There are regime change hopes and civil war fears for Iran after Operation Epic Fury. Photo / Getty Images
For the people behind it, Operation Epic Fury is a moment of historic importance. “People do not understand how big this is,” says one Israeli official. “The Middle East will be completely changed after this. We are going all the way.”
But all the way to what?
US President Donald Trump has changed his account of objectives multiple times. Even those convinced of the righteousness and success of the war acknowledge the ultimate outcome is uncertain.
Democratic regime change? A new Supreme Leader more open to compromise? A royal restoration? An even more aggressive military dictatorship? Or a nation turned on itself, torn apart by civil war and state collapse?
The outcome many Iranians would like is quite clear – an end to the dictatorship of the Islamic Republic. For them, the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was the welcome beginning to a national rebirth.
They also want justice for the slaughter in January of tens of thousands of people, and the removal from power of the whole class of clerics and securocrat thugs who have, for four decades, terrorised the public, locked the country in a pointless confrontation with the rest of the world and run the economy into a death spiral.
“The protesters who were cut down in the streets were not driven by simple rage,” says Maral, 35, a journalist in Tehran.
“Alongside the youth who have no future, there was a massive bloc of disillusioned technocrats. They don’t want a bloody upheaval – they want a return to ‘integrity’. They want a country that functions, a currency that holds and a government that stops behaving like a suicide cult.”
Sceptics might call this a utopian daydream.
Regime-change operations in Libya and Iraq, for example, ended in blood-soaked chaos. An initially pro-democracy uprising against Bashar al-Assad in Syria became a civil war in which moderates were crushed between a ruthlessly bloodthirsty regime and psychopathic jihadist extremists.
Iranians who spoke to The Telegraph have three responses to that.
First, they point out, Iran has a deeply rooted sense of civic and national identity that transcends ideological, religious, ethnic and class divides. That, they argue, sets it apart from Syria, Libya and Iraq – countries invented by British and French diplomats armed with a map and ruler a century ago.
Second, it was the Islamic Republic itself that fuelled much of the bloodshed in Syria and Iraq. Remove it, and you remove one of the main factors in terror.
Third, and most significantly, Iran has a vast, highly educated and largely apolitical middle class.
“The West looks at Iran and sees another Syria,” says Nahal, 30, a PhD candidate in political science in Isfahan. “They fear that a collapse in Tehran means a thousand militias and a regional fire. But they are misreading the room. Iran is not a patchwork of tribes – it is a sophisticated, highly educated nation currently held hostage by a mafia.
“Under the surface lies a dormant engine of engineers, scientists, urban planners, non-aligned civic actors, and medical and humanities researchers waiting for a signal to rebuild.”
The main barrier to that outcome is the state’s vast mechanism of internal repression. Hence, says the Israeli official, “we are not doing regime change. We are creating the opportunity for the Iranian people to change the regime” through attacking the IRGC, police, Basij militia and other instruments of state repression.
The result could be a kind of reverse-1979, where near-universal public revulsion leads to a street revolution that consigns the Islamic Republic to history.
Iran would radically alter its political alignment, turning from an American and Israeli foe to a Western-aligned, democratic ally. With the sponsor of Hezbollah, Hamas and so many other terror groups out of the game, peace, argues the Israeli official, would break out across the Middle East. With sanctions lifted and the corruption of the IRGC removed, Iran itself would experience rapid economic growth.
Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Crown Prince who has positioned himself as the figurehead of this putative revolution, would presumably return and preside over a democratic transition and a constitutional royal restoration.
“I am not a monarchist. But Iranians are making a calculation based on trust,” said Milad, 23, a civil engineer from Rasht. “They remember that the Pahlavis invested in the soil of Iran, not in Hamas or Hezbollah.”
The regime is well aware of the threat. It has flooded the streets of Tehran with its own supporters, and Basij militiamen are on the prowl for anyone who dares to celebrate the killing of Khamenei. Text messages have been sent to every mobile phone warning that street protesters will be treated as collaborators with the enemy.
Few people want to risk coming out while bombs are dropping out of the sky. But change need not come immediately. The largely peaceful revolution that toppled Slobodan Milosevic, the dictator of Serbia, in October 2000, was carried out by Serbs themselves.
Those who took part in it bitterly resent the suggestion that the Nato attack on their country the previous year had anything to do with it.
As Sara, 43, a businesswoman in Tehran, puts it: “It is time the West stopped fearing Iran’s collapse and started counting on the capacity of its people.”
Unfortunately for many Iranians, the Americans and Israelis seem increasingly dubious about such an outcome. “Some people like him,” Trump mused when asked about Pahlavi’s role in the future of Iran on Tuesday.
“I don’t know whether or not his country would accept his leadership. Certainly, if they would, that would be fine with me,” he went on, although someone already inside the country “would be more appropriate”.
That was taken as a sign Trump is less interested in a revolution than in replicating his January intervention in Venezuela. There, commandos kidnapped Nicolás Maduro, the President, so Washington could cut a deal with his more pliant successor, Delcy Rodríguez.
The quid pro quo is straightforward – the regime can stay in place and do whatever it likes at home, as long as it accedes to certain American demands regarding nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and antagonism toward Israel.
“I think it’s still the most likely outcome. And frankly, the desired outcome of the Trump administration is going to be to cut a deal with remnants of the regime. Now the question is, ‘What kind of remnants do you want, and what kind of a deal do you want?’” says Arash Azizi, an Iranian historian and journalist based in the United States.
There is a logic here. Despite the killing of Khamenei and many of his close confidants, there is no sign of the Islamic Republic itself crumbling. Its institutions are still functioning, and the same entrenched, IRGC-aligned elite is still in charge.
From Washington and Jerusalem, who rules the country is of less interest than their foreign policy. And from the regime insider’s point of view, survival may trump glorious martyrdom.
“I know that the Ministry of Intelligence reached out to the CIA last week or early this week, asking to speak on terms. The US rejected that, of course, and the regime claimed that they didn’t ask for that. But I think that probably did happen,” said Jonathan Hacket, a former US marine interrogator who has worked on intelligence operations against Iran. The Telegraph could not immediately confirm the claim.
The problem, Hackett says, is that there is “no Delcy Rodríguez” in Iran – the succession is incredibly opaque.
Officially, Iran is being run by an interim council made up of Masoud Pezeshkian, the President, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, the chief justice, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi.
Real power is thought to lie with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, an IRGC commander and Speaker of Parliament, and Ali Larijani, a career regime insider, who are running the national security council. They are very much conservative regime insiders, but also “represent a steady hand that has commanded security forces, but that is also pragmatic and flexible enough to engage in this sort of dealings. So it’s not a bunch of nutjob hardliners”, says Azizi.
But until the Assembly of Experts – possibly strong-armed by Qalifbaff and Larijani – elect a new Supreme Leader, it will not be clear how serious the Trump regime is about compromise.
The choice of Hassan Rouhani, a former reformist president, would signal a willingness to deal with the Americans and perhaps liberalise slightly at home.
But Mojtaba Khamenei, Ali Khamenei’s second son, is part of his father’s “ancient regime” and the preferred candidate of the IRGC. His election could mark an effective military coup by hardliners in the security forces.
The flaws in this plan are threefold. First, the idea that anyone from inside the regime is seriously interested in quitting the nuclear and ballistic missile programmes may be a pipe dream.
“They are taking a hammering,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli Defence Intelligence chief focused on Iran, “but their goal is regime survival.” Interim leaders might negotiate to stop the war, but then, says Citrinowicz, the risk is they “say they won it and start rebuilding everything that was destroyed”.
Second, it would be betraying the many Iranians desperate for justice.
“It’s not only foreigners who fear Iran becoming Syria, we fear it, too,” Maryam, a bookseller from the southern city of Shiraz, said before the war began. “We fear that Western countries may pave the way for the rise of a figure drawn from the military-security establishment, even after the blood of tens of thousands of Iranians has been spilled.”
Third, the injustice, corruption, economic and environmental incompetence that have triggered biannual waves of protest for the past decade would remain unaddressed.
Perhaps, says Azizi, the next rulers could buy themselves some time by ditching the compulsory hijab, lifting restrictions on alcohol and dialling back political repression. A deal leading to lifted sanctions might also offer economic relief to an exhausted and fed-up public.
“It is obviously not democratisation, and it’s not what Iranians want. But it might buy them five or 10 years,” says Azizi.
But for the public, that may be too little, too late.
“The US is saying that if the regime puts down its weapons, there will be immunity. I’m not sure how much that can be enforced when the regime just killed roughly 30,000 people in Iran in January,” says Hackett. “Are those families going to listen to Trump’s call to grant immunity?”
All of which may point to a darker outcome – one that would mean many more Iranian deaths than have been inflicted by either regime death squads or American and Israeli bombing.
“Civil war is a strong second possibility,” says Azizi. “If the Americans and Israelis cannot get a deal, they might push enough so that you have some sort of a state collapse.”
Earlier this week, reports emerged of a possible US-backed ground incursion by Kurdish militant groups based in northern Iraq.
Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, when asked about the reports, merely said his department would not be involved in anything like that – but that only reflects the reality that under the American system, such an incursion would be a covert operation likely run by the CIA, points out Hackett.
Trump on Thursday went even further. “I think it’s wonderful that they want to do that, I’d be all for it,” he said.
Arming disenfranchised ethnic minorities is an old gambit that great powers have played for centuries. But it is fraught with danger.
“I think that was a strategic release of information that wasn’t a mistake to signal what’s coming next,” says Hackett. “The thing is with the Kurds, they’re not a monolith. There are Kurds that oppose Kurds. So you have the groups that have been consistently enemies of one another, and also enemies of Turkey, and also have not worked well with the Barzani family in Iraqi Kurdistan. So this would cause additional issues as far as separatism goes in the western part of the country.”
Such a war might not overthrow the regime. The Iranian Government has a vast number of men in uniform to call on compared to the few thousand that Kurdish armed groups might be able to put into the field.
Furthermore, the Kurds would be unlikely to find much support beyond their homeland in the western mountains.
“It would lead to sectarian conflict. And I very rarely say people could be galvanised behind the regime, but frankly, this could be an occasion for it – just to stop the country’s territorial integrity from disintegrating,” says Azizi.
War might not simply break down along ethnic lines. The ugly truth, says Hackett, is that the only way a democratic revolution along the lines described in our first scenario could work is with armed force.
But there are plenty of other ethnic divisions American or Israeli spies might seek to exploit.
Northwestern Iran is also home to a large Azeri minority. There are also Arab minorities in the southwest near the border with Iraq, who happen to be heavily armed, because in their tribal culture, it is normal to keep a rifle or two at home.
The major cities in the west are ethnically mixed, which presents the possibility of urban battles between neighbourhoods, similar to those that tore apart Aleppo in Syria.
And in the southeast, along the Gulf of Oman and the Pakistani border, several ethnic Baloch militant groups united under a single banner in December.
It is not clear whether the consolidation is connected with American and Israeli war plans, but the group has continued to clash with security services in the region before the war.
There, the risk of a civil war seems real. The IRGC and army have already abandoned coastal Balochistan in the face of American bombing, leaving an obvious vacuum for the militants, said Amir, a student from the town of Minab, where an Israeli or American airstrike on a school killed dozens on Saturday last week.
“If America came and changed the regime or at least controlled the country until someone came, there would be no huge war,” he told The Telegraph by phone.
“But if this war does not end with regime change and the end of the IRGC, if the regime stays, but we end up with a weak army and IRGC, I am 100% sure that if the central power is gone, there will be a huge conflict.
“Here in the east, it is just the Baloch and the Persians – we can somehow deal with each other. But in the west, with Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, Persians and others, it is a different story. If the US leaves the job half done, then God help the people in western Iran.”
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.