persian culture, this celebration of the beginning of spring predates Islam by at least 2,500 years and stems from the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian religious tradition. It’s Persian but not Islamic, and that doesn’t sit well in an Islamic theocracy.

Celebrating Nowruz last year. Photo: Reuters

Iranians start celebrating the new year before it even starts, in the ultimate non-Islamic, Zoroastrian celebration: it’s called Chaharshanbe Suri (چهارشنبه‌ سوری), or Scarlet Wednesday, representing fire, and includes some very un-Islamic rituals like jumping over bonfires. Religious zealots in Tehran hate it, and in the past they’ve flooded the streets with law enforcement to stop these joyous celebrations.

Last year during Chaharshanbe Suri, young Iranians turned the fire festival into a political statement, with celebrations turning into anti-government protests in many cities.

And now the authorities have sent mass text messages warning citizens that Israeli operatives are “seeking to exploit” the festivities to “carry out acts of sabotage.” The IRGC intelligence directorate threatened a response “even stronger than January 8” (the date of the regime’s mass slaughter of demonstrators this year) against anyone using the holiday for anti-regime activity.

Enter Pahlavi. The exiled crown prince called on Iranians to turn Chaharshanbe Suri into a symbol of national solidarity, urging them via his X account to “refrain from any tension, conflict, or even approaching the regime’s mercenaries on the streets” while warning “all agents of repression … from 6 PM onward, vacate the streets, alleys, and neighborhoods, and do not stand against the people.”

Larijani and friend. Photo: Reuters 

Heads roll

We know the headlines: Ali Larijani, the man de facto running Iran since the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the war’s first day, was assassinated on Tuesday, alongside Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani and the bulk of the Basij leadership. Yesterday brought the killing of Intelligence Minister Esmaeil Khatib. And Mojtaba Khamenei is still MIA.

But there’s much more to unpack here:

A systems strike, not a decapitation — and what it broke. On Day One, the U.S. and Israel did not simply try to kill Iran’s leadership. They tried to kill the entire system at once, with every functional layer of the Islamic Republic’s security state struck simultaneously in the opening minutes of the war. Command. Intelligence. Weapons development. Internal repression. The personal apparatus around the supreme leader. Roughly 40 senior officials were killed on Day One alone.

The theory: Remove enough organs simultaneously and the whole body fails, regardless of who sits at the top. The two allies divided the labor. Israel ran the leadership assassination campaign, the U.S. the campaign against missiles, nuclear infrastructure, and naval assets. Removing the people and destroying the hardware at the same moment was supposed to yield what neither could achieve alone.

Of those layers, the intelligence directorate has produced the most visible consequences. Five senior intelligence officials were killed in the opening strikes — the men who ran Iran’s foreign intelligence, internal security, counterterrorism and military emergency operations. The intent was to blind Iran’s command structure by severing the information flow between Tehran and its dispersed military units.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed the result on Day Two: units were “now independent and somehow isolated, acting based on instructions given to them in advance.” Missiles and drones have struck hotels and shopping malls across the Gulf. Turkey intercepted an Iranian ballistic missile. Azerbaijan was struck by drones. In each case the Iranian armed forces issued denials, not necessarily because they didn’t know, but because nobody in Tehran could authorize, coordinate or call off what dispersed units were doing on pre-war orders. The problem isn’t that Iran’s units are blind. It’s that nobody can tell them to stop.

Why it matters: Iran’s mosaic defensive doctrine was designed to survive decapitation. It wasn’t designed to survive the simultaneous removal of everyone who could tell local commanders what was actually happening on the ground. Nearly three weeks in, the regime is still standing, running on pre-war instructions, commanded by people who were never meant to be in charge.

Iranian missiles in an underground “missile city.” Photo: Reuters

Weapons development was struck on day one. Two names appear in almost every Day One kill list that have received little analytical attention: Hossein Jabal Amelian and Reza Mozaffari-Nia. Jabal Amelian was the sitting head of SPND, Iran’s primary defense research and development body, the organization at the center of Iran’s weapons program. Mozaffari-Nia was his predecessor.

SPND is the brain of Iran’s military-industrial complex. Killing its current and former director simultaneously dealt a body blow to Iran’s capacity to rebuild what the bombs are destroying and restock missiles, repair launchers, and reconstitute the nuclear program.

Why it matters: Military campaigns degrade hardware. Killing the engineers and administrators who understand how to replace that hardware is harder to reverse. Tehran can appoint a new SPND director, but it can’t easily replace the institutional knowledge that died on Day One.

The repression machine is being dismantled deliberately. The Basij does not fire ballistic missiles at Israel. It mans checkpoints, enforces the dress code, shoots protesters. On Tuesday, US and Israeli strikes killed Gholamreza Soleimani, seven-year Basij commander, along with his deputy, the majority of the Basij leadership, and per some reports approximately 300 field commanders and operational officials. The aim: degrading the instrument the regime uses to prevent its own population from rising up.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said publicly last week that weakening the Islamic Republic’s ability to repress domestic dissent is a core goal of the campaign alongside the destruction of nuclear and missile capabilities. The kill list, read in full, makes that goal clear on every level. Gholam-Reza Rezaeian, the police intelligence chief, was killed on Day One. The Imam Ali security battalions, which led the January crackdown, have suffered heavy losses.

The strikes on Basij checkpoints across Tehran were guided in part by targeting intelligence sent by Iranian citizens through Persian-language Israeli social media accounts, verified by Israeli intelligence before action was taken — a remarkable development given the near-total internet blackout, apparently made possible in part by Starlink terminals that some Iranians have managed to keep operational despite the regime actively hunting for them.

Why it matters: The regime has survived this war so far primarily through fear, with the ever-present and credible threat of lethal force against its own population. If the apparatus that delivers that threat is sufficiently degraded, Iranians might have space to return to the streets. Nowruz week will be a major test of whether that degradation has reached a threshold that matters.

A text message from the Revolutionary Guards warns potential rioters that they would face ‘a stronger blow than January 8,’ the date the regime massacred thousands of protesters. Photo: Wall Street Journal

The IRGC now runs everything, with untested people. The succession that followed the Day One strikes was not constitutional in any meaningful sense. According to the New York Times, four IRGC veterans applied what Iran International described as “repeated contacts and psychological and political pressure” on Assembly of Experts members to install Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader. As I noted in a previous piece, the appointment reportedly contravened his father’s written wishes.

The men now running Iran’s security state are a generation of survivors and recently-promoted deputies, not the figures who built the system. Mojtaba Khamenei has not appeared in public. His only two statements since his appointment were written, not spoken. 

Why it matters: The Islamic Republic is now governed by an IRGC that has consolidated power more completely than at any point in its history, but is doing so with second-tier figures operating under wartime conditions, without functioning intelligence, and with a supreme leader whose physical condition and authority remain unverified.

For more on why, in spite of all the above, the regime still hasn’t collapsed, read me here.

Browsing books on a Tehran street. Photo: Reuters

ESSENTIAL READING

Foreign Policy’s Iran reading list of five books is a good place to start for historical context. Steven Cook at CFR recommends Ray Takeyh’s The Last Shah as the single best book for understanding Iran today. Alex Vatanka at the Middle East Institute recommends John Ghazvinian’s America and Iran as the ideal “pre-mortem” for the current war. My Princeton professor Roy P. Mottahedeh’s The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran is cited as “a classic.”

For the strategic picture, the Atlantic Council’s “Twenty Questions About the Iran War” covers military, political, and economic dimensions without a unifying editorial line: contributors disagree with each other, which is the point.

“As War With Iran Rages, the Axis of Resistance is in Survival Mode.” This piece from War on the Rocks has the best analysis of proxy fragmentation: Why Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, and Hamas are each fighting a different war despite sharing a patron.