The violence of Iran’s regime will only increase

The protesters demonstrating against Iran’s clerical regime have already shown that they are brave. And they seem to be meeting with more and more success.

Women walk around unveiled in Tehran and are hailed by drivers for their courage. It seems some security forces have given up on policing certain remote areas, effectively surrendering control of the streets to the protesters.

This may look like victory, as though the danger from the regime has passed. But Iran’s protesters will need their bravery and every drop of their courage. They have faced immense violence already and it has spurred their movement. But worse is likely to come.

The current wave of demonstrations was begun by an act of state violence against an innocent young woman. Mahsa Amini, who was 22, was viciously beaten into a coma by the so-called morality police. She later died in hospital.

This drew Iranians onto the streets in large numbers, outraged by the appalling treatment Amini had received. The violence the state unleashed upon them cemented the character of these protests.

The senselessness of the violence — the brutality of Amini’s fate — seemed to epitomize the character of the Iranian regime. Resistant to change, out of step with Iran’s young population, completely immune to compromise, and resorting, in the final equation, to casual brutality and savage violence because that is the ultimate prerogative of the revolutionary state.

Tensions that had been building up for years — through repeated protest movements cut off by violence and repeated rigged elections — finally brought Iranians out onto the streets for the most sustained protest movement in a decade.

More violence kept protesters out, demonstrating. Other women and girls have been killed by authorities and their deaths have further fueled the protests.

Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmaeilzadeh were two of the teenagers killed in the course of the protests. The authorities have been deliberately mute on the state’s role in their deaths — but naturally, their parents and the protesters blame the regime.

It is a particular type of violence that the Iranian regime practices, one it believes will allow it to crush any protest movement and forever restrain any challenge to its clerical rule.

Its toolkit is old and unsophisticated, but it has been extensively used. The challenge Iranian protesters now face is how to deal with the targeted violence Iranian leaders will inevitably send their way.

We have seen it across Iran and in every corner of the country; the second locals become too critical of power, the forces of the state descend upon them. We have even seen it abroad, as Iranian-backed militia groups have put down protests in Iraq and Lebanon using similar tactics, producing similar results.

What will happen to Iran’s protests is grim. It will unfold like this. The first wave is a wave of savage, instinctive violence. Protesters are to be detained and beaten — some of them will die. Then the authorities, fearing overwhelm, will start firing on protests, with the intention of scattering large and angry crowds before they start to represent a serious military threat. This campaign is intended to terrify the opposition and drive it off the streets.

Once this level of violence is established, if the protests do not end, the regime will escalate its use of force. It will draw on paramilitaries, the Basij among them, whose primary goal is the defense of the regime at the expense of the people. As the paramilitaries maintain a new state of violent disorder — roughing up protests and preventing peaceful organization in public — the targeted killings of leaders will begin.

Alleged Iranian “snipers” have done this in Baghdad and Basra during protest movements there. Sadly, it is very likely the same tactics will come to bear on the streets of Iran.

Many prominent activists and protesters are already in jail. Many who wrote or sang revolutionary songs were scooped up by authorities and arrested the moment their work began to gain traction.

But among the protests, if they continue, natural leaders will shortly emerge — and the Iranian authorities will seek to kill them. Dozens of leading Iraqi activists critical of the Iranian regime’s influence in Iraq have met that fate: Some of them were followed home from work and shot, others identified and shot at the barricades.

The challenge the protesters now face is how to deal with the targeted violence Iranian leaders will inevitably send their way.

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim

If Iran’s protesters are deemed an existential threat to the regime, its leaders will be targeted, found and killed in just the same way.

The protests in Iran are inspiring, but they are also deeply sad. That such popular feeling exists is remarkable and heroic, but the paths of the protesters are unlikely to be easy. Iran’s leaders are, in their own minds, the keepers of a violent revolutionary tradition. They are allergic to change and accustomed to violence.

Violence caused the protests. It will be used to try to extinguish the hope they have brought.

• Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is the director of special initiatives at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington D.C. and author of “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide” (Hurst, 2017). Twitter: @AzeemIbrahim