Launching an aggressive war is perhaps the greatest gamble that a political leader can make. Over a year into Russia’s grueling invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is now beginning to taste the consequences of betting poorly.

On Friday, armed paramilitaries under the leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin — a former caterer turned commander of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organization —launched what looked like a coup against Putin’s regime. At the height of the action over the past 24 hours, troops under Prigozhin’s command captured the strategic city of Rostov-on-Don and barreled toward Moscow. Prigozhin reportedly turned his troops around late on Saturday following a negotiated settlement, but it was the first major crack in Putin’s armor. Putin, who has positioned himself as an inheritor of past Russian imperial glory, may ultimately suffer the fate of many czars before him: a military uprising against his own rule, fueled by the blowback of a failing war.

“It’s a stab in the back of our country and our people. Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in World War I, but its victory was stolen,” Putin said in an address Friday night, comparing the insurrection to the uprising that destroyed czarist Russia during the First World War. “Intrigues and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe: destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.”

The extreme-right Wagner Group has little in common with the left-wing Bolsheviks who took power in the revolution that overthrew Czar Nicholas II and founded the Soviet Union. But the background circumstances of the insurrection that threatened Putin’s regime — particularly the unhappiness brought by a failing war — nonetheless resemble those that sparked the uprising more than a century ago.

Though the czar’s opponents were heavily motivated by the ideology of revolutionary communism, the revolution could not have occurred without the incredible carnage of World War I; the suffering during the war provided the fuel that fired the revolt.

Russians, tired of being thrown into the meat grinder of trench warfare for reasons that had little to do with their own lives or interests, eventually turned on the czar, backing whichever movement seemed most capable of putting a quick end to the conflict. The war ultimately fed mass disillusionment against czarist rule, breathing life into the mix of angry populist movements that eventually destroyed Nicholas II’s regime, while convincing ordinary Russians that they had little to gain from defending their last monarch.

“Russia was more unstable and had more serious internal dilemmas than many other great powers, and so the degree to which the shock of war resulted in chaos was correspondingly more intense,” Steven Miner, an expert on Russian history at Ohio University, observed in an analysis on the influence of World War I on Russian society — words that could easily describe contemporary Russia. “Collapse minus war was possible, but in my view not certain. Involvement in the cataclysm of war made it nearly inevitable.”

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Putin’s dictatorship, too, is characterized by a mixture of incompetence, corruption, and indifference to the suffering of its own population. Russian society has been rapidly immiserated by the invasion of Ukraine, launched in early 2022. While well-off Russians have left the country for places like Turkey and Dubai, tens of thousands, and perhaps far more, have been sent to die on the bleak battlefields of war-torn eastern Ukraine, including thousands of former prison convicts recruited as fighters for the Wagner Group. Just as World War I was launched in the interest of monarchs with little concern for the lives of those fighting it, the purpose of these deaths in Ukraine remains unclear to many Russians, while an end to the conflict remains nowhere on the horizon.

Prigozhin, who claims to command at least 25,000 troops at present, emerged to capitalize on this unhappy situation. He has made no secret about the influence of the mismanaged war in Ukraine on his thinking. The catastrophic sacrifices of life over small scraps of territory that the past year has seen in Ukraine are eerily similar to the futile battles and trench warfare of World War I. In places like Bakhmut, cities have been reduced to rubble at the cost of thousands of dead on all sides. The Wagner Group leader has accused Russian military leadership of hiding the true toll of the war with false casualty numbers, as well as exaggerating the threat that Ukraine and NATO posed to Russia before the war began.

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“Huge numbers of our fighters, of our combat comrades, have been killed,” Prigozhin said in an audio message posted to Telegram. “The evil that the military leadership of the country bears must be stopped. They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forget the word ‘justice.’”

Prigozhin described his insurrection as a “march of justice” rather than a coup, vowing to confront Russia’s military leadership. Though details are still unclear, some reports indicate that the Wagner chief won concessions in exchange for withdrawing his troops, including a change in military personnel leading the war. The mercenary commander has been a vocal critic of Russian military brass since the war began, particularly its Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The Russian military put up a limited resistance to his offensive, declining to fight the Wagner Group in Rostov-on-Don. The Russian government nonetheless treated his insurrection as a mortal threat, filing criminal charges against Prigozhin for “inciting an armed uprising,” and deploying military troops and police across Moscow in anticipation of the Wagner troops’ arrival.

Should he ever succeed in taking power, Prigozhin would not inaugurate a more liberal or progressive Russia. Given the hideous track record of his organization, the opposite is more likely. Nor is there any indication that he would end the war in Ukraine if given the chance. Yet the Wagner Group chief has now emerged as the most serious threat to Putin’s rule since he took power over two decades ago. For this opportunity, which likely won’t be the last, Prigozhin has a failing war and its impact on an autocratic ruling regime to thank.

“The war placed Russian society in a state of extreme tension,” Vladimir Lenin observed with satisfaction a century ago, reflecting on the impact of World War I on his czarist enemies. “The revolution drew its first breath from the war.”

The post Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Threatened Uprising Against Putin Echoes Russia’s History of Wars Gone Bad appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Amir Hossein Naroi, an Iranian boy, was only 10 years old when he died from thalassemia, an inherited blood disease. The condition is highly prevalent in the southern Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan, where Naroi’s family lives; tens of thousands of people in the region are believed suffer from the disease. It is not an inevitably fatal condition: Thalassemia can be treated with regular blood transfusions and oral medications designed to remove the excess of iron built up in the bodies of patients. For much of his short life, Naroi was able to get treatment. His fate, however, was decided when access to the necessary medicines inside Iran began to dry up in recent years.

In the earliest years of his life, Naroi was taking a specialized drug known as Desferal, which is manufactured by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis. Starting in 2018, however, around the time that President Donald Trump launched a “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions against Iran, supplies of the iron-chelating drug in Iran — along with other medicines used to treat critical diseases — started to become difficult or impossible to access inside Iran, according to local NGOs supporting patients with the disease. By the summer of 2022, his organs failing due to complications from the disease, including damage to his organs from excess iron in his blood, Naroi passed away in a hospital, surrounded by his family.

According to documents obtained by The Intercept, multinational companies providing drugs for thalassemia and other conditions, as well as banks acting as intermediaries for attempted purchases, said U.S. foreign policy was ultimately causing the problems delivering drugs to Iranians. Namely, American sanctions against Iran have made the transactions so difficult that supplies of the medicines are dwindling.

The U.S. government is now facing a lawsuit from the Iran Thalassemia Society — an Iran-based NGO supporting victims of the disease — on behalf of Iranians with thalassemia and another inherited disease, epidermolysis bullosa, claiming that thousands of Iranian patients have been killed or injured after foreign companies producing specialized medicines and equipment for these diseases and others began cutting off or reducing their business with Iran as a result of sanctions. While the U.S. has given assurances that humanitarian trade with Iran will be exempted from sanctions, the lawsuit, which is currently pending appeal after being dismissed, alleges that the large-scale sanctioning of Iran’s banking sector has created a situation in which foreign companies are either unwilling or unable to do any trade with Iran at all.

“The American government has said that they will consider some exceptions for humanitarian aid, but in practice we have seen that there are no exceptions.”

“The American government has said that they will consider some exceptions for humanitarian aid, but in practice we have seen that there are no exceptions,” said Mohammed Faraji, staff attorney at the Iran Thalassemia Society. “We have had communications with countries that export medicines and medical equipment who have clearly told us that we cannot import medicaments to Iran because of sanctions. Banks won’t work with us, and health care companies won’t work with us. They are afraid of secondary sanctions and tell us that directly.”

Documents obtained by The Intercept bear out the picture of some companies balking at humanitarian trade with Iran because of the risk of being caught up in sanctions enforcement or because sanctions have closed off legal pathways for transacting with Iran. The communications reviewed, between European health care companies, foreign banks, and their Iranian counterparties, began in 2018. At times, the messages relayed are explicit: The companies won’t engage in trade with Iran — even to provide lifesaving medicines — due to the sanctions.

The intensity of foreign companies and banks aversion to dealing with Iranians reflects a victory of sorts for sanctions advocates, including hawkish pro-Israel advocacy groups and think tanks like United Against Nuclear Iran and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Thanks to their efforts, Iran today is one of the most sanctioned and isolated countries on Earth. While its government has held on to power and continues to remain aggressive and defiant despite the international pressure, life for ordinary Iranians has become materially worse under the sanctions regime, especially patients suffering from rare diseases.

The letters between banks, drug companies, and their Iranian interlocutors show in detail how the “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iranian financial institutions have blocked even mundane transactions for medical equipment required to treat a range of conditions.

A letter in September 2018 from a Danish manufacturer of urology products, Coloplast, informed its Iranian distributor that “despite the fact that Coloplast products are not excluded by US and/or international export control sanctions, we now face a situation, where the international banks have stopped for financial transactions with Iran. Under current conditions it is not possible to receive money for products sold in Iran.” (Coloplast did not respond to a request for comment.)

Mölnlycke, a Swedish provider of specialized bandages needed to treat patients with epidermolysis bullosa, sent a letter that same year to the head of an Iranian NGO supporting patients with the disease, EBHome, commending the organization for its work helping patients with the condition. Despite the approbation, the company said it would not be sending any more bandages to treat Iranian epidermolysis bullosa sufferers: “Due to the U.S. economic sanctions in force Mölnlycke Healthcare have decided not to conduct any business in relation to Iran for the time being.” A complaint from an Iranian NGO was filed against the company in Sweden in 2021 over the humanitarian impact of its cessation of business in Iran, but the complaint was rejected. (Mölnlycke did not respond to a request for comment.)

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The denial of these specialized bandages has been particularly dire for Iranian patients. Epidermolysis bullosa is a disease that causes painful blisters and sores to appear on patients’ bodies. Many people with the condition are children whose skin is particularly tender and who require specialized wound dressings to avoid tearing the skin off when bandages are changed. An Iranian specialist on the disease submitted a testimony as part of the pending lawsuit describing the cases of six young Iranian patients who suffered excessive bleeding, infection, and “excruciating, severe pain” as a result of losing access to the specialized bandages produced by Mölnlycke.

The sanctioning of these supplies has at times led to desperate workarounds by foreign governments. In 2020, the German government and UNICEF cooperated to purchase and deliver a shipment of specialized bandages to Iran. Iranian doctors have also been forced to rely on locally produced approximations of specialized foreign medicines, many of which are of poorer quality and have resulted in life-altering complications and even deaths of patients.

Thalassemia sufferers, in particular, have been forced to use a product known as “Desfonac,” a local equivalent which is less effective at treating the disease and carries debilitating side effects not found in the original product. The Intercept obtained communications made in 2018 by local country representatives for Novartis, the company that manufactures Desferal, telling their Iranian interlocutors the drug company experiencing difficulty conducting transactions as a result of banking sanctions. These transaction problems, local organizations working on the disease say, were the beginning of the end of their own steady access to thalassemia drugs, which must be regularly administered to patients with the disease to be effective.

“We have documented at least 650 people who have died since 2018 when we stopped being able to import medicine.”

“We have been fighting for years to control this disease inside Iran, and it is achievable, but the simple reality is that if patients do not get the iron-regulating drugs they need to treat it, they will die,” said Younus Arab, head of the Iran Thalassemia Society. “We have documented at least 650 people who have died since 2018 when we stopped being able to import medicine and over 10,000 who have had serious complications.”

Unlike other companies, and despite difficulties in receiving payments, Novartis did not cut off ties with Iran in response to U.S. sanctions. A spokesperson for Novartis told The Intercept that the company is willing to send medical supplies to Iran and has done so since the imposition of the “maximum pressure” sanctions, including through the use of a humanitarian trade channel created by the Swiss government in 2020.

The problem created by sanctions, according to the company, is less an unwillingness to do business with Iran over legal fears than an inability of Iranian officials to access their own foreign currency reserves to make payments. The sanctions, while not eliminating Iran’s foreign reserves, have frozen Iran’s access to them, sending the country’s accessible reserves from $122.5 billion down to a mere $4 billion between 2018 and 2020, according to International Monetary Fund figures. The collapse of accessible reserves has made it impossible for the Iranian government to carry out basic economic functions like stabilizing its currency or engaging in foreign trade, even with willing parties.

“Since the imposition of certain sanctions in 2018, the most significant challenge observed by many pharmaceutical companies has been a shortfall of foreign exchange made available by the Iranian government for the import of humanitarian goods, such as medicines,” said Michael Meo, the Novartis spokesperson. “With respect to thalassemia medicines specifically, Novartis has supplied these medicines continuously since 2019. We have been — and remain — ready to satisfy orders for these medicines.”

“However,” Meo’s statement continued, “for our medicines to reach thalassemia patients in Iran, Novartis relies on the action and collaboration of the Iran Ministry of Health and Food and Drug Authority in allocating sufficient foreign currency resources to import these medicines through regular commercial channels.” (The Iranian Ministry of Health and Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not reply to requests for comment.)

For Arab, whether sanctions are creating difficulties importing medicines due to companies’ reticence or a lack of foreign currency reserves, the results are the same: Patients under the care of his organization are dying.

“We don’t want money,” he said, “what we need is medicine for these patients.”

Iranian citizens seem hopeful that incoming U.S. President Joe Biden will lift the sanctions as they read the news regarding the U.S. election on Nov. 9, 2020, in Tehran, Iran.

Photo: Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The Trump-era economic sanctions were considered a crowning achievement of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. Some of the economic sanctions against Iran targeted specific individuals and institutions involved in human rights abuses, but many others went after entire sectors of the Iranian economy, including its financial sector.

The blanket sanctions on Iranian banks essentially severed the country from trade with the rest of the world by cutting its financial arteries, including access to Iran’s own reserves held in foreign banks. The U.S. government has also imposed so-called secondary sanctions on Iran, meaning that any foreign entity that still dares to engage in trade with Iranian banks or companies puts itself at risk of being sanctioned and being cut off from doing business in the U.S. — a risk that few businesses are willing to take.

Though the U.S. government repeatedly insisted that humanitarian trade with Iran would not be affected by its “maximum pressure” campaign, economic sanctions experts said the claim is misleading. Assurances that ordinary Iranians will still be able to purchase food and medicine are meaningless, they say, when the sanctions in place are so broad that banks and foreign countries view any dealings at all with the country as a looming violation.

“The banking issue is the real crux of the problem. There is a general blocking authority on all of Iran’s financial institutions, some on which have been designated for terrorism-related reasons, some for WMD reasons, and some for human rights reasons,” said Tyler Cullis, an attorney at Ferrari & Associates, a D.C.-based law firm specializing in economic sanctions. “The Trump administration then came and imposed sanctions on Iran’s entire financial sector, and that has targeted any remaining Iranian institutions that were not covered by those measures.”

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Although President Joe Biden campaigned in part on restoring the Obama-era nuclear deal, his administration effectively maintained the maximum pressure policy. The banking sanctions that made Iranian business anathema to foreign financial institutions remain in place, making the prospect of doing any trade with Iran too legally and financially risky to be worth it for any foreign company. Those risks are augmented by hawkish activist groups like United Against Nuclear Iran, which maintains public lists of companies accused of engaging in trade with Iran. The blacklists — on which UANI has in the past included companies engaged in legal trade, including for medicines, with Iran — create a potential for reputational risk that makes doing business with Iran an even more unsavory prospect.

“At the end of the Obama administration, we had ideas in front of the administration calling for a direct financial channel between the U.S. and Iran that would be able to facilitate licensed and exempt trade between the two countries. To be frank, the Obama administration rejected creating such a channel on multiple occasions,” said Cullis. “The U.S. has now hit a dead end where they have used up all their levers of pressure other than military force.”

He went on, “I sympathize with folks in Iran, as there are a lot of people there who are nonpolitical and simply trying to find solutions. But it’s really hard to find a solution when U.S. government itself is not interested in one.”

While U.S. sanctions succeeded at wrecking Iran’s middle class and preventing Iranians from accessing necessities like food and medicine, they failed to achieve the aims of Washington: forcing Iran to change its foreign policy or renegotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal on less favorable terms. Instead, the Iranian government has survived waves of popular anger by doubling down on repression — including through executions and imprisonment of political dissenters — against an increasingly impoverished population.

Despite growing misery in the country, the Islamic Republic of Iran seems to be as firmly in charge as ever. The hardening narrative echoes the story of U.S. economic sanctions on countries like Iraq, Cuba, and Venezuela that succeeded in harming civilians but never resulted in regime change.

“The original idea of such sanctions is that they will cause people to rise up and overthrow their government, but there is not much evidence of that while there is a lot of evidence that they harm ordinary people,” said Amir Handjani, a nonresident senior fellow at the Quincy Institute and a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project. “When you consider regular Iranians living under sanctions with rare diseases, who need specialized drugs that can only be imported from the West, they are facing a very dark future.”

“We’re talking about little children who need medical dressings and didn’t get them.”

The lawsuit currently filed in U.S. federal court in Oregon on behalf of Iranians with thalassemia calls on the U.S. government and the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, which administers sanctions and trade licenses, to “permit the reintroduction of life-saving medicines and medical devices into Iran through normal business channels.”

The suit was recently dismissed by the court on grounds of proving standing by the plaintiffs; an appeal of the ruling was filed in May. Lawyers working on the case say that they will continue pressing the matter in U.S. courts to compel the government to create a solution that will allow critical medicines to reach patients inside Iran. Neither the Office of Foreign Assets Control nor the Biden White House responded to requests for comment.

“On a visceral level, people are suffering and dying. We’re talking about little children who need medical dressings and didn’t get them,” said Thomas Nelson, the attorney for the plaintiffs in the case. “No one is willing to stand up to the impunity and bullying of the U.S. government on this subject, and particularly OFAC. It ought to be brought to the public’s attention that these types of things are happening.”

The post Children Are Dying Because Companies Are Too Scared to Sell Medicine to Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Politicians all over the world tell voters that the next election in their country will be “the most important one of their lives”; it’s a favored, and well-trodden, get-out-the-vote tactic in the United States and beyond. In 2023, though, there is one country where a claim about an election’s existential importance might really be true: Turkey.

This week, the country’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan moved up the date of the forthcoming Turkish presidential and parliamentary votes to May 14, a month earlier than expected, even as the country reels from a spiralling economic crisis and increasing social polarization.

“Turkey has become a textbook ‘competitive authoritarian’ country.”

Erdogan has now been in power for two decades, a period during which he has gone from being perceived in the West as a pragmatic economic reformer into an authoritarian who has replaced Turkish institutions with strongman rule centered around himself and his close associates.

Time may be running out to stop this country of 84 million people — and a NATO ally that Western powers have an obligation to defend — from turning into a permanent one-man show.

“Turkey has become a textbook ‘competitive authoritarian’ country. It is authoritarian in the sense that Erdogan jails his opponents and institutions have been hollowed out, but it’s competitive enough that we can talk about meaningful elections,” said Gönül Tol, director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkish Studies program and author of “Erdogan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria.” “Obviously the playing field is not level, and the opposition are having a hard time, but there are elections and there are limits to how much they can be rigged, particularly in the big cities.”

The Turkish opposition — divided between secularists, Islamists, nationalists, and pro-Kurdish parties — have attempted to form a coalition comprising at least some of these forces, banding together under a movement known as the “Table of Six” that has proposed reforms to the Turkish Constitution to undo the consolidation of power that has taken place under Erdogan.

Polls show that the electorate is roughly equally polarized behind supporters of Erdogan and the various opposition movements. Even with elections now on the horizon, however, the opposition has yet to coalesce around a single leader. All this means that the vote will not just be fiercely contested but likely subject to challenge by whoever comes up short.

In the run-up to the coming vote, the man seen as the most serious challenger to Erdogan, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, was sentenced to two years in prison by a Turkish court and banned from politics. He was convicted on the charge of insulting public officials, based on a 2019 remark where he referred to election officials as “fools,” in a press release.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, whose popular leader, Selahattin Demirtas, has been in jail since 2016, is now facing serious threats from Turkish courts aimed at blocking access to its own bank accounts — a move seen as a likely prelude to banning the party from politics entirely.

Despite these types of authoritarian measures, elections in Turkey are still seen as free, if not fair, and thus widely viewed as worth contesting. In 2019, Erdogan’s ruling party, the Justice and Development Party, lost in local elections around the country, including a contested vote for Istanbul in which Imamoglu came out on top.

As Tol puts it, the coming national elections are the last chance for the opposition to forestall Turkey’s descent from a country with independent institutions and centers of power into what would be a personalist regime revolving around its leader.

Turkey has experienced many periods of dictatorship in the past, as well as authoritarian rule by the military which has intervened to manipulate elections, staged coups, and even executed leaders who have run afoul of its prerogatives. Yet the dysfunction of Turkey’s politics and economy in recent years seems to reflect a dangerous new frontier.

The Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, has presided over an unprecedented hollowing-out of state capacity. Thousands of civil servants have either been purged or sent to prison for insufficient loyalty to the ruling government, particularly in the aftermath of a failed 2016 coup attempt.

The purges have taken their toll. Many institutions in Turkey simply do not function anymore, even as government-controlled media outlets portray an alternate reality of constantly increasing political and economic strength.

“The AKP has succeeded in cementing its hegemonic status in Turkish politics, but at the cost of undermining the very same institutions through which it is supposed to govern,” wrote Burak Kadercan, a Turkey expert at the U.S. Naval War College, in a recent article for the national security publication War on the Rocks. “The result is an institutional decay that is gradually but surely transforming the Turkish political landscape.”

In the U.S., a favored talking point of progressive political activists is that racism harms not just minorities, but also the majority community by alienating them from their own material interests. That argument happens to be true not only in the U.S., but in Turkey as well. Ginning up ultranationalist sentiments against the minority Kurdish population has long been a favored vote-winning tactic for politicians pursuing their own interests.

In the early years of his rule, Erdogan was popular with many Kurds for taking a more conciliatory stance on the country’s long-running ethnic conflict and pursuing peace talks with Kurdish militant leaders. He has since reverted to the Turkish political norm of cracking down on Kurdish participation in political life and waging war in the country’s Kurdish-heavy southeast.

“If the opposition coalition manages to appeal to the Kurdish population, they will likely win the elections, whereas if they don’t have that support it will be very difficult, if not impossible.”

The opposition — much of which is from the secular nationalist old guard that has long viewed Kurdish culture, nationalism, and rights with contempt — has so far failed to chart a different course on this issue, remaining largely mute in the face of crackdowns on the pro-Kurdish political parties and leaders.

“The biggest weakness of opposition is where they stand on the Kurdish question,” said Tol. “From a simple math point of view, if the opposition coalition manages to appeal to the Kurdish population, they will likely win the elections, whereas if they don’t have that support, it will be very difficult, if not impossible.”

This view is echoed by Turkish pollsters, who have taken to warning in recent months that the only hope for an opposition coalition to win will be to form links with Kurdish political movements.

Tol said that the traditional opposition’s failure to join up with the Kurds reflects a fear of alienating nationalist segments of their own base. That failure, she said, “comes at the expense of everyone, not just Kurds, but also Turks who want to live in a democratic and prosperous country.”

Whether they take this advice or not, this election — now a month sooner than expected — may really be the last chance for Turkey to steer clear from a bleak future of democratic decline and economic chaos.

Turkey is a NATO member country whose fate is intimately tied to that of the European Union. As much as activists and politicians may “cry wolf” over the life-changing importance of any vote, sometimes, as today, the wolf may really be at the door.

The post Turkey’s Next Elections Could Be the Country’s Last Real Democratic Vote appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has existed in a near-constant state of crisis since its creation following the revolution of 1979. In the face of brutal wars, international sanctions, internal dissent, and an ongoing confrontation with the world’s only superpower, the Iranian government has, so far, managed to amble forward.

Today, the regime is facing one of its greatest challenges yet: a massive wave of popular discontent that began in September with the death in police custody of a Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Jina Amini. This round of protests has been different from past movements owing to its catalyst: Amini had been arrested for wearing an improper headscarf. Protesters have since been challenging Iran’s mandatory hijab law — an ideological pillar, and tool for social control, of the Islamic Republic. Three months in, demonstrators continue to brave overwhelming state violence to take to the streets with chants of “woman, life, freedom,” with a recent general strike highlighting the still-growing popular anger against the regime.

So far, clerical rule has survived thanks largely to a brutal crackdown. Some 15,000 people have reportedly been arrested. Hundreds more have died in the streets at the hands of security forces. Thursday saw the first execution of a man sentenced owing to protest-related charges. The government, though, is hanging on.

Meanwhile, another major threat looms over the regime, simmering beneath the surface yet rarely breaking into public view. It could prove to be the gravest crisis yet for the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is aging and reportedly ill. His looming death, with no clear successor in place, puts the Islamic Republic on the brink of a succession crisis — exactly the kind of challenge that has unraveled many authoritarian regimes in the past. The crisis may soon empower one of Iran’s powerful security organizations, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, to take a direct role in governing Iran for the first time in its history.

When protests broke out this September, Khamenei, whose supporters had expected him to deliver a public response, was rendered absent due to lingering ill health from a recent bowel surgery. In recent years, Khamenei, who is 83, has been stricken by an array of serious ailments, including prostate cancer, but has also survived many past predictions of his imminent death.

Though he has since appeared in public to denounce the recent protests as foreign subversion, it is worth considering what Iran will look like, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy, after its supreme leader finally departs from this world. The most recent wave of public rejection towards his regime only serves to emphasize how stark the coming changes may be.

“It is something that almost nobody discusses openly inside Iran, but the whole country is now bracing itself for the issue of succession.”

“Khamenei’s passing will pose a significant challenge to the Islamic Republic because whoever succeeds him will be from a generation that did not participate in the revolution. It is something that almost nobody discusses openly inside Iran, but the whole country is now bracing itself for the issue of succession,” said Sina Azodi, a lecturer on international affairs at George Washington University. “Khamenei took part in the 1979 revolution and was even imprisoned by the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, whom he considered stooges of the United States. He has been very skeptical of Western intentions towards Iran, and, once he leaves the scene, one of the major impediments to Iran’s improvement of relations with the West would be gone.”

Khamenei, who became supreme leader in 1989, has ruled Iran almost four times longer than his one and only predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution and founder of the Islamic Republic. In many ways, the regime that exists today is his own personal creation, and the management of competing power centers inside Iran is dependent on his role as final authority. Khamenei has marginalized most of his competitors inside the clergy, solidifying himself as a near-unquestioned authority within the system. This monopolization of power and influence, common to dictatorships, has made his own place secure, while calling into question the system’s ability to adequately replace him after he dies.

Despite his singular power, factions have emerged inside Iran’s security establishment that may be ready to capitalize on Khamenei’s demise. Most prominent among them is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the armed forces created after the 1979 revolution as an ideological armed service. Today, the IRGC is perhaps the only force inside Iran left with both the strength and incentive to take a direct role in Iranian politics after Khamenei is gone.

Designated as a terrorist organization in a controversial decision by the Trump administration in 2019, the IRGC today is no longer just a military force under the command of the supreme leader. It is also a major economic player inside Iran, owning lucrative businesses and real estate holdings that it will likely seek to preserve regardless of what changes may come in Iranian politics. Understanding the level of mafia-like control that the IRGC exerts over Iranian society today is key to understanding what the country’s politics may look like once its leadership is fair game.

“Looking at their behavior, the IRGC seem primarily interested in their own material benefits, they are not simply ideological. They are in the business of making money, unlike Khamenei, who, at least on the surface, has tried to show some degree of modesty,” said Azodi. “These people are interested in protecting their economic advantages, and they have benefited from international sanctions. They control not just the visible economy but much of the black market. All the luxury goods that come to Iran today arrive through channels controlled by the IRGC.”

Experts say it is highly possible, even likely, that an economically powerful and well-armed IRGC leadership may decide to stage a military coup to take direct control over Iran after Khamenei dies.

Such a coup need not be overt. Many other countries in the region, most famously Egypt and Pakistan, are run from behind-the-scenes by powerful military establishments, even while they maintain a patina of civilian government. Such arrangements have not usually benefited the citizens of these countries, but they have worked quite well for military elites themselves. There is no reason to think that powerful figures in the IRGC would be averse to such an opportunity, nor that they would restrain themselves from seizing it if it emerges after Khamenei’s passing.

The issue of how a possible IRGC-led regime would govern Iran, particularly with regards to the restrictions on personal freedoms that are at the heart of many Iranians’ grievances today, will depend on how its leaders view the continued usefulness of Iran’s clerical establishment.

The Islamic Republic was created as a theocracy, a feat pulled off in no small part thanks to the reverence for clerical authority in the Shia sect of Islam that dominates Iran. Today, though, popular anger over its misrule is increasingly directed at members of the clergy themselves. In addition to personal attacks against Khamenei, Iranians have taken to posting viral videos of themselves slapping the turbans off clerics’ heads as they walk down the street — a visible indication of how far the credibility of this institution has fallen in the eyes of the public. The dim perception of the clergy among ordinary Iranians is likely to play a role in how a possible military-led government may behave.

“With the IRGC as de facto leaders of the Islamic Republic, its stance on domestic issues depends on its leadership’s perception of the question of legitimacy and the role of the Shia clergy,” said Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, and author of “Political Succession in the Islamic Republic of Iran.” “If the Shia clergy is still perceived as a source of legitimacy, the IRGC will continue restricting personal freedoms on religious grounds.”

“Iranian youth spending their free time on sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll can buy an IRGC military dictatorship at least ten years in power.”

Alfoneh went on, “If the IRGC leadership no longer perceives the Shia clergy as a source of legitimacy, it will throw them under the bus and likely give personal, though not political, freedoms to the Iranian public. Iranian ladies wearing mini-skirts, and the majority of Iranian youth spending their free time on sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll can buy an IRGC military dictatorship at least ten years in power.”

There is little sign that the IRGC is ready to make a move for power any time soon, particularly while Khamenei himself may beat the odds again and survive for some years to come. Yet his inevitable departure from the scene, absent a clear successor either chosen by him or allowed to emerge organically from within the clerical establishment, means that a future picture of Iranian politics is already hazily visible on the horizon.

An Iranian government run by the IRGC — either directly as a military dictatorship or, more likely, with a puppet supreme leader under its control — may not just change some of Iran’s domestic policies, but also its approach to the international community.

To be sure, an Iran run by its security elites would not be a democracy. Yet it would likely return to a pragmatic position regarding its relationship with Israel and the West, if not the countries of the Arab world. Though it would fall short of the demands of protesters in the streets today calling for democratic change, such a regime may still transform Iran into something like a socially liberal Saudi Arabia — acceptable to Western interests, no doubt thanks to its richness in fossil fuels, yet still authoritarian at its core.

A relatively pragmatic system such as this is likely to come into existence, regardless of any future ideological changes that may mark an IRGC-run regime after Khamenei’s death, Alfoneh said.

“The IRGC has had excellent relations with Israel and the United States in the past: From 1979 until 1988, Israel was the primary source of the IRGC’s procurement of U.S. produced arms, and the IRGC has also on multiple occasions engaged in tactical alliances of convenience with the United States against the Taliban and against the Islamic State,” he said. “I see no reason why these patterns of behavior should not continue seen under an IRGC-ruled Iran.”

Though its foreign relations could be revised, Alfoneh cautioned that some things just won’t change. “As for more fundamental issues, such as Iran’s nuclear ambitions, missile program, support to proxies, and opposition to great power presence in the Persian Gulf, there will be no change as long as Iran exists as a unified political entity,” he said. “Even if the Islamic Republic collapses, Iranians collectively convert to Zoroastrianism and revive the Sassanid Empire, all these policies will continue as before.”

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The Jordanian film “Farha,” released this week on Netflix, tells the story of an individual tragedy that took place during the 1948 war to create the state of Israel — where Palestinians, who remember the event as the Nakba, or catastrophe, were expelled from their homes by the hundreds of thousands.

A 14-year-old Palestinian girl, nursing dreams of breaking out of the traditional gender expectations of her village to attend school at a nearby city, is forced into hiding by her father after their quiet settlement is attacked by soldiers of the newly created Israeli Defense Forces. Hiding inside a locked pantry while waiting for her father to return, she watches through a small opening in the wall as Israeli soldiers execute a Palestinian family — including two young children and a baby.

Filmmaker Darin Sallam’s debut, “Farha” is also the Jordanian entry for the 2023 Academy Awards. Sallam has said that the movie is based on the true story of a friend of her mother, who, living years later as a refugee in Syria, recalled her experience as a young girl during the Nakba. Sallam describes the film as a means of helping process a painful memory of that time.

“I’m not afraid to tell the truth. We need to do this because films live and we die,” Sallam said in an interview last winter following the film’s premiere at the Red Sea International Film Festival. “This is why I decided to make this film. Not because I’m political, but because I’m loyal to the story that I heard.”

Cancel Campaigns

Predictably, the film — and the attention that it is now getting on a major platform like Netflix — has angered Israeli officials, who have denounced “Farha” and even threatened consequences for its airing.

“It’s crazy that Netflix decided to stream a movie whose whole purpose is to create a false pretense and incite against Israeli soldiers,” outgoing Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman said in a recent statement. Lieberman also took steps to revoke state funding to a theatre in the Tel Aviv suburb of Jaffa that screened the film, with the “goal of preventing the screening of this shocking film or other similar ones in the future.”

Various other Israeli officials have denounced the production of “Farha” in public statements. In response to its screening on Netflix, there has been coordinated downvoting of its ratings online, as well as a social media campaign calling on people to cancel their Netflix subscriptions.

Many people do not want “Farha” to be seen under any circumstance. Yet this attempt to shut down screenings of the film seems to reflect an unfair denial of yet another basic human right to Palestinians: the ability to process their trauma through art. Rather than gratuitously attack Israelis, the creator of “Farha” has said that this personal impulse was at the core of why the film was created.

“The story traveled over the years to reach me. It stayed with me. When I was a child, I had this fear of closed, dark places, and I kept thinking of this girl and what happened to her,” Sallam said following the film’s release. “So when I grew up and became a filmmaker, I decided that this would be my debut feature.”

The desire to use art as a means of dealing with pain — including historical traumas passed down through generations — should be familiar to Israelis, many of whom are descendants of genocide survivors from Europe, about which there is a voluminous history of cultural production continuing into the present day.

Despite the documented fact of the Palestinian refugee exodus, the individual accounts of those who suffered these events have often been suppressed, only recently receiving halting recognition from the broader public, decades after the fact. The Palestinian film industry, which has achieved popular success in recent years, has emerged as a vital tool for capturing the historical memory not just of the Nakba, but of the continued traumas suffered by millions of Palestinians living as occupied subjects of the Israeli military.

Acknowledging the Other Side

The pivotal scene in “Farha” showing the murder of a Palestinian family depicts the wartime Israeli military in a poor light. Yet far from being unthinkable, such incidents have been documented by Israeli historians as common during the Nakba.

“The Jewish soldiers who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death,” the historian Ilan Pappe wrote in his book, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” describing accounts of a massacre that took place in the Palestinian village of Dawaymeh.

Despite attempts to shut down its production, there is a strong case to make that “Farha” should be seen.

The massacre in Dawaymeh was just one of countless incidents of ethnic cleansing during this period, many of which have survived in the memory of Palestinians but are only now being recognized by others.

That the people who suffered through the Nakba and their children have a right to memorialize their experience through art should not be denied, even if, as is likely, the stories they tell make some people uncomfortable in the present day.

“Farha” is now available to millions of people to watch on Netflix. Despite attempts to shut down its production, there is a strong case to make that it should be seen — though not to deepen hatred over terrible events that cannot be reversed. Rather, the film should stand as an acknowledgement of the other side of a historic story about the creation of the state of Israel that has too long been ignored or denied: the story of its victims.

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