What Would Be Indicators of Regime Collapse in Iran?

The Trump administration has given a litany of reasons for launching a war on Iran in conjunction with Israel, from degrading Iran’s ballistic missile programs and further damaging nuclear sites bombed last June to sinking the Iranian navy.

President Donald Trump has also invoked regime change, urging the Iranian people to confront weakened Iranian security forces and overturn the system in place for 47 years, while hedging about whether the U.S. would intervene on the ground to assist. In any case, the Islamic Republic faces a significant challenge, and its long-term survival is not assured.

Following the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and a lengthy list of top security officials on Feb. 28, Iran is being led on an interim basis by a three-member council chaired by President Masoud Pezeshkian and a larger Supreme National Security Council, led by its secretary, the veteran Iranian official, Ali Larijani. This structure of decision-making is consistent with the Islamic Republic’s constitution and appears to have been agreed to by Khamenei before the war. Multiple officials from these two councils have spoken to the public over national television, an indication that they are in control. A prompt naming of a new supreme leader would be a further sign of confidence within the Iranian leadership – if the successor survives. The extent of hostile intelligence penetration into circles in and around the Iranian leadership is remarkable, and Iranian leaders operate under constant threat of attack.

In the days ahead, they will try to maintain their command and control, even if decentralized, of Iranian security assets. Media reports state that a new commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Ahmed Vahedi, was named quickly after the previous commander, Mohammed Pakpour, was killed in an airstrike. In preparation for gaps at the top of security forces leadership functions, Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi, who is also a member of the Supreme National Security Council, asserted on March 1 to the Al-Jazeera network that the military units firing at Gulf states were operating under a decentralized command and control scheme.

Command and control of security forces is vital because ultimately survival of the Islamic Republic depends on holding major cities. Indications that leadership at the local and national levels cannot control population centers would be a major sign of the beginning of fragmentation within Iran’s political structure. Multiple media reports indicated widespread if limited public celebrations inside Iran after Khamenei’s assassination. The Iranian leadership is worried, and has warned of harsh responses to any new protests as well as throttling access to the internet to limit demonstrators’ ability to communicate with each other and the outside world. An unwillingness on the part of police and other local security elements to confront protesters or to detain members of any new local governance committees that operate outside the regime’s purview could precipitate loss of control. (This occurred shortly before the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in Tunis in late 2010 during the Arab Spring, and in parts of Syria in 2012-2013 during the civil war.)

A decentralized command structure might impede the central government’s ability to respond speedily to a local crisis. Large defections from military units, and even battles between defecting security personnel and loyalists, would be another indication of a growing risk of regime collapse. Clashes between rebel soldiers and regime loyalists were an early sign of the emerging civil wars in Syria and Libya that ultimately doomed those regimes.

So far, however, there are no reports of any significant security force defections or of urban areas falling outside government control. President Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth all have called for this scenario and even promised “immunity” for security forces that do not fight oppositionists. (How Washington or Jerusalem would ensure such “immunity” from angry Iranians is not clear.) If reports that American and/or Israeli military operations have targeted Iranian border posts are accurate, that suggests the intent is to facilitate Iranian government loss of control in restive regions of Iran such as the northwest where Kurdish militant groups operate next to Iraqi Kurdistan. Indeed, Trump spoke on March 1 to the leaders of the two main Iraqi Kurdish factions. It is not yet clear if the Kurdish fighters will intervene.

Even if parts of northwestern Iran fall outside central government control, the Islamic Republic could continue to run other large cities. With a Persian-Azeri majority, Iran is more ethnically coherent than many other Middle Eastern countries. Bashar al-Assad’s regime functioned in most of the Arab-dominated part of Syria for a decade. The lesson from Saddam’s Iraq, Assad’s Syria, and Algeria during its civil war in the 1990s is that with loyal security forces, a fierce but brittle regime can hang on for a long time in the absence of a unified, national opposition inside the country enjoying outside help.

Iraqi oppositionists operating outside Iraq, some of whom enjoyed strong Iranian and American support, sought unsuccessfully for a decade to bring down Saddam’s weakened regime. Instead, the Iraqi oppositionists entered Iraq only behind the U.S. army in 2003. Likewise, Syrian oppositionists backed by the West and based outside Syria never put great military pressure on the Assad government.

There still are no signs of any coherent national opposition inside Iran. Any such opposition initially would operate clandestinely. A unified, national opposition that emerged to control a few cities would be a major development. Five Iranian Kurdish parties announced the formation of a coalition against the Tehran government shortly before the war started, but tellingly, their press conference was held in Erbil in northern Iraq, not inside Iran.

Rebel forces inside Libya joined to bring down long-time ruler Moammar Qaddafi despite their ethnic and tribal divisions. The Syrian militants who erupted out of northwestern Syria to bring down Assad had deep links to other Syrian Arab cities that fell to them quickly once Assad’s weakness was revealed.

With a deeply divided diaspora and confronting a regime with still-loyal security forces, the Iranian opposition seems far from being able to field a military force capable of overturning the forces of the Islamic Republic without foreign military intervention. Even then, success in a country three times the size of Iraq with twice the population would be far from assured.