American and Israeli officials have continued to speculate about fomenting some kind of internal rebellion or large-scale street uprising inside Iran, in hopes of toppling the leadership of the Islamic Republic. Bombs have largely fallen silent, for now.
But the longer the Iran war drags on, amid sporadic tit-for-tat action between US and Iranian forces as they clash over who controls the Strait of Hormuz, the more unlikely the kind of groundswell of protests like what was seen last January will be.
The Trump administration is betting that long-term severe economic 'D-Day' sanctions will eventually break Iranian society, but there's also the reality that a wartime and de facto martial law situation now makes large public anti-government demonstrations all the more difficult. It is also the case then when a country is under attack, there is a 'rally around the flag effect' - making it further easier for authorities to stamp out dissent before it spreads. And without doubt, Iran leaders have genuine support across various sectors of the Iranian populace, as they face down the United States.
Additionally, it has been a longtime claim of Iranian officials that Israeli Mossad has infiltrated and in some cases armed protest groups.
"They have trained some people inside and outside the country; they have brought in some terrorists from outside," President Masoud Pezeshkian had said of Israeli and foreign intelligence back in January, amid the violent economic unrest that served as a precursor to Trump launching Operation Epic Fury.
Fast forward to now more that six months into the US-led war, and there are still instances of ground level deadly confrontations between Iranian security services and mysterious armed 'opposition' entities.
The AFP and Israeli media report of a fresh incident, "A local commander in Iran’s paramilitary Basij force was killed in a 'terrorist attack' in the country’s restive southeast, local media reports." According to more:
Abdolraouf Eshaghi, a commander in the Parud district of Sistan-Baluchistan province, had been “martyred,” the semi-official Tasnim news agency says, without providing details. It is not immediately clear who was behind the attack.
Yesterday, Iranian authorities said three people were killed and nine arrested during a raid in the province on hideouts of Islamist groups it claimed were affiliated with Israel and the United States.
However, armed clashes with ethnic groups which have separatist movements and leanings are nothing new for Iran, particularly in restive Sistan-Baluchistan province. That province has witnessed a long pattern of attacks on IRGC and Basij units by Baloch insurgent groups, going back decades.
While Iranian society is overwhelmingly Shia, most of the border province's large Baloch population is Sunni. But Tehran has long been worried that foreign intelligence could 'weaponized' the impoverished Sunni population, and a similar thing has been at issue with the Iranian Kurdish minority, which tends to be in the mountainous north of the country near Iraq. So this is a plausible scenario and very real possibility.
Trump back in April openly boasts "we sent some guns" to the "people of Iran"...
It should also be noted that similar dynamics were at play during the lengthy Syrian proxy war. Washington and Gulf allies funded, trained, and armed Sunni radical insurgent groups as well as Kurds, which pressured Damascus from the north and east of the country.