It began with the retailers in Tehran’s bazaars. Their anger had peaked in late December as Iran’s foreign money, the rial, slid to an all-time low in opposition to the US greenback. Inflation, as ever, was sky-high. Their protests unfold. Lockdowns, web blackouts and brutal crackdowns adopted: in two weeks, greater than 18,000 folks had been detained and not less than 2600 have been useless, in keeping with one US human rights group, together with college students and members of Iran’s safety forces.
Iran’s chief, the 86-year-old cleric Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned, “Within the face of those that have interaction in destruction, the Islamic Republic won’t again down.”
Within the aftermath, US President Donald Trump – whose warplanes bombed nuclear installations in Iran in 2025 – was weighing choices for a response, from diplomacy to navy strikes and, in late February, talks have been underway between the US and Iran, together with over Iran’s nuclear program. The US had assembled the most important drive of its warships and plane within the Center East in many years.
Now Iran has come below assault – from Israel and the US. explosions in central Tehran. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz mentioned the assault was being achieved “to take away threats.”
How did Iran get right here? Who runs the nation? What’s its Revolutionary Guard? Who’re its “proxies” and its enemies, and why?
What occurred within the 1979 revolution?
Iran sits on the crossroads of Asia and the West, as soon as the hub of the Silk Street buying and selling route. “Even earlier than oil, fuel and different minerals have been found in substantial portions within the twentieth century,” writes historian Ali Ansari in his guide Iran, “European statesmen have been conscious about the geopolitical significance of the world.”
Right this moment, Iran borders a few of the world’s most risky areas, together with Afghanistan and Iraq, from Pakistan within the east to Turkey within the north. Simply throughout the Persian Gulf are the oil and gas-rich Gulf states; Israel is a day’s drive away (border police and bandits allowing) through Iraq and Jordan.
Whereas Iran, or Persia as it’s nonetheless typically referred to as, is considerably lowered in status for the reason that glory days of its historical rulers, Iranians prefer to proudly recall how their nation was a crucible for magnificent cultures that outshone something within the comparatively barbaric West. Take Isfahan, Iran’s one-time capital and with a nuclear enrichment web site that made it extra not too long ago a goal. Constructed within the 1600s at mind-boggling expense by the Safavid ruler Abbas the First, it was a metropolis of such magnificence – intricately tiled mosques, hovering minarets, grand boulevards and water gardens sprinkled with rose petals – that it stays a world-heritage web site able to rivalling Angkor Wat for tourist-pulling energy.
We are able to hint Iran’s up to date state of affairs to many flashpoints, however we’ll go to 1953 and the occasion any Iranian merely calls “the coup”. In a nutshell, amid tensions over neocolonial oil income, Britain and the US assisted the navy in overthrowing the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and drastically empowered the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The shah’s rule, supportive of Western oil pursuits and US anti-communist ideology, was a blended bag. For a time, the economic system grew and the nation modernised. However the shah turned more and more despotic, permitting corruption to flourish, brutally suppressing dissent and indulging in extravagances that, by the Seventies, have been stirring unrest, particularly amongst left-leaning secularists, extra conservative Muslims and people angered by land reforms that had infected social tensions.
Peak “shah” got here in 1971, when, to commemorate the 2500th anniversary of the Persian empire, he threw a lavish social gathering within the historical ruins of Persepolis (now additionally a World Heritage web site). Substances and workers got here from Maxim’s of Paris: truffles, caviar, partridge, foie gras and 2500 bottles of champagne poured into Baccarat crystals have been simply the beginning.
The shah, reported The New York Instances, “was in full navy uniform, his chest coated with medals. The empress wore a inexperienced and white silk ball robe, though it was solely 11am, and lengthy white gloves. A few of the emeralds in her 10‐pound [4.5 kilogram] crown have been the scale of golf balls.” Visitors housed in an expensive tent metropolis included Princess Anne, Princess Grace of Monaco, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, assorted Scandinavian royalty, Richard Nixon’s vice-president Spiro Agnew, and Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu. It was fairly a gathering.
‘Allow them to go all the best way to Mars or past the Milky Manner; they may nonetheless be … unable to resolve their very own social issues.’
Lacking from the social gathering: the non secular chief Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, often called the face of Shia Islam, residing in exile after being jailed twice for dissent. However he despatched his regards. “Allow them to go all the best way to Mars or past the Milky Manner; they may nonetheless be disadvantaged of true happiness, ethical advantage and religious development and be unable to resolve their very own social issues.”
By the mid-Seventies, unrest was rising inside Iran, fuelled by supporters of Khomeini. The economic system started to falter. The shah, recognized with most cancers in 1974, then made a sequence of deadly missteps, together with abolishing the multi-party democracy and arranging a weird newspaper article that claimed Khomeini was homosexual, a drug addict, a British spy and Indian, not Iranian – which backfired by triggering violent protests. Efforts to quash these protests by drive solely infected the state of affairs. By late 1978, the shah’s behaviour was more and more erratic. A televised flip-flop, by which he promised to take heed to protesters’ calls for, fell on deaf ears. In January 1979, he fled the nation together with his household, by no means to return.
Two weeks later, Khomeini returned to the capital, Tehran, on a chartered Air France Boeing 747 full of journalists. “Our tradition has been despotism and colonialism,” he declared as soon as he’d made his means by way of ecstatic crowds, reported the Related Press. “Every thing we had has been thrown to the wind. He, the shah, has made the military observe the orders of one other nation”, apparently the US.
Inside weeks, Khomeini had sidelined the provisional authorities and held a referendum to abolish the monarchy in favour of a sort of Islamic authorities that he himself had devised, primarily based on the idea of “velayat-e faqih”, or “the rule of the jurist”. The referendum handed with 98 per cent of the vote. A brand new period had begun: that of the ayatollahs.
Khomeini, who had provided the promise of a people-friendly democracy, rapidly started governing with a a lot more durable line than lots of his early supporters had anticipated, notably these on the left, whom he misplaced little time in purging. He would go on to present Islamic clerics virtually full energy over authorities coverage, imprison or execute dissidents, mandate that ladies put on the hijab headband, ban Western music, motion pictures and alcohol, and prohibit women and men from swimming or sunbathing collectively.
In 2013-14, British adventurer Lois Pryce took her motorbike to Iran for a 4500-kilometre journey from Tabriz within the north to southern Shiraz. In her guide Revolutionary Street, she recounts a go to to a once-bustling seaside resort. “It was straightforward to see how the Caspian coast would have been the grooviest place to be earlier than the revolution,” she writes, “however the final three many years had taken their toll.” She puzzled “if I might ever in my lifetime see Iranians returning to those seashores of their bikinis and Speedos”.
Khomeini put in place a brand new construction of presidency topped by himself because the supreme chief (and commander-in-chief of the armed forces) with a president under, an Meeting of Consultants clerics and a Council of Guardians to resolve who might run in parliamentary elections and which laws must be struck out for not complying with sharia legislation. The one chief since Khomeini, Ali Khamenei, has but to call a successor. “Khamenei,” wrote Ali Alfoneh for The Arab Gulf States in Washington web site in 2023, “presumably needs to have his personal most popular candidate succeed him, however he can’t publicly title a successor-designate with out making a rival and bringing a couple of twin energy dynamic undermining his personal authority.”
Workplace of the Iranian Supreme Chief through AP
What’s the Islamic Revolutionary Guard?
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is likely one of the strongest – and feared – organisations in Iran, in keeping with the Council on International Relations. Separate from the common navy, it’s charged with defending the state’s regime. It was born of mistrust within the common armed forces amongst Iran’s clerical leaders after they got here to energy, framed as a “folks’s military” that may defend the clerics from any coup, and performing as a “counterweight” to present establishments similar to the federal government and judiciary – it bypasses the elected president and reviews on to the supreme chief.
In addition to being accountable for legislation enforcement, the guard’s pursuits lengthen from oil and fuel tasks to building and telecommunications. It additionally runs Iran’s ballistic missile program, which got here into the highlight in June 2025 when Israeli and US forces attacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment websites after Israel claimed Iran was days from assembling nuclear bombs. The Israeli strikes killed the pinnacle of the Revolutionary Guard, Hossein Salami (pictured above, to the correct of Khamenei). He was changed by Mohammad Pakpour, a guard since 1979 who fought within the Iran-Iraq struggle within the ’80s. The guard’s elite international espionage arm, the Quds Power, misplaced its prime commander, Qassem Soleimani, to a US drone assault in Iraq in 2020.
By way of numbers, the guard is made up of an estimated 190,000 personnel throughout floor forces, air, navy and cyber forces, and since 2007 has commanded the Basij paramilitary arm, which has about 600,000 members when mobilised, reviews the Council on International Relations. (Iran’s common military has about 350,000 troops, together with conscripts.)
Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, the US and Australia (as of November 2025) take into account the guard a terrorist organisation. In Canberra, the transfer to checklist it as a state sponsor of terror adopted the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador and the closure of Australia’s embassy in Tehran, in August 2025, after revelations that the Iranian authorities had directed not less than two assaults in opposition to the Jewish group in Australia in 2024.
Why does Iran have an issue with the US?
“For a lot of Iranians and positively these within the Islamic Republic, the friction may be traced to 1953,” says Ali Ansari, a professor at St Andrews College in Scotland and extensively thought to be a world authority on Iran. He means the coup, after all, that Britain and the CIA helped orchestrate.
Then there’s 1979: the US granted asylum to the shah, prompting offended Islamic revolutionaries to storm the US embassy in Tehran and take 52 US hostages. They have been held for 444 days and launched on January 20, 1981, simply after Ronald Reagan had been sworn in as president. It was additionally in 1979 that Khomeini coined his memorable catchphrase: “[America is] the good Devil, the wounded snake.” (The shah’s son, former crown worth Reza Pahlavi, and different relations nonetheless stay within the US.)
Quick-forward 45 yearsand the good Devil remains to be enemy primary. Forward of Iran’s legislative elections in 2024, Khamenei mentioned this: “Elections are a manifestation of the republican system, and because of this the conceited powers and the US, who’re against each republicanism and the Islamic nature of the Islamic Republic, are in opposition to the elections and the enthusiastic participation of the folks on the poll packing containers.”
Who’re these “conceited powers”? Khamenei once more, this time from 2023: “The conceited powers refers to these villainous, aggressive, worldwide forces that all the time need extra and are by no means ever glad with what they’ve. They observe, make plans, and see that they should create a battle in a single place so as to revenue in another place.”
Then there are the continued US commerce embargoes imposed since 1979 and now in a stalemate. In 2018, the US, throughout Trump’s first presidency, walked away from a 2015 nuclear settlement often called the Joint Complete Plan of Motion, designed to restrict Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In February 2024, the pinnacle of the Worldwide Atomic Vitality Company, Rafael Grossi, mentioned Iran was enriching uranium virtually at weapons-grade, which belied its claims it was for civilian energy manufacturing.
“Iran and the US have many causes to not belief one another,” says Alam Saleh, lecturer in Iranian Research on the Australian Nationwide College. “But it surely’s primarily a couple of energy wrestle. Iran is positioned in maybe probably the most strategically essential areas on the planet, the Center East. Subsequently, Iran’s rise in energy wouldn’t solely undermine the US and the Western pursuits within the area but in addition can be thought-about a menace by lots of Iran’s neighbouring regimes. So no person is blissful within the area.”
What’s Iran’s shadow struggle with Israel? What are its ‘proxies’?
For years, Iran and Israel have been engaged in a “shadow struggle”. Israel had lengthy sought to thwart the regime’s ambitions to construct nuclear weapons, its secret brokers believed to be answerable for assassinating a number of Iranian nuclear scientists, together with one by a remote-controlled machine gun.
However in April 2024, Israel appeared to alter up a gear when its warplanes destroyed the Iranian consulate in Syria’s capital, Damascus, killing not less than 11 folks, together with two senior commanders within the Revolutionary Guard – a provocation that Khamenei vowed can be avenged, foreshadowing rocket and drone assaults that stepped up the battle. (These assaults prompted little harm, partially as a result of Iran telegraphed them.) The next yr, over 12 days in June, Israel launched strikes in opposition to Iran’s nuclear websites, Iran retaliating with missile and drone assaults, the US then hanging targets in Iran – which prompted Iran to launch missiles at a US navy base in Qatar (once more, the bottom had been evacuated) earlier than a ceasefire got here into impact.
But for a few years, Iran largely restricted its threats in opposition to Israel by supporting “proxies”: militant and terror teams within the area, notably Hamas in Gaza. Iran helps Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, though Hezbollah was considerably weakened by Israeli bombing and floor assaults on Lebanon in 2024. It helps the Houthis, a insurgent group that emerged within the Nineteen Nineties in northern Yemen and which, in response to the struggle in Gaza, has harassed navy and business transport passing by way of a pinch level on its solution to the Suez Canal. And it helps numerous militias and political events in Bahrain, to whom it offers weapons, monetary assist and navy coaching by way of the guard and the Quds Power. Iran can be “deeply concerned” within the affairs of next-door neighbour Iraq, particularly for the reason that fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, in keeping with the Council on International Relations.
It’s an uncommon association in that the objectives of the proxies don’t all the time immediately align with these of Iran or its Shia department of Islam. “Iran is just not notably pious with regards to which teams they’ll again,” says Ben Scott, a senior adviser on the Nationwide Safety Faculty at ANU. “They like to again teams which are extra aligned to them, who’re Shia if doable, however they’ll again whoever works. Essentially the most outstanding non-Shia proxy is unquestionably Hamas as a result of Hamas is Sunni Arab. It hasn’t been a simple relationship, because it has been with Hezbollah [which is Shia].”
‘Believable deniability is a giant a part of their method. All that feeds into the concept of build up this community of companions and proxies by way of the area.’
Sunni Islam is the most important department of Islam, adopted by a lot of the world’s Muslims, together with these in Saudi Arabia, making it the most important non secular denomination on the planet. Shia Islam is the second-largest department of Islam and is the dominant type of the religion in Iran, Iraq and Azerbaijan. (The variations between Sunni and Shia Muslims emerged after a disagreement over the succession to the Prophet Muhammad.)
Was Iran answerable for the Hamas assaults on Israel on October 7? “We are able to’t totally attribute Hamas’ assault on Israel to Iran,” Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British tutorial in Center Jap political science, instructed us in 2024. “However I do suppose that the hyperlink there may be that, after an unprecedented wave of mass protests following the demise of Mahsa Amini, Iran’s leaders determined the perfect type of defence is offence.” Moore-Gilbert was famously detained by the regime for 804 days and now advocates for different hostages and activists inside Iran.
“Believable deniability is a giant a part of their method,” says Ben Scott. “All that feeds into the concept of build up this community of companions and proxies by way of the area, which you should use to hold out these battles elsewhere to assault US, Israeli and Gulf Arab states.”
Iran and the Saudis are on opposing sides within the civil struggle in Yemen, the Houthis pitted in opposition to the ousted authorities supported by Saudi Arabia. Once more, says Scott, “there’s a debate about Iran’s command and management. It’s truthful to say it’s a lot looser with regards to the Houthis.”
In the meantime, Iran’s home troubles have been brewing for a very long time, not least as costs have risen a lot quicker than wages, making on a regular basis objects unaffordable. Even earlier than the protests of 2022, The Monetary Instances reviews, Iran “skilled the world’s quickest progress within the migration charge” to rich OECD nations between 2020 and 2021, a rise of 141 per cent. The variety of Iranians learning abroad rose yearly for eight years to 2024, in keeping with the Tehran-based Iran Migration Observatory.
Many ladies proceed to defy obligatory hijab guidelines, in place since 1979, both blatantly or by carrying their headscarves “immodestly”. Since 2022, newer legal guidelines have made carrying “inappropriate” clothes much more prison, punishable by as much as 10 years in jail.
“I don’t suppose reform has been on the playing cards for a while,” Ansari instructed us in 2024. “The regime has run out of concepts and may solely consider doubling down on a fossilised ideology. I feel it’s on a gentle spiral downwards.”
With Maher Mughrabi
This explainer was first printed on February 25, 2024. It has since been up to date to replicate a sequence of developments.
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