…we have an excellent analysis of why this is happening and how it is different from the earlier protests, which Iran’s murderous mullahs were able to crush.
Excerpted from Akhtar Makoii’s excellent article for London’s Daily Telegraph, via msn.com:
After 35 years of ruling Iran, Ali Khamenei is running out of options fast.
The 86-year-old supreme leader is facing his most serious challenge yet. Protesters chant “death to Khamenei” rather than the regime’s traditional “death to America”.
Protests against him have entered their second week and spread to 340 places in all 31 provinces of Iran. Around 192 people have now been killed, human rights groups have said as of Sunday morning, though the true death toll is obscured by an internet blackout.
The revolt has engulfed small, economically devastated cities across Iran’s poorest provinces – places that should form the regime’s support base.
That is a key difference to the 2009 Green Movement, which was concentrated in Tehran and the 2022 protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, who was beaten to death by Iran’s “morality police” for not wearing a headscarf.
Khamenei has always crushed dissent with brute force, which succeeded in 2009 and 2019, when protests were more concentrated geographically.
People in the capital and major cities are angry again in this new uprising, but the scale of demonstrations across small, impoverished cities suggests a breadth of fury that cannot be suppressed without casualties in the thousands.
This is diffferent than the other times. Very, very differrent. This isn’t a group of dissidents from a couple of major cities. This is the population from cities and towns, large and small.
How many Iranian citizens does khamenei and his thugs think they can kill to quash it? The number now is in the hundreds but the protests continue to grow. And the more brutally/murderously they try to stop it, the more fury builds against them – which, I have no doubt, is at some point (maybe even now) going to manifest itself in defections among the Iranian police and armed forces.
Is a civil war there imminent? No one can know for sure. But there is no doubt at all that it is one hell of a lot closer than it was those other times.
In an earlier blog I posted an article which claimed khamenei has made plans for himself, and a small contingent of his relatives/pals, to flee the country. If he flees, it almost certainly will end the ruling government.
May that happen – sooner rather than later – and may the transition away from what Iran has become take place as peacefully as possible…
…so that Iran can at least hope to regain thre stability, normalcy and freedoms (such as they were) it had before the lunatics took over.
