---
title: "The Regime That Devours Its Own: Iran's Mullahs, the IRGC, and the Architecture of Atrocity"
slug: the-regime-that-devours-its-own
summary: "The mullahs and IRGC began their rule in 1979 with revolutionary tribunals and mass executions. A timeline at a glance of 45+ years of domestic terror, proxy wars, nuclear brinkmanship, and strategic self-sabotage — from the founding bloodbath to the 2025 strikes on Iran itself."
publishedAt: 2026-06-12T21:20:25.093Z
updatedAt: 2026-06-12T21:20:25.257Z
coverImage: https://mystrangemind-images.us-iad-10.linodeobjects.com/images/articles/the-regime-that-devours-its-own/01-cover-the-regime-devours.jpg
canonicalUrl: https://mystrangemind.com/p/the-regime-that-devours-its-own
---
# The Regime That Devours Its Own: Iran's Mullahs, the IRGC, and the Architecture of Atrocity

**A long-form essay on the Islamic Republic's war against its people, its neighbors, and ultimately its own survival — beginning at the very beginning.**

---

::::section{title="Introduction: The Spark That Revealed the Furnace" id="introduction-the-spark-that-revealed-the-furnace"}
:::brief
On September 13, 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman named Mahsa (Zhina) Amini was arrested in Tehran by Iran's "morality police" — the Gasht-e Ershad — for the crime of showing too much hair under her hijab. Three days later she was dead. The regime claimed a heart attack. Eyewitnesses and the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission later concluded she had been beaten to death in custody.
:::

Her death lit a fuse that had been waiting for decades.

What followed was not a polite reform movement. It was a nationwide uprising — "Woman, Life, Freedom" (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) — that reached every province. Young women burned their hijabs in the streets. Schoolgirls cut their hair in protest. Men joined them. The chants were not for better economic policy. They were "Death to the Dictator," "Death to Khamenei," and rejection of the entire theocratic system.

The response from the Islamic Republic was exactly what its ideology demanded: overwhelming, sadistic force. Security forces — a mix of regular police, the Basij paramilitaries, and full IRGC units — used live ammunition, shotguns loaded with metal pellets fired at faces and chests from close range, and vehicles as weapons. Internet blackouts were imposed so the world would not see the scale. The UN documented at least 551 deaths, including 68 children. Amnesty International recorded dozens of children killed, some as young as six or seven. Hundreds more lost eyes to "less lethal" pellets. Sexual violence in detention was widespread. Over 20,000 were arrested.

Two years later, there has been zero accountability. The families of the dead are harassed, threatened, or forced to lie about how their children died. The regime's "Special Committee" whitewashed the entire massacre.

This was not an aberration. This is the system working as designed.

The men in turbans and the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have spent more than forty years proving the same point: they fear their own people more than any foreign enemy, and they will burn the country to the ground before they surrender power.

They did not learn this behavior in 2022. They began this way in 1979.

## Timeline at a Glance

:::timeline{view="vertical"}
| Period              | Domestic Atrocities & Repression                          | Export of Violence & Proxies                              | Nuclear Posture & Direct Threats                  | Regime Stability & Internal Dynamics                  |
|---------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------|
| **1979–1982**       | Revolutionary tribunals; 600+ executions by Oct 1979 (Amnesty); thousands more; IRGC founded as internal terror force; Cultural Revolution purges; Baha'i & Kurdish mass killings | Hostage crisis begins export of revolutionary terror      | Early nuclear interest; "Death to America" rhetoric cements | Clerics consolidate power by liquidating all rivals; IRGC created as loyal enforcer |
| **1988**            | Secret mass execution of 3,000–5,000+ political prisoners (mostly MEK) via Khomeini fatwa & death commissions | War with Iraq ends; MEK incursion crushed with extreme internal reprisals | —                                                 | Post-war paranoia; Montazeri (designated successor) sidelined for protesting the killings |
| **2022**            | Mahsa Amini murdered by morality police; 551+ killed (68 children) in Woman Life Freedom uprising; pellet shootings, rape in detention, total impunity | —                                                         | —                                                 | Closest the regime has come to losing control since 1979; "Woman Life Freedom" becomes permanent opposition slogan |
| **2023–2024**       | Continued executions (hundreds/year); intensified hijab enforcement with cameras & snitching apps | IRGC-built "Axis" (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis) enables Oct 7 massacre; multi-front war launched | Direct missile/drone attack on Israel (mostly intercepted) | Overconfidence in proxies; leadership believes "strategic patience" will prevail |
| **2025–2026**       | Executions surge to record 2,159 in 2025 alone            | Proxy network decapitated (Nasrallah, Sinwar, others killed); Syria land bridge lost | Nuclear facilities struck by U.S./Israel; program set back; breakout time lengthened to ~9–12 months | Khamenei dies; hardline son Mojtaba takes over; direct strikes on Iranian soil |
:::

*This timeline captures the through-line: the same logic of terror, ideological certainty, and strategic miscalculation that began in 1979 has never been abandoned.*

---
::::

::::section{title="The Theology of Rule: The Hidden Imam and the Doctrine That Built the Regime" id="the-theology-of-rule"}
:::brief
Every atrocity in this story rests on an idea. The Islamic Republic is not merely a government that happens to be religious; it is a theological claim about who may rule — justified by a specific, and within Shia Islam deeply contested, reading of the faith. To understand the bloodshed you have to understand the belief beneath it: the Hidden Imam, the cleric who claims to rule in his name, and the apocalyptic horizon that turns dissent into cosmic treason.
:::

### Twelver Shi'ism: the faith of the Hidden Imam

Twelver Shi'ism (Ithnā ʿAsharī) is the largest branch of Shia Islam and the faith of the overwhelming majority of Iranians. Its defining belief is a line of twelve divinely guided Imams — successors to the Prophet Muhammad through his cousin and son-in-law Ali — who hold rightful spiritual and temporal authority over the community of believers.

The twelfth of these, Muhammad al-Mahdi, is said to have been born in the ninth century and then withdrawn from the world into a state known as occultation (*ghayba*) — alive, hidden, and awaited. One day, Twelvers believe, he will return as the Mahdi, the divinely guided redeemer, to "fill the earth with justice as it has been filled with injustice," in many traditions arriving alongside the return of Jesus. For most of the world's Shia, across more than a thousand years, this has been a hope held in patience — a promise of ultimate justice, not a political program.

### Velâyat-e Faqih: the doctrine that built the regime

Here is the pivot on which everything turns. Mainstream Shia tradition held that because the only rightful ruler — the Imam — is in hiding, no cleric may claim his political authority. Clerics could teach, guide, and judge; they were not to seize the state. This "quietist" position is still the dominant one in Shia Islam, and its most influential living voice, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf, rejects clerical rule outright.

Ruhollah Khomeini broke with that consensus. His doctrine of *velâyat-e faqih* — the "Guardianship of the Jurist" — argued that in the Imam's absence a supreme cleric should wield near-absolute authority as his deputy until the return. This was not the recovery of an ancient orthodoxy but a modern innovation, and a contested one, opposed by senior Grand Ayatollahs in Khomeini's day and since. The entire architecture of the Islamic Republic stands on it. The Supreme Leader does not govern as a politician; he governs as the stand-in for a messiah.

That claim carries a lethal logic. If the Leader rules in the name of God's chosen one, then opposition is not mere dissent — it is rebellion against the divine order. This is why the regime's courts can brand protesters *mohareb*, "those who wage war against God," a charge that carries the gallows. The machinery of execution this essay documents is not a betrayal of the regime's ideology. It is its expression.

### The apocalyptic horizon

Because the regime's legitimacy flows from a messiah who has not yet come, the end of days is never far from its imagination. The return of the Mahdi is the axis of its eschatology: a final reckoning in which oppression is destroyed and a just order is established over the whole earth. Devotion to the Hidden Imam runs through Iranian religious life — most visibly at the Jamkaran mosque near Qom, where the faithful drop written petitions to the Twelfth Imam into a well.

Under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–2013), this apocalyptic register moved from the shrine into statecraft. He spoke openly of the Mahdi's imminent return, cast his government as preparing the ground for it, and invoked it from the podium of the United Nations. A current within the clerical establishment treats upheaval — regional war, civilizational confrontation — not as catastrophe to be avoided but as the birth pangs of redemption.

How much this actually drives policy is genuinely debated, and honesty requires saying so. Day to day, the regime behaves less like a death cult racing toward Armageddon than like a cold, rational machine consumed by its own survival. The apocalyptic language functions mostly as fuel: it sanctifies sacrifice, justifies the costs of confrontation, and binds the Basij militia and the believing base to the cause. But rhetoric that makes martyrdom holy and national ruin bearable is not harmless. A state that can tell its people their suffering is sacred can ask almost anything of them.

### From belief to bloodshed

The thread from doctrine to action runs through Karbala. The founding trauma of Shia identity is the martyrdom of Husayn, the Prophet's grandson, slaughtered with his small band of followers in 680 CE for refusing to submit to a tyrant — a story of righteous sacrifice against impossible odds, and one of the most morally powerful narratives in any faith. The regime has inverted it. It casts itself as Husayn and its opponents as the tyrant, sacralizing its own wars, its proxies, and its dead. To "export the revolution" becomes a religious duty rather than a geopolitical choice; the proxy network becomes a sacred project; the willingness to spend lives and treasure on distant battlefields is reframed as devotion rather than recklessness.

### A faith hijacked, not a faith indicted

None of this is an indictment of Shia Islam, of Iranians, or of the world's Muslims, who have no part in any of it. The opposite is true, and it is the regime's deepest vulnerability: the faith it claims to embody does not belong to it. The highest authorities in Shia Islam reject its founding doctrine. Millions of devout Iranians are among its fiercest enemies; clerics have died in its prisons for saying so. When the women of 2022 marched, many of them were believers. The Islamic Republic's most dangerous accusation is not that it is too religious — it is that it hollowed out a religion and wears it as armor. It is a regime that devours its own, and that begins with the faith it claims to defend.

![The Hijacked Faith](https://mystrangemind-images.us-iad-10.linodeobjects.com/images/articles/the-regime-that-devours-its-own/05-theology-hijacked-faith.jpg)
*A cleric at the well of petitions pours chains and death warrants into the sacred space while a grotesque shadow-puppet of the Mahdi looms over a defiant young woman's rising shadow. The regime's deepest vulnerability: it wears a faith it has hollowed out.*
::::

::::section{title="1979: The Original Sin — Revolutionary Tribunals and the Blood Price of Power" id="1979-the-original-sin"}
:::brief
The 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah began as a broad popular coalition — liberals, leftists, nationalists, and Islamists united against the monarchy. Within months, the clerical faction led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had sidelined or destroyed every other partner.
:::

The instrument of that consolidation was terror.

In the spring and summer of 1979, Islamic Revolutionary Tribunals (also called revolutionary courts) were established across the country. These were not courts in any recognizable sense. Proceedings were summary, often held in secret or with no defense counsel, with vague charges such as "corruption on earth" or "warring against God." Sentences were frequently delivered and carried out the same day by firing squad. Khomeini personally legitimized the process, appointed many of the clerical judges, and in some cases intervened directly in death sentences.

Contemporary documentation by Amnesty International, which sent a mission in 1979, recorded 899 specific cases tried by these tribunals. By October 1979, when Khomeini temporarily ordered a pause, more than 600 people had already been executed. Many hundreds more followed in the subsequent years. The Boroumand Center's Omid database, which meticulously tracks named executions since the revolution, confirms hundreds of documented cases in 1979 alone — former officials, military officers, SAVAK agents, and rapidly expanding categories of political opponents.

The targets quickly broadened beyond the old regime. Leftist groups, liberal intellectuals, members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), and especially Iran's Baha'i community found themselves in the dock. In Kurdish regions that demanded autonomy, the new revolutionary forces fought a brutal counterinsurgency that killed thousands between 1979 and 1983.

In May 1979, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC / Pasdaran) was formally established. Its explicit purpose was not primarily to fight foreign wars but to protect the Islamic Revolution from internal enemies — to serve as the armed enforcer of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist) against any rival power center, whether the regular army, leftist militias, or ethnic movements. From the very first year, the IRGC was the regime's praetorian guard and internal terror force.

By 1980 the "Cultural Revolution" closed the universities for years while they were purged of secular and leftist professors and students. The pattern was set: any independent center of power or thought would be crushed.

This was not the chaotic excess of a revolution that later sobered up. It was the deliberate method by which one faction of the revolution monopolized power and announced that dissent would be treated as treason against God.

![Revolutionary Tribunals, 1979](https://mystrangemind-images.us-iad-10.linodeobjects.com/images/articles/the-regime-that-devours-its-own/02-1979-revolutionary-tribunals.jpg)
*Clerics and armed revolutionaries conduct summary justice in the first months of the Islamic Republic. The firing squads that began in 1979 never truly stopped.*
::::

::::section{title="1988: Khomeini’s Death Commissions — The Great Prison Massacre" id="1988-the-prison-massacre"}
:::brief
The early 1980s brought another wave of mass killings as the regime crushed armed opposition from the MEK and leftist groups during the Iran-Iraq War. But the single most concentrated act of postwar internal terror came in the summer of 1988.
:::

After Iran accepted a ceasefire with Iraq, and after a failed MEK incursion from Iraqi territory, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a secret fatwa ordering the execution of political prisoners who remained loyal to their organizations. "Death commissions" — panels of a judge, a prosecutor, and an intelligence official — were dispatched to prisons across the country. Prisoners were given minutes-long interrogations that amounted to loyalty tests:

- "Are you a supporter of the Mujahedin?"
- "Will you denounce them?"
- "Do you pray?"

Those who gave unsatisfactory answers were hanged, often in groups the same day. Estimates of those killed range from 3,000 to 5,000 or more (Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch place the figure in the several thousands). The vast majority had already served or completed sentences for non-violent political activity. Many were prisoners of conscience. The bodies were buried in unmarked graves; families were denied information or proper mourning for years.

Several members of those death commissions later rose to the highest positions in the Islamic Republic, including the judiciary and the presidency. There has never been accountability.

The 1988 massacre was not an aberration in a time of war. It was the logical continuation of the logic established in 1979: political opposition is not disagreement; it is war against God, and the punishment is death.

![The Architecture of the 1988 Massacre](https://mystrangemind-images.us-iad-10.linodeobjects.com/images/articles/the-regime-that-devours-its-own/03-1988-death-archive.jpg)
*Evin's hallways lined with the photographs of the executed. The 1988 death commissions turned bureaucratic paperwork into mass murder on an industrial scale.*
::::

::::section{title="2022: Woman, Life, Freedom — The Uprising the Regime Feared Most" id="2022-woman-life-freedom"}
:::brief
The mandatory hijab is not a minor cultural preference. It is a tool of total control, a constant reminder that the state owns a woman's body. The morality police are the street-level enforcers of a medieval ideology updated with modern surveillance — cameras, apps that let citizens snitch on each other, and now AI monitoring of public spaces.
:::

The mandatory hijab is not a minor cultural preference. It is a tool of total control, a constant reminder that the state owns a woman's body. The morality police are the street-level enforcers of a medieval ideology updated with modern surveillance — cameras, apps that let citizens snitch on each other, and now AI monitoring of public spaces.

Mahsa Amini's murder was the match, but the kindling had been there since 1979. The revolution that promised "independence, freedom, and Islamic Republic" delivered the last part with a vengeance. Women who lived through the Shah's era and the early revolution watched rights they had taken for granted — divorce rights, custody, dress — stripped away in the name of God.

The 2022 uprising was different from previous protests. It was led by women and the young, and it was explicitly anti-regime rather than reformist. The regime understood the threat. Leaked documents showed top military commanders ordering forces to "mercilessly" confront "troublemakers." They did.

The killing continued long after the streets were cleared. Protesters were executed after show trials based on tortured confessions. The regime added new tools: longer prison sentences for "improper hijab," business closures for women who refuse to comply, and a new wave of repression in 2025-2026 that referenced the 2022 trauma as justification for even harsher measures.

This is not about modesty. It is about power. A regime that must terrorize half its population into submission has already lost the argument for its own legitimacy.

![Woman, Life, Freedom — 2022](https://mystrangemind-images.us-iad-10.linodeobjects.com/images/articles/the-regime-that-devours-its-own/04-woman-life-freedom-2022.jpg)
*A young woman raises a burning hijab as a torch while thousands confront the security forces. The uprising that revealed how deeply the regime fears its own daughters.*
::::

::::section{title="II. A Factory of Death: Executions as Policy" id="ii-a-factory-of-death-executions-as-policy"}
:::brief
If the world paid attention only during spectacular protests, it missed the daily machinery of death.
:::

Iran is one of the world's leading executioners per capita — often the leader when China is excluded. The numbers have surged in recent years as the regime responded to the 2022 challenge and broader discontent:

- 2023: At least 853 executions (Amnesty International)
- 2024: At least 972 executions
- 2025: At least 2,159 executions — the highest figure recorded in 44 years, and more than double the previous year.

These are minimums. Many executions are carried out in secret or in groups. A large percentage are for drug offenses that would not qualify as "most serious crimes" under international law. Others are for the catch-all political charges of "enmity against God" (moharebeh) and "corruption on earth."

The victims disproportionately include ethnic and religious minorities — Baluchi, Kurdish, Afghan nationals — and political prisoners. Public hangings are still used as spectacle and warning. Trials are a farce: defendants often have no meaningful access to lawyers, "confessions" are extracted under torture, and appeals are theater.

The surge in executions after 2022 was not an accident of overzealous prosecutors. It was policy — a deliberate choice to terrorize the population back into submission after the regime saw how close it came to losing control.

A regime that kills its own citizens at this rate while claiming to be the champion of the oppressed in Gaza and Lebanon has revealed the full depth of its hypocrisy and its fear.
::::

::::section{title="2023–2024: The Axis of Resistance — Build-Up and Sudden Collapse" id="2023-2024-axis-of-resistance"}
:::brief
While the mullahs were busy killing Iranians at home, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — particularly its Quds Force — was busy building an empire of proxies abroad.
:::

Hezbollah in Lebanon became the most sophisticated non-state military in the world, armed and funded by Iran to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza received training, weapons designs, rockets, drones, and money. The Houthis in Yemen were supplied with missiles and drones that could reach Saudi Arabia and, later, commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Iraqi and Syrian militias filled out the "Axis of Resistance."

This was not defensive. It was an offensive strategy to project power, deter Israel and the United States, and position Iran as the dominant regional force while avoiding direct conventional war.

The strategy produced its most spectacular result on October 7, 2023.

U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran did not give the direct order for that day's atrocities. But the same intelligence, along with Israeli reporting and seized documents, made clear that years of Iranian funding, training (including hundreds of fighters trained in Iran as late as September 2023), weapons, and coordination meetings with IRGC officers enabled Hamas to carry out an attack of that scale and barbarity. The "Axis" was activated in the aftermath: Hezbollah opened a northern front, the Houthis attacked shipping, and Iranian-aligned groups struck U.S. forces.

The IRGC's great project had finally delivered the multi-front war its architects had long dreamed of.

What they did not anticipate was how quickly and brutally the fronts would collapse under Israeli and American pressure.
::::

::::section{title="2025–2026: Nuclear Reckoning — Strikes on Iranian Soil" id="2025-2026-nuclear-reckoning"}
:::brief
For decades, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the IRGC leadership played a dangerous game with the nuclear program. Official policy was that nuclear weapons were forbidden by religious edict. The actual policy was to enrich uranium to 60% — a hair's breadth from the 90% required for a bomb — while accumulating a stockpile large enough, according to IAEA calculations, for material equivalent to roughly 9-10 nuclear weapons by mid-2025.
:::

For decades, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the IRGC leadership played a dangerous game with the nuclear program. Official policy was that nuclear weapons were forbidden by religious edict. The actual policy was to enrich uranium to 60% — a hair's breadth from the 90% required for a bomb — while accumulating a stockpile large enough, according to IAEA calculations, for material equivalent to roughly 9-10 nuclear weapons by mid-2025.

Breakout time for fissile material had shrunk to days or a week.

The threats were constant and explicit: "Israel must be wiped off the map," repeated across decades by presidents and supreme leaders alike. "Death to America." "Death to Israel." The IRGC paraded missiles with those slogans painted on them.

In June 2025, the bluff was called.

U.S. and Israeli strikes hit Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. Above-ground facilities were destroyed. Underground halls took significant damage. The program was set back. U.S. intelligence assessed that the time required to produce a weapon had been pushed back to 9-12 months.

Khamenei himself died in early 2026 during the opening phase of the broader conflict. His son Mojtaba, viewed as even more hardline and tied to the IRGC, took over.

The regime that had spent years telling its people that its nuclear program was an unassailable symbol of national strength and scientific pride had instead turned parts of that program into a target. The bluster had invited the very outcome the IRGC's "forward defense" was supposed to prevent.

![Nuclear Reckoning, 2025–2026](https://mystrangemind-images.us-iad-10.linodeobjects.com/images/articles/the-regime-that-devours-its-own/07-nuclear-reckoning.jpg)
*A cleric and general celebrate over the ruins of their own nuclear program as the strikes they invited fall. The people trapped in the wreckage pay the price for the leadership's hubris.*
::::

::::section{title="The President They Came to Free: Ahmadinejad and the Revolution That Eats Its Own" id="the-president-they-came-to-free" era="2017–2026"}
:::brief
For eight years he was the revolution's snarling face to the world — the Holocaust-denying, Israel-baiting populist the West loved to fear. Then Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fell out with the Supreme Leader, was struck from his own ballot, watched his closest aides hauled to prison, and reinvented himself as a dissident. The man who vowed to wipe a nation off the map is now, by some accounts, a prisoner of the revolution he helped build.
:::

### From bogeyman to outcast

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad governed Iran from 2005 to 2013, and for most of that time he was exactly what the regime needed him to be: a blacksmith's son with a populist's tongue and a provocateur's instincts. He hosted a conference of Holocaust deniers. He told the world that Israel must be "wiped off the map" — a translation Tehran would later quibble with, never the sentiment. When his contested 2009 re-election drove millions into the streets, the security forces answered with the bullets and prisons that crushed the Green Movement. He was, in those years, Ayatollah Khamenei's useful populist.

Then the useful populist stopped being useful. In 2011 he picked an eleven-day public fight with Khamenei over control of the intelligence ministry — and lost, badly, in a system where the Supreme Leader does not lose. By 2017 the Guardian Council, the unelected clerical body that decides who is even allowed to appear on a ballot, simply disqualified him from running for president. It did so again in 2021. His closest aides were prosecuted and jailed. The firebrand had been quietly written out of his own revolution.

### The dissident in a hardliner's skin

Stripped of office and access, Ahmadinejad did the one thing insiders almost never do: he turned his fire on the machine itself. He accused the judiciary of corruption, charged the IRGC and the intelligence services with running the economy as a private racket, demanded free elections, and called for the release of political prisoners — including, with breathtaking nerve, the very dissidents his own crackdown had once filled the jails with. He recorded open letters and posted videos courting the same Western audiences he had spent a decade taunting. Whether this was conviction or pure opportunism hardly matters: a former two-term president was now fluent in the language of the opposition, and the regime had no idea what to do with him.

### Caged, or merely cornered?

Here the record goes deliberately blurry — and the regime prefers it that way. For years, rumors of Ahmadinejad's house arrest, travel bans, and warnings to keep quiet have circulated, amplified by his own allies and impossible to confirm in a state that owns the news. The precedent is real enough: the Green Movement leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi have been held under house arrest, without charge or trial, since 2011. What can actually be verified about Ahmadinejad is narrower — the disqualifications, the imprisoned aides, the conspicuous silences, the occasional summons. Around the 2025 strikes, with the leadership bloodied and the future suddenly unfastened, the speculation only intensified: about purges, about which insiders might be sidelined or shielded, about back-channels said to reach men long discarded by the system. None of it is provable. All of it is precisely the sort of thing a paranoid security state grows like mold.

### The point of the story

Strip away the rumor and the irony stands on its own, hard and bright. The man who embodied the revolution's belligerence — who denied one genocide and openly wished for another — was thrown aside by the same apparatus the instant he became inconvenient. A council of clerics overruled the choice of a nation and erased a two-term president. The security services he once commanded turned their tools on his circle. This is the thesis of the entire essay compressed into a single biography: the Islamic Republic does not, in the end, divide the world into Iranian and foreigner, or even believer and infidel. It divides it into the regime and everyone else — and everyone else, given enough time, comes to include its own.
::::

::::section{title="V. Kleptocrats in Turbans" id="v-kleptocrats-in-turbans"}
:::brief
None of this repression or adventurism would be possible without money. The IRGC is not just a military organization. It is a vast economic empire that controls construction companies, smuggling networks, sanctioned oil sales, and large sectors of the formal economy. Commanders and their families live in luxury while the currency collapses and inflation destroys the middle class.
:::

None of this repression or adventurism would be possible without money. The IRGC is not just a military organization. It is a vast economic empire that controls construction companies, smuggling networks, sanctioned oil sales, and large sectors of the formal economy. Commanders and their families live in luxury while the currency collapses and inflation destroys the middle class.

Iran sits on the world's second-largest natural gas reserves and substantial oil. Its people should be rich. Instead, they face one of the most mismanaged economies in the region, with youth unemployment that is structurally catastrophic and a brain drain so severe that hundreds of thousands of the best-educated have left since 2022 alone.

The sanctions are real and painful. But the regime has turned sanctions evasion into a profit center for the very people who claim to be resisting "arrogant powers." The same IRGC that launches missiles at Israel and chants "Death to America" has grown fat on the black market and corrupt contracting.

This is not a revolutionary government that lost its way. This is the logical endpoint of a system that fused absolute religious authority with praetorian military power and no accountability. The result is a parasitic elite that has looted the country while convincing itself that its own survival is identical with the survival of the nation.

![Kleptocrats in Turbans](https://mystrangemind-images.us-iad-10.linodeobjects.com/images/articles/the-regime-that-devours-its-own/06-kleptocrats-in-turbans.jpg)
*IRGC commanders and clerics divide gold and sanctioned wealth while a monster of their own making devours the nation outside. The economic engine of forty-five years of self-destruction.*
::::

::::section{title="VI. The Cult of Strategic Stupidity" id="vi-the-cult-of-strategic-stupidity"}
:::brief
The most remarkable feature of the Islamic Republic's foreign policy is not its wickedness. It is its consistent strategic incompetence.
:::

- The killing of Qassem Soleimani in 2020 removed the single most effective IRGC operator of the modern era and triggered a wave of internal recriminations.
- The "Axis of Resistance" that was supposed to deter Israel instead provided the justification and the targets for the most significant degradation of Iranian power in decades. Hezbollah's leadership was gutted. Hamas was decapitated. The land bridge through Syria was lost when the Assad regime fell.
- Direct Iranian missile and drone attacks on Israel in 2024 were largely intercepted and achieved almost nothing militarily while exposing the weakness of Iranian air defenses when Israel retaliated.
- The nuclear program, the supposed ultimate deterrent, became a magnet for direct strikes on Iranian soil.

At every turn, the regime's leadership has chosen the options that maximize short-term ideological satisfaction and long-term damage to Iran's actual power position. They have confused the ability to cause pain with the ability to win. They have mistaken the fear they inspire in their own population for strength.

The buffoonery is not incidental. It is structural. A system that promotes ideological loyalty over competence, that kills or drives out its best minds, and that treats every problem as a test of revolutionary purity, is almost designed to produce these repeated own-goals.
::::

::::section{title="VII. The People the Mullahs Fear" id="vii-the-people-the-mullahs-fear"}
:::brief
The greatest threat to the Islamic Republic has never been the United States, Israel, or Saudi Arabia. It has always been the Iranian people.
:::

The 2022 uprising showed that the regime has lost an entire generation. The executions and repression that followed showed that the regime knows this and has no answer except more terror.

Every year that passes, the gap between the rulers and the ruled grows. The clerics and IRGC commanders live in a bubble of privilege and ideological self-justification. The people they rule live in a country of collapsed currency, poisoned air, water shortages, and a future that looks worse than the present.

The diaspora — millions strong, educated, and increasingly organized — represents a permanent opposition that the regime can never fully silence. The brain drain continues. The memory of 2022 has not faded; it has become part of the national story that the regime cannot erase.
::::

::::section{title="Conclusion: What They Built and What They Could Not Destroy" id="conclusion-what-they-built-and-what-they-could-not-destroy"}
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The mullahs and the IRGC set out to create an Islamic revolutionary state that would export its model and resist the "arrogant powers" forever. What they actually built was a prison for their own people, a network of proxies that brought death and destruction to multiple countries, and a nuclear program that ultimately invited military strikes on Iranian soil.
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The mullahs and the IRGC set out to create an Islamic revolutionary state that would export its model and resist the "arrogant powers" forever. What they actually built was a prison for their own people, a network of proxies that brought death and destruction to multiple countries, and a nuclear program that ultimately invited military strikes on Iranian soil.

They began that prison in 1979 with firing squads and revolutionary tribunals. They reinforced it in 1988 with the secret hanging of thousands of their own political prisoners. They have maintained it ever since with the highest per-capita execution rate of any country of Iran's size, systematic violence against women and ethnic minorities, and an economic model that loots the nation to feed the Revolutionary Guards.

They have shown remarkable durability. They have also shown a consistent talent for making the worst possible long-term decisions while congratulating themselves on their ideological purity.

Iran is a great civilization with a young, educated, and increasingly brave population. The tragedy is not that the regime has survived this long. The tragedy is what it has done to the country in the process — the lives stolen in Evin Prison and on the streets from the very first year of the revolution onward, the talent driven into exile, the regional wars fueled by Iranian weapons and money, and the slow poisoning of a nation's future.

The regime that devours its own children cannot last forever. The only question is how much more it will break before it finally breaks.

![The People the Mullahs Could Not Devour](https://mystrangemind-images.us-iad-10.linodeobjects.com/images/articles/the-regime-that-devours-its-own/08-the-people-endure.jpg)
*Iranians march past the crumbling fortress that tried to consume them. A people the mullahs and the IRGC could terrorize but never finally break.*
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