Long before the bombs started falling over Tehran, the signs were there for anyone willing to look.
The Jerusalem Post had been documenting the Islamic Republic's cruelties for months. A human rights lawyer named Khosro Alikordi was found dead in his Mashhad office hours after a regime interrogation. A young activist, Bita Shafaei, was hauled into custody alongside her mother for the crime of posting a video in support of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. Minuscule protests that were, at first, little more than scattered gatherings.
Then came December 28.
The big merchant protest in Tehran. The bazaar shut down. A general strike took hold. The economy had reached critical levels, and the Iranian street responded with a fury that would have seemed unthinkable even by the standards of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement.
Protests spread across the country. The regime's response left thousands dead over the span of just two days in early January. And then came an internet blackout so complete, so prolonged, that the country was operating on something approaching North Korea levels of isolation.
For those in the Iranian diaspora, the silence was excruciating. Weeks passed without the ability to check on family, to confirm who was alive, who had been taken. But when messages did trickle out, through whatever cracks remained in the regime's digital wall, they carried an unmistakable sentiment: hope, gratitude for the outside support, and a plea. Iranians stood on the streets of Tehran and cities across the country, calling on President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu to come and help.
That help arrived on February 28, when Israel and the United States launched Operation Roaring Lion, a joint aerial campaign that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei within the operation's opening minutes and has since struck thousands of targets across the country.
This is not, it should be said, some kind of 2003 Iraq-style invasion. Israel has never really invaded foreign countries in that manner. This is something altogether different, an aerial campaign against a country thousands of miles away, and the distinction matters, not only to analysts and policymakers, but to the Iranians watching it unfold.
What Iranians who have managed to get messages out to the Post have consistently emphasized is what the campaign is not doing as much as what it is. Israel and the United States are deliberately targeting the regime's infrastructure rather than the Iranian people: IRGC installations, command structures, and, more recently, Basij checkpoints on the streets where plainclothes enforcers had been the most visible face of everyday oppression. The Basij targeting, in particular, has drawn a striking response from Iranians. These were the people brutalizing the public at street level, and the reaction from those we have been in contact with has been only joy that these specific targets have been struck.
The IDF's recent acknowledgment that regime change was never an explicit military objective drew alarm in some quarters, a sense that the promise made to Iran's people was being walked back. But when you think about it, this was always obvious. Israel and the US are attacking from the air. There are no boots on the ground. The goal was never to march into Tehran. It was to lay the groundwork for Iranians to take their future into their own hands.
And this is where the picture becomes more interesting than most Western coverage has suggested. Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has evolved from a symbolic figure of exile into something closer to an active opposition leader, recently referenced on social media what he called the "Immortal Guards," essentially sleeper cells, small, unconnected groups scattered across Iran, loyal to the opposition and waiting for the right moment. This is not secret intelligence. It is all there on Pahlavi's public channels, a portrait of an opposition movement that has been organizing quietly for precisely this moment.
The million-dollar question is whether that moment will come. Will the conditions align, enough of the regime's infrastructure degraded, enough fear removed from the streets, for 90 million people to do what scattered protests have attempted and failed to accomplish for decades? There are many who don't think it will happen. But there is a good reason to believe the majority of the 90 million people trapped inside Iran despise this regime, and that when the conditions are right, they will act.
As for the new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, appointed by the Assembly of Experts on March 8 in what critics have called an IRGC-engineered power grab, the opacity surrounding his status is remarkable even by the Islamic Republic's standards. Reports have ranged from Mojtaba being fully in control to lying in a coma, unaware that his father, wife, and other family members were killed in the strikes.
The truth is probably somewhere in between, as it usually is. But the absence of video appearances, the reliance on a written statement released to the media rather than the address that was expected, none of it inspires confidence in the picture of stability the regime is trying to project.
Many within the Iranian system itself have questioned Mojtaba's qualifications on both religious and leadership grounds, a legitimacy deficit that echoes the constitutional contortions required to elevate his father back in 1989. This entire appointment, in all likelihood, was engineered by the IRGC to maintain its grip on power. It is difficult to see it lasting.
What all of this points to is a conviction that should be stated plainly: this is an all-or-nothing moment. The protests of December and January crossed a threshold. The internet blackouts reached unprecedented duration. The Crown Prince took an active role. And the coalition struck the Supreme Leader himself. We have gone past the point of no return on so many levels.
Consider the alternative. What would be the point if Trump declared a ceasefire tomorrow and was willing to sit down with the Islamic Republic? This regime would still be in power. And whatever people may say about reformists within the regime, there is no such thing. We would still be left with a country that calls Israel a cancerous tumor to be wiped off the face of the earth, that calls America the great Satan. We would still have to deal with these people.
Could the American administration end this war tomorrow? Absolutely. It could, because of the polls, because of the markets, because that is the nature of geopolitics and global diplomacy. You don't always get what you want. Sometimes the good guy doesn't win. But for those of us here on the firing line, those of us who have spent years running to bomb shelters at three in the morning with our children, the question is why they would. Why push the regime almost to the brink of collapse, kill the Supreme Leader, decimate its command structure, maintain complete control over the skies, and then pull away?
The IDF has indicated that operations may continue through Passover, which begins in early April. This week brings the Persian New Year, Nowruz, and how celebrations unfold inside Iran may offer a first signal of the public mood in a country that has been largely sealed off from the world.
For now, the bombs are still falling. The internet is still dark. And somewhere, scattered across the country in cells that don't know each other's names, the Immortal Guards are listening for a word that hasn't yet been spoken.