Iran is a country with a very long history. From the emergence of its written history in the 6th century BC, with the Achaemenid Empire, to the Islamic "Republic" of the late Khamenei era, one could find events that justify almost any position. However, there is one notable characteristic that is found both at the beginning of Persian history and today, permeating this particular culture throughout its entire scope, to varying degrees depending on the period, but always with consistency. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes more subtle. It is respect for the idea of freedom.
The founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, Cyrus the Great, who was also the first Persian emperor in the written history of Persia, was known for his remarkable tolerance and religious freedom, which he granted to the peoples conquered by the Persian Empire. The principal artifact of that legacy, the Cyrus Cylinder, a barrel-shaped clay tablet inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform and discovered in the ruins of Babylon in 1879, has been called the world's earliest charter of human rights. Now housed in the British Museum, a replica sits in the lobby of the United Nations headquarters in New York. The cylinder records how, after conquering Babylon in 539 BC, Cyrus permitted displaced peoples to return to their homelands and restore their places of worship, reversing the oppressive policies of the defeated Babylonian king Nabonidus. Subsequent Achaemenid emperors continued the policy; as historians have noted, tolerance proved to strengthen political stability so effectively that the empire endured for two centuries.
Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, described the cylinder as representing the first known attempt to run a multi-ethnic, multi-faith state, a new kind of statecraft. Xenophon, the Greek historian, composed his Cyropaedia in the 4th century BC, holding Cyrus up as the model ruler who governed diverse peoples through persuasion rather than oppression. That text later influenced Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers and was reportedly read by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Whether Cyrus acted from genuine idealism or shrewd imperial calculation, modern historians tend to emphasize the latter, which is almost beside the point. The practical outcome was a governing philosophy in which diversity was managed rather than crushed, and that precedent has echoed across millennia.
Ancient Persia and Israel: A Forgotten Alliance
Today, the Iranian regime's relations with Israel are completely hostile, but this was not always the case. Cyrus himself, the first emperor of the first historical Persian Empire, was so positively imprinted on the consciousness of ancient Israel that one of the authors of the book of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 45:1) explicitly presents him as the Messiah awaited by the Jews. The image of an Israelite seeing a Persian as the Messiah sounds paradoxical, but it is easily explained.
Cyrus was the one who overthrew the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BC, allowing the conquered peoples to continue to practice their religious duties and customs undisturbed. He was the one who allowed the Jews, who had been taken captive by the Neo-Babylonian Empire, to return to their land and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, known as the Second Temple, after Solomon's First Temple. The Book of Ezra records the decree directly: Cyrus proclaimed that the God of heaven had charged him to build a house at Jerusalem, and he commanded the surrounding peoples to assist with silver, gold, and provisions. For generations of Jewish commentators and scholars, this act of liberation was not merely a political maneuver; it was the restoration of a covenant.
Observing such a positive start to Israel–Iran relations, as well as an early Iran so tolerant of diversity, one is overcome with intense disappointment when seeing the development of these relations today, with Iran and Israel as bitter enemies and with an Iranian regime that is not only completely intolerant of freedom and religious freedom but also deeply disrespectful and murderous towards its citizens. As Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has observed, there is a great contradiction between what Iran once stood for, its rich heritage, its support for free thinking and freedom of religion, and what it has become today: a state that executes more people per capita than any other country, locked in a death struggle with the very nation whose ancestors once revered its founder as a messiah.
A People Apart from Their Regime
What appears to be a contradiction is not one in reality. Even today, Iran still seems to love freedom just as much. Iran as a people, however, and not as a regime. The general use of the name "Iran" hides a very important and proven distinction: the Iranian people and the Iranian regime both belong to the category "Iran," but they are very different and often contradictory things.
The demographics alone speak volumes. Iran's population of roughly 92 million is strikingly young: the median age is approximately 34–35, and nearly 60 percent of the population is below the age of 39. Most Iranians alive today were born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and have known nothing but theocratic rule. Youth unemployment hovers near one in five. The country's fertility rate has plummeted to roughly 1.44, well below the replacement level of 2.1, a marker not of contentment but of a generation that sees little reason for optimism about raising families under the current system. Nearly 77 percent of Iranians live in urban areas, are digitally connected when the regime permits it, and are acutely aware of how citizens in other countries live.
The Iranian people, with their sacrifices and self-sacrifice, with their revolution against the Khamenei regime and even earlier, have demonstrated in practice their desire for freedom and their desire to be liberated from the regimes that oppress them. It is one of the few countries in the East, if not the only one, that has a very large number of oppressed people (women, young people, and others) who do not hesitate to courageously risk their own lives in the name of freedom and their rights.
The "Woman, Life, Freedom" Uprising and Its Aftermath
The eruption that brought Iran's internal fracture to global attention began on 16 September 2022, when 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Jina Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran's morality police after being arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Eyewitnesses reported she was severely beaten; authorities denied this and claimed she collapsed due to a pre-existing condition, a claim her family rejected. A UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran later concluded that her death was unlawful and caused by physical violence for which the state bore responsibility.
What followed was described as the greatest challenge to the government since the 1979 revolution itself. Under the rallying cry of "Woman, Life, Freedom" (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi), protests engulfed more than 150 cities, towns, and villages across all 31 of Iran's provinces. Schoolgirls demonstrated in numbers for the first time. Even historically conservative power bases, the holy cities of Mashhad and Qom, saw unrest. Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO), based in Norway, verified the killing of at least 551 protesters, including 68 children and 49 women. Tens of thousands were arrested. At least ten people were executed in connection with the protests, according to Amnesty International, after what the organization described as grossly unfair sham trials. The regime arrested and imprisoned human rights lawyers, journalists, athletes who refused to wear the hijab or who quit their national teams in solidarity, and even the Supreme Leader's own niece, Farideh Moradkhani, who had called on foreign governments to cut ties with Iran.
Though the street protests had largely subsided by spring 2023, the underlying dynamics had not changed. Iran Human Rights documented a steep rise in executions, from 815 in the two years before September 2022 to 1,425 in the two years after, arguing that the death penalty was being weaponized to instill societal fear. The morality police, whose dissolution had been briefly rumored, resumed patrols in July 2023 after a ten-month gap. New legislation, the "Hijab and Chastity" bill, with penalties of up to three years' imprisonment, was passed by Iran's parliament and awaited approval by the Guardian Council. The UN Fact-Finding Mission also reported chilling evidence that the state was deploying artificial intelligence and mobile apps to monitor and enforce compliance with mandatory veiling laws. Far from loosening, the apparatus of control was tightening.
The Collapse of the "Axis of Resistance"
While the regime was battling its own citizens at home, its strategic position abroad was disintegrating at a speed few analysts had predicted. The period from late 2023 through 2025 amounted to what some called an annus horribilis, or, more precisely, a multi-year cascade of strategic reversals.
The sequence of losses was staggering. Israel systematically dismantled Iran's proxy network across the Middle East. Hamas, the centerpiece of Iran's influence in Palestine, was decimated after the catastrophic consequences of its October 7, 2023 attack. Hezbollah, for decades Iran's most powerful non-state asset, was severely degraded; its leader Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated by Israel in September 2024, along with prominent IRGC commander Abbas Nilforoushan. Most dramatically, the Assad regime in Syria, Iran's most important state ally and the corridor through which it had armed Hezbollah for years, fell in late 2024, severing a critical logistical link.
Then came the Twelve-Day War. On 13 June 2025, Israel launched a massive surprise attack on Iranian military and nuclear facilities. Over 200 Israeli fighter jets struck more than 100 targets, killing key nuclear scientists and military commanders. On 22 June, the United States joined in, bombing three major nuclear complexes, Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, with bunker-busting ordnance. Iran retaliated with over 550 ballistic missiles and more than 1,000 suicide drones, striking civilian areas in Tel Aviv and Haifa and hitting military, energy, and government sites. A US-brokered ceasefire took hold on 24 June.
The toll was devastating for Iran. More than 600 Iranians were killed and thousands hospitalized, compared to up to 33 deaths in Israel. Iran's nuclear program, central to the Islamic Republic's strategic identity, suffered severe setbacks. Its Russian-supplied S-300 air defense systems, already damaged in earlier Israeli strikes in October 2024, were further degraded. The war exposed the limitations of Iran's alliances: Moscow and Beijing offered only symbolic support, confirming that the "Look East" strategy was transactional rather than strategic. Perhaps most consequentially, the war accelerated the erosion of Supreme Leader Khamenei's authority, shattering the regime's carefully cultivated image of infallibility.
December 2025: The Dam Breaks
If the Woman, Life, Freedom movement was a political and social earthquake, the upheaval that began on 28 December 2025 was an economic one, and it may prove to be more structurally damaging.
The immediate trigger was the catastrophic collapse of the Iranian rial. Battered by cumulative factors, the June 2025 war's infrastructural damage, the reimposition of full UN sanctions in September 2025 (when the Security Council voted against permanently lifting restrictions on Iran's nuclear program), and the US Treasury's deliberate engineering of a dollar shortage, the rial plunged to record lows. By early January 2026, one US dollar traded at approximately 1.42 million rials on the open market, a 56 percent decline in just six months and a staggering collapse from roughly 700,000 rials to the dollar in January 2025. Annual inflation surged past 50 percent, with food prices rising by an average of 72 percent year-on-year. Nearly one in five young Iranians was unemployed.
The protests began with shopkeepers in Tehran's Grand Bazaar shuttering their businesses and taking to the streets, an echo of the bazaar's role in the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah. From Tehran, the unrest spread with astonishing speed to over 100 cities, with demonstrators chanting "Death to the dictator," "Long live the Shah," and the persistent "Woman, Life, Freedom." Truck drivers, students, and salaried workers joined. Prominent cultural figures weighed in: the Sunni cleric Molavi Abdolhamid spoke of crushing living conditions and a political dead end driving the revolt, while the acclaimed filmmaker Jafar Panahi called the unrest an uprising to push history forward.
The regime's response was unrelenting. After initially striking a conciliatory tone, President Masoud Pezeshkian met with bazaar merchants and replaced the Central Bank governor; the crackdown escalated to live fire. The internet was shut down almost entirely, the longest such blackout in the Islamic Republic's history, crippling an economy that the Virginia Tech economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani estimated was running at roughly 50 percent capacity during the shutdown. By early February 2026, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) had confirmed over 7,000 deaths, with thousands more cases under review. The regime's own figures acknowledged over 3,000 dead, by far the most lethal crackdown in modern Iranian history. President Pezeshkian issued an apology on 11 February. A second wave of protests, led by university students, broke out on 21 February.
The proposed government budget that accompanied the crisis laid bare the regime's priorities: security spending was increased by nearly 150 percent, while wage increases amounted to only about two-fifths the rate of inflation. A food coupon system was rolled out, the most dramatic admission of economic failure since 1979.
Why This Time May Be Different
Will these cracks be found? What will be the future of the long-suffering Iranian people? The first and most honest answer is that no one can predict the future with certainty, especially on such complex issues. However, there are many indications and pieces of evidence that offer a compelling answer: the Iranian regime is in its most precarious position since its founding, and its trajectory is one of terminal decline.
Previous rounds of unrest, 2009's Green Movement, the 2017–2018 economic protests, the November 2019 fuel-price uprising, and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, each shook the system but did not break it. Several structural factors distinguish the current moment.
First, the regime has lost control of its currency, the most basic attribute of a functioning state. The rial's collapse is not a temporary shock; it reflects the permanent erosion of Iran's economic foundations under sanctions, mismanagement, and war damage. As the Hudson Institute's analysis bluntly put it: no scenario exists in which the Islamic Republic survives 2026 with its power intact.
Second, the regime's external security architecture has been shattered. The Axis of Resistance, the network of proxy forces that gave Iran strategic depth from Lebanon to Yemen, lies in ruins. Hamas is fighting for survival. Hezbollah is a shadow of its former self. The Assad regime no longer exists. Iran's ballistic missile force, once its principal deterrent, was shown during the Twelve-Day War to be far less accurate and destructive than feared. Russia and China proved to be fair-weather partners at best.
Third, the coalition of discontent is broader than ever. Previous protests drew from specific segments: students in 2009, the working poor in 2017, and women and youth in 2022. The current movement began with the bazaar merchant class, a conservative, commercially oriented group that has historically been a pillar of the Islamic Republic's social contract. When shopkeepers who have profited from the system decide they can no longer make a living, the regime has lost a constituency it cannot afford to lose.
Fourth, the international environment has shifted. US President Donald Trump warned that mass killings of Iranian protesters would trigger intervention, and his administration's actions elsewhere, including in Venezuela, gave the warning some credibility. The US and Israel launched fresh military strikes on Iran on 28 February 2026, with both countries openly framing the objective as regime change. The Mahsa Amini Act, passed with bipartisan support in the US Congress and signed into law in 2024, provides a legal framework for targeted sanctions and support for Iranian civil society, though its implementation has been slow.
The Weight of History
Solid regimes cannot be infiltrated by such a large number of foreign agents as those needed to monitor the movements of senior Iranian officials, including the country's leader himself, with sufficient precision to carry out surgical strikes. In solid regimes, it is not so easy to provoke a revolution led by young people and based mainly on online messages from foreign leaders. Nor can missiles and drones pass so easily to strike the territories of powerful regimes. All of the above clearly show that the Iranian regime is much weaker than it appears and has already collapsed internally. Its blind attacks on countries such as the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and even Cyprus are like a man drowning in water who, just before his last breath, waves his arms spasmodically in every direction.
Yet caution is warranted. The Islamic Republic has survived mass unrest before. Its security apparatus, the IRGC, the Basij militia, and the intelligence ministry remain formidable. The opposition is fragmented: monarchists who support Reza Pahlavi, secularists, leftists, and ethnic minority movements do not share a single vision of a post-Islamic Republic Iran. As the Real Instituto Elcano observed, these protests share key characteristics with earlier movements, economic triggers, rapid diffusion, limited leadership, and eventual containment, while reflecting the accumulated grievances of a society under prolonged pressure. Without sustained elite fragmentation or a complete economic collapse, the political system may adapt once more.
The Brookings Institution's Suzanne Maloney, one of the leading American scholars of Iran, argued that even if the regime survives this latest upheaval, it is moving steadily closer to its own collapse. Three plausible scenarios present themselves: outright regime collapse, managed transformation from within, or muddling through that leaves the system nominally intact but profoundly weakened. None of these preserves the regime as it currently exists. Collapse is possible. Severe decline is inevitable.
The Flame Underground
If one looks back at Iranian history, the politics of Cyrus the Great and the tolerance of the Persian Empire at that time seem to contrast sharply with the authoritarian stance of the current Persian regime. However, the value of freedom has not been lost. It has simply been forced underground so that the flame of freedom can remain unquenched. Freedom is stirring in the hearts of Iranian citizens, seeking cracks through which it can once again express itself freely.
The Iranian regime will fall from the gaps it has created itself. All these decades of mistreatment and murder of its citizens have gradually turned them against their regime, making them more sympathetic to Iran's enemies. A regime that does not respect its citizens will always fall sooner or later. Because it causes the cracks through which both agents and bullets can pass more easily, ultimately killing its corrupt leadership.
There is a Persian proverb that Iranians have begun repeating with grim humor during the latest protests: Same donkey, different saddle. What many Iranians fear most is not the end of the Islamic Republic, but a cosmetic transition that swaps faces at the top while leaving the same corrupt machinery in place. What they want, what the bazaar merchants shuttering their shops, the students streaming out of Tehran University, and the women walking bareheaded through Isfahan's streets all want, is a clean break. Fair rules, real accountability, and a government that derives its legitimacy not from God's alleged representative on earth but from the consent of its people.
The distance from the Cyrus Cylinder to the streets of Tehran in early 2026 spans twenty-five centuries. But the argument, that a diverse people can be governed through tolerance rather than terror, has not changed. What remains to be seen is whether Iran's next chapter will finally close the gap between its ancient ideals and its modern reality.