The mass protests in Iran appear to be more contentious and pose a greater risk to the regime than previous iterations, but it is too soon to tell whether this could topple the government.
Since the protests began last month, Iranian forces are believed to have killed more than 2,400 protesters and detained more than 18,000 others, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency. The government is carrying out a media blackout, making it much harder for protesters to communicate with one another and for them to share with the outside world what’s going on inside the country. Some have estimated the death toll to be thousands more.
“I think it’s a really extraordinary time, and this feels a little bit different,” retired Gen. Joseph Votel, who was the commander of U.S. Central Command from 2016 to 2019, told the Washington Examiner. “Having watched several of these, it just feels more serious. And I think the impression we’re getting, at least from what I’m reading, is that the regime appreciates the seriousness of this.”
President Donald Trump has threatened that Iran would “pay a big price” if authorities continue killing protesters in the streets and said he called off “all meetings with Iranian officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS.”
These large-scale protests have popped up after varying inflection points dating back nearly 10 years, but according to experts who have followed them, this time may pose an “unprecedented threat” to the leaders in Tehran.
“This protest movement is unique, however, in that it appears as though it’s posing, in some respects, an unprecedented threat to the regime,” Nicholas Carl, the assistant director for critical threats at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “And so although I’m not prepared to tell you that the regime is about to collapse, I do want to reflect that these protests are challenging regime stability in a way that I quite haven’t seen before.”
Irfan Sultani, a 26-year-old protester, is facing the death penalty over his participation in the protests, and if he is executed, it would mark the first known instance of a protester receiving a death sentence during this wave of anti-government protests.
The regime has been in power for nearly 50 years, dating back to the 1979 Iranian revolution, and has repeatedly cracked down on protests in the past through the country’s security forces.
As has happened during those previous rounds of protests, the government may be able to quell the current unrest, but the underlying sentiment with a hope for a better future likely cannot be extinguished altogether without delivering on that.
“Large-scale protest waves have been common throughout Iran since 2017,” Carl said. “We’ve seen countrywide protests on a variety of occasions since then, with citizens continuing to turn out to decry a variety of economic, political, ecological grievances and so on. There’s no shortage of reasons for the Iranian population to be extraordinarily frustrated with the regime.”
Trump is also a wild card in this equation, having threatened to intervene only roughly six months after he authorized the U.S. military to destroy three of the country’s nuclear facilities.
His willingness to use military force in Iran and the success of that mission, which occurred with little to no Iranian resistance, likely factors into how both governments in Washington and Tehran are viewing the current situation.
The United States and Qatar are also taking preemptive actions in case of an Iranian military operation. Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, houses roughly 10,000 service members. The U.S. has begun evacuating some personnel. Iran attacked this air base in response to the U.S. bombing of its nuclear facilities last year.
As Trump is doing this time around, he warned the Iranian government that it had 60 days to come to a deal regarding its nuclear program, and the U.S. launched its mission to cripple the nuclear program one day after that time frame expired.
However, the target in that mission was more clear-cut than the current situation appears to be. The president could have U.S. forces go after Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, which it is trying to rebuild, or they could go after regime leaders themselves, or they could carry out more covert operations, including those that can be carried out from afar, such as cyberattacks.
It is unclear exactly how U.S. military intervention would affect the change the protesters are hoping to see without going after senior regime officials.
WHAT ARE TRUMP’S MILITARY OPTIONS FOR IRAN?
Six years ago, in Trump’s first term, he authorized the military to carry out the assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Iran subsequently sought to avenge his killing by targeting the U.S. officials involved in that mission, including Trump himself.
A Pakistani man, Asif Raza Merchant, 46, accused of trying to arrange a murder-for-hire scheme targeting Trump, was arrested in 2024 in connection with the plot, while the Justice Department unsealed charges in August 2022 accusing Shahram Poursafi, an Iranian national and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member, of attempting to arrange the murder of former Trump national security adviser John Bolton.
