Iran, Between War and Revolt
Sameneh Moafi and Omid Montazeri on the state of Iranian civil society
The bloody winter of 2026 in Iran began with a mass uprising and its brutal repression, claiming thousands of lives. It ended in a war that devastated the conditions of life, destroying homes, schools, and hospitals. As such, an entire people found themselves trapped in a historical echo of the revolution of 1979 and its subsequent eight-year war.
“The Revolution of 1979 was defeated one day after its victory.” This was among the most provocative positions articulated by Rah-e Kargar, a small but intellectually influential communist organisation on the Iranian revolutionary left. In their writings, accepting defeat was not a means to disrupt a movement’s trajectory. Rather, it was a way to reckon with the limitations that had been present from the outset.
For the fifth anniversary of the revolution, and at the midst of Iran’s war with Iraq, Rah-e Kargar asserted that the revolution (or the February revolution as they would refer to it) could not be repeated. They explained that the moment of populist equality had passed and social contradictions could not be resolved through a blanket solidarity; fraternal on the surface but devoid of political form and content. The Iran of their time held an amorphous population of millions, fractured by competing interests and antagonisms of different and differing social classes. The new ruling block led by Khomeini had suppressed the revolutionary forces and it was no longer conceivable to seize political power overnight. They turned this diagnosis into a single slogan, printed prominently on the front page of one of their early publications:
The revolution is dead, Life to the revolution.
It would not have been easy for them to write these words. The revolution had generated an intense utopian energy and a profound sense of possibility. Yet their position embodied an escape from that euphoria. It showed a recognition of what had been lost and repressed and a return to that site of collective trauma. It involved inhabiting contradiction without seeking premature closure. It was also an act of inheritance: recovering the abandoned legacies of the revolution and staying with its troubles and contradictions.
The ‘day after’ the revolution has been a temporal distortion: a prolonged present bent back toward the past. Events have appeared less as ruptures than as echoes. Instead of discrete moments of dissent, the protests of 1999, 2009, 2019, 2022, and 2026 have repeatedly reinterpreted the excesses and losses of the 1979 revolution. Likewise, the debris of the wars of 2025 and 2026 has lingered as re-inscriptions of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. In between these echoes, Iranians have found themselves in a contradictory condition, between wounds and dreams, hopes and fears, caught in a negative dialectic of origin and destiny, where both life and death are delayed.
The war of the bloody winter of 2026 broke at the Strait of Hormuz, the very site where the war with Iraq had ended. The attack on Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, echoed the downing of an Iranian passenger airliner nearby, 38 years earlier. For the deadly strike on the school, preliminary reports suggested that the US military was responsible and that it was likely the result of a targeting mistake by their planners. Independent investigations used satellite imagery to show that, at the time of the attack, the building was a school and had served that purpose for over a decade. Forensic Architecture (FA) went further and used photographs and videos published on the school's website, to reconstruct its building as a navigable 3D model. Their digital model went into as much detail as interior finishes, the decorations on the walls, and the bright paint on the staircase that connected the boys' school on the ground floor, to the girls' school on the first floor. The impact crater from the strike had landed on the assembly hall of the building and at least 121 schoolchildren aged 6 to 13 were killed.
In 1988, too, the last year of the Iran-Iraq war, as the United States escalated its military operations against Iranian oil infrastructure and naval bases, the shooting down of an Iranian passenger flight by the Strait of Hormuz was officially attributed to a fatal misidentification. Iran Air Flight 655 had been flying its routine route when it was struck by two surface-to-air missiles fired from a US Navy warship. All 290 people on board were killed. The United States later claimed that the cruiser had mistaken the aircraft for an F-14 Tomcat, a US-made fighter jet still in Iran's inventory, that it had repeatedly attempted to contact the aircraft but received no response, and that the flight had departed from a joint civilian and military airport. In fact, CIA documentation produced around this time also referred to a possible military support facility in Minab, laying the ground for future target identifications.
The bloody winter had a different beginning. A euphoric energy, reminiscent of the day after the revolution, had swept throughout Iran, from major urban centres to peripheral towns. It was triggered by a deepening economic crisis shaped by decades of Western sanctions, predatory accumulation by state elites, and abrupt policy shifts imposed across the country. In collective acts of defiance, people staged sit-ins in bazaars, confronted anti-riot police, and occupied the streets. In Abdanan, a small town in Ilam Province, protesters had managed to seize control of the town. Some broke into a chain store affiliated with the military, smashed the CCTV cameras, and ripped open bags of rice. They tossed the grain into the air, a commodity many of them could scarcely afford to buy, as an act of defiance and a symbolic reclaiming of their dignity. The security forces were left with no option but to retreat. For a brief moment, hope for radical change appeared on the horizon. But history repeated itself, bringing back a familiar trap.
At least in its initial phase, the protests appeared to follow the peculiar historical pattern of revolutions that follow wars. Kurdish-Iranian scholar in International Relations, Kamran Matin had explained in a post: “French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions all followed wars that bankrupted the state, leading to general impoverishment and popular insurrections that overthrew the ancient régime.”
Less than a year had passed from the war of the summer of 2025. Brief though it was, that war had accompanied a monstrous intimacy. As documented in the Citizen Lab investigation We Say You Want a Revolution, a sophisticated information campaign was directed at Iranian audiences, using fake social media accounts, AI-generated content, and coordinated messaging to encourage anti-regime mobilisation inside Iran. Its most dramatic episode was the circulation of a fabricated video purporting to show a strike on the gates of Evin Prison, seemingly signalling the beginning of a prison break. Then, FA’s analysis showed that at least six strikes had landed within the perimeters of Evin. The targeted buildings included the visitation hall where families would come to meet their loved ones, as well as wards 4, 240 and 209, where prisoners were held behind bars and had no means to escape. Seventy-two were killed in these strikes. The so-called “symbolic” attack on Evin redefined foreign intervention, fused war with revolt, labelled precision targeting as a means to separate the state from the people and invited the latter to take to the streets and bring regime change.
As the days passed, however, it became increasingly clear that history unfolded with the cunning of reason. There was no simple pattern to events. The uprising did not emerge in the aftermath of war but was taking shape in anticipation of it. In an unforeseen turn, the son of the deposed Shah advanced a restorative vision of regime change, one grounded in a return not to the future but to the day before the 1979 revolution. Through a series of consecutive public appeals, he called on Iranians to chant at specified dates and times, then urged them to take to the streets, occupy urban centres, and prepare for his return. Finally, he linked the nationwide uprising to the prospect of foreign intervention, echoing a message from the US president as he declared: “help is on its way.”
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The thousands who responded on 8 and 9 January were suppressed by the state with extraordinary violence. Live ammunition was used against masses of civilian protesters, including children. Streets were covered in blood. Morgues overflowed with bodies. Terror spread through the whole of the nation like wildfire. In the eight weeks that followed, some waited, some longed, some felt put on hold, embracing for an intervention, the kind that doesn’t ask permission. Finally, on 28 February, the United States and Israel launched a war and put their foot down by taking on the same day, the life of the state’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran, and over 121 children in the elementary school in Minab. A full circuit had been completed, and the trap between war and revolt had taken its shape.
Blood was washing blood. Friendships broke, families shattered, and a whole society lost its ability to narrate what it was experiencing. Those who defended the war each returned to the revolution in different ways: some as its protagonists, others as antagonists; some to renew their vows, others to repudiate them; some to embrace its day after, others longing for the day before. What could be more romantic than embracing war in pursuit of a lost cause, once believed to be worth living, and dying, for? How else can one account for the choice of death over life, or for the enduring appeal of martyrdom as the highest form of political subjectivity?
It felt as though Iranians had found themselves in the last scene of the film Bahram Beyzai made in the year of the revolution, the Ballad of Tara (1979): a mourning mother, dressed in blood-red, facing a past that refused to remain past. Just like her, Iranians in their multiplicity, the state supporters, monarchists, Kurdish groups, the left, the anti-imperialists and the Mojahedin, were chasing the revolution, sword in hand, turning it helplessly against the waves of a rocky sea.
The history of Iran is often written as a history of popular uprisings. Analyses of social movements have tended to focus on acts of rebellion and their confrontation with various forms of repression. For their limited framework, these historical inquiries have in fact contributed to the persistence of the trap of war and revolt. The problem is not only that uprisings repeat themselves, but that they are repeatedly interpreted through the same temporal frame of rebellion and repression. This emphasis has clouded the constitutive role of war. Wars are not merely a backdrop to uprisings, but a force that shapes their emergence, trajectories, and political meanings.
The war of the winter of 2026 marked the fourth time in the past five decades where the United States conducted military operations in Iran. The first, Operation Eagle Claw (April 1980), was brought only a year into the revolution as an ambitious attempt to deploy military assets into Tabas desert and rescue the American hostages. Eight years later, amidst the Iran-Iraq war and through Operation Praying Mantis (April 1988) the US targeted Iranian oil platforms and naval vessels along the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. It was about six weeks into these operations that they shot the Iran Air passenger flight. In many ways, these interventions contributed to pushing Iran to accept the ceasefire at the time. The third episode occurred during the summer of 2026 amidst the Iran-Israel war, when the United States bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities. Following those strikes too, the US called for a ceasefire and urged Israel to halt its attacks.
These three operations were limited, short-lived, and surgical in nature. But the war of 2026 was different. It brought a combination of established American and Israeli strategies, stretching from targeted assassinations to the destruction of the conditions necessary for life, and life-sustaining infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, oil and gas infrastructure and the air that people breathed. Iran responded immediately, and what began as a series of surgical operations rapidly escalated into a full-scale regional war with global consequences.
Despite eliminating large parts of Iran's military and political leadership, the war failed to produce the kind of political transformation that some had anticipated. On the contrary, it largely displaced the longstanding debates over the Islamic Republic's structural crises and institutional inefficiencies, giving way instead to the immediate imperatives of nationalism. The Iranian state managed to use the war to rebuild itself anew. Externally, it succeeded in reclaiming its position within the region as an anti-imperialist power, locking arms with its allies in Lebanon and Yemen. Internally, it managed to mobilise sections of society to the extent that the streets of most cities and towns were occupied on a daily basis since the start of the war in demonstrations against the US and Israel and in support for the state. These mobilisations culminated in a week-long funeral procession, during which millions were brought to mourn the loss of Khamenei and his family. While these displays of national unity carried elements of anti-imperialism, they deepened internal divisions within society across class, ethnicity, and gender.
One of the more prominent terms of the 1970s, was Khalgh (the people), particularly amongst the Fedai and Mojahed guerrillas who saw themselves as part of the national liberation movements in the region. It was not a narrowly defined political constituency, but a people understood as the collective agent of revolutionary transformation. The gorillas associated it with revolutions driven through mass participation rather than formal political organisation, such as those in Algeria and China. For them, it functioned less as a precise category and more as a mobilising myth: an expansive, unifying subject that could encompass workers, the petty bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and even sections of the national bourgeoisie in a united front. As such It gave the revolutionary moment its initial openness, creating the expectation that a diverse coalition could legitimately claim a place in the post-revolutionary order. In this sense, the future of Iran laid in the imagined unity of a khalq.
It was only a year and a half into the revolution that the war with Iraq began. By their inherently liminal and antagonistic nature, wars redraw boundaries with greater force and clarity. They create new alliances, define new enemies, and legitimise forms of extraordinary violence against external adversaries that can easily be extended to internal opposition. In this process, the khalq ceased to function as an open and capacious political subject and instead became progressively delimited through the distinctions imposed by wartime mobilisation.
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The political effects of the war were so profound that it became impossible for any political group not to define itself in relation to it. The Iranian left, who at the time, carried an unprecedented diversity of political tendencies and theoretical positions, found itself grappling with the nature of the revolution, the state and the war. At the time a distinctive culture of publishing had flourished across leftist groups, some periodicals addressed and analysed immediate political concerns, while others were devoted to articulating a group’s theoretical foundations.
Competing interpretations of the appropriate course of action emerged in the first two months of the war, between September and October of 1980, each grounded in a distinct understanding. Kar, the publication of the majority faction of the Organisation of Iranian People's Fedai (or Fedai - Aksariyat in short) declared the war as imperialist in nature. It explained that the Iraqi regime was the enemy of Iran, the enemy of the labouring classes of Iraq, the enemy of the Kurdish groups and the enemy of all revolutionary forces and as such the enemy of the Khalq. Accordingly, it called on its members to join the frontline and defend the Islamic Republic. The war, it argued, imposed a duty to preserve national unity and defend the homeland. Later, they went as far as publishing the name of their members who were martyred in the frontlines with pride. They even advocated a slogan on their 1st October 1980 issue “arm the Revolutionary Guards with heavy weaponry”, the very paramilitary force that had been previously deployed to suppress the autonomous councils in Kurdistan. In contrast, the Minority faction (Aghaliat) saw the war as a betrayal of the people's interests, and both states were reactionary.
Peykar, the outlet of the Marxist splinter of the Mojahedin, characterised the war as both “unjust” and “deceptive”. It was unjust, they argued, because it was waged by reactionary states and ran counter to the interests of the Iranian and Iraqi working classes. It was deceptive in that it sought to suppress revolutionary consciousness in both countries through the mobilisation of Arab and Persian nationalism. From this perspective, the question of who had initiated the war was politically irrelevant. What mattered was that imperial and socio-imperial powers supplied the weapons used to devastate the oil infrastructures of both countries, structures built by the laboring classes, who would ultimately bear the greatest cost. Inspired by Lenin, they proposed ceasing the possibility and transforming the war with Iraq into a civil war against the Iranian state.
Rah-e Kargar, heavily critiques Peykar for their blind and inappropriate interpretations of Lenin, without doing the hard work of analysis. War is the continuation of politics, they described, and politics is the most lively and productive means for class consciousness. The question at stake, they asserted was the following: Is it possible for a ruling class who is anti-revolutionary and the state who supports the interests of this class, to take part in a war, in which it would fight for the interests of the Khalgh? They continued, the political independence of Iran was brought by the revolution of the masses, and it must be defended until they come to power.
The Mojahedin dared to occupy a more ambivalent and ultimately untenable position, one that actively pushed the practical limits of independence. In an early pamphlet, they insisted on participating in the war effort against Iraqi aggression, but sought to do so autonomously from the state, organising through independent ranks and avoiding incorporation into official structures. In practice, this proved impossible. Participation required access to arms, which the state denied them. What they wanted defied the very logic of a state who had just gained monopoly of the means of violence. Even when they managed to capture weapons in combat, as in the battle of Qasr-e Shirin in October 1980, those arms were quickly confiscated.
A deeper contradiction followed. As they attempted to fight the external enemy, they found themselves increasingly treated as an internal one. Two months into the war’s outbreak, on 16 November 1980, their publication carried an imageof sixteen of their fighters who had posed victoriously with their arms for a picture. Their caption explained that the majority had been arrested by Iranian forces while fighting against the Iraqi invasion of Abadan and Khorramshahr. They were subsequently transferred to a prison in Abadan, at the very moment it was under bombardment by the same forces they had been fighting. In less than a year, the Mojahedin entered into an urban war with the Iranian state. Month after month, they were driven, street by street, out of Tehran and into the borders with Iraq. Within five years, the group declared an official base in Iraqi soil, from which their Liberation Army would begin attacking Iran.
Eight years into the war, the morale of the Iranian forces had declined sharply. War historian Jafar Shirali Nia illustrates this through his observation of military recruitments. Enlistment numbers remained high. Students, in particular, continued to sign up and board buses bound for the front lines, waving goodbye to their families as they departed. The journey could last up to twenty-four hours, crossing more than a dozen cities between Tehran and the border regions with Iraq. Yet as the buses drew closer to the trenches, hesitation began to set in. One by one, passengers disembarked, abandoning the journey midway. By the time the buses reached the front, many arrived nearly empty. The number of Iranians captured by the Iraqi military doubled in the war’s final year, reaching twenty-four thousand. More than a million lives were lost. Homes and civilian infrastructure were devastated, while entire territories and waterways were left polluted.
The war drew to a close in the summer of 1988 by a UN brokered ceasefire and found the Iranian left with all its multiplicity extinguished: some on the trenches of the war with Iraq and others behind Iran’s prison walls. In the time between signing the ceasefire and its coming to effect, the Iranian state systematically massacred thousands of Iranian political prisoners across the spectrum of opposition, from the Mojahedin to armed and unarmed factions of the left, that it held captive in multiple cities across the country. The massacre was “an act of violence unprecedented in Iranian history” explained historian Ervand Abrahamian “unprecedented in its form, content, and intensity.” Great care was taken to conceal and deny the executions, which were carried out after the decision of a three-person committee rendered in a matter of minutes, rather than through any meaningful judicial process. The bodies were buried in unmarked mass graves, without names, and in many cases, even the locations of the burial grounds were withheld from bereaved families. With this ending, the fervent revolutionary society of 1979 was transformed into a depoliticised nation, cloaked in silence and mourning.
Four decades later, when a participant in the mass executions of 1988 was arrested overseas, the trap of war and revolt resurfaced. Hamid Nouri was arrested upon arriving in Sweden, at Arlanda Airport in November 2019, charged with the murder, torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners connected to the 1988 executions. It had taken years of groundwork by the surviving revolutionaries, the survivors of the massacre, along with the investigators, lawyers and human rights advocates they had persuaded, who helped piece together and identify those involved and track their movements. Under Swedish law, grave international crimes committed abroad could be prosecuted regardless of where they were committed, based on the principle of universal jurisdiction. This made it possible for the Swedish prosecutors to pursue the case once Nouri entered the country.
It was only by being framed as a war crime that the 1988 massacre, a political violence that claimed thousands of lives, could be brought before a Swedish court under the principle of universal jurisdiction. The violence endured, a violence that was simultaneously conditioned by war and directed against a political opposition group at home, could not fit into easy classifications. The paradox exceeded the well-known tension between historical truth and legal truth. It pointed to the layered and unresolved character of Iranian history itself, stretching across and beyond the borders of the nation-state: a predicament through which a people had experienced life in the trap of war and revolt.
The arrest of Nouri was a turning point. After decades of denial and silence, the life and fate of the revolution’s revolutionaries was brought into public view. The events of the summer of 1988 were formally brought before a court and closely monitored by international observers. Portions of the hearings were made available online, and interpretation was provided in multiple languages, including Farsi, allowing survivors and the families of victims to follow the trial in real time.
The prosecution argued that the war did not end with the ceasefire and a series of military operations were launched in the months before and days after by the Mojahedin: Operation Sunshine (28 March 1988), Operation Forty Stars (18 June 1988) and Operation Eternal Light (26 July 1988). It explained that these operations were carried out in collaboration with and under the control of the Iraqi Army. On this basis it sought to establish that the Mojahedin were participants in international armed conflict between Iran and Iraq. The Mojahedin themselves had a different perspective. For them, their operations were part of an internal armed conflict. The tension between their views came into sharp focus during the court’s eighty-sixth session, when a western professor of international law, was called to testify as an expert witness and stood under questioning by the legal counsel for the plaintiffs affiliated with the Mojahedin:
Plaintiffs’ Counsel: Could you once again explain to us, in simpler and more understandable terms, when you say there was overall control [by Iraq over Mojahedin], what evidence and arguments you can present in support of that claim?
Expert witness: “If you look at paragraphs 26 onwards in my expert report, you will see that I refer there to Iraq’s support. This support was not limited to financial investment and military equipment; rather, it also included military training provided to the Mojahedin, and military operations against Iran were carried out with bilateral cooperation and coordination. It is also important to add that, based on the information I collected regarding Iraqi intelligence cooperation with the Mojahedin, this is mentioned in their Directive No. 14 and is documented in written form. I should add, however, that this information cannot be verified, and I proceed on the basis that I am unable to confirm it.”
Plaintiffs’ Counsel: Let’s continue… it’s good that you mentioned, regarding Directive No. 14, that you have no evidence confirming its authenticity and have been unable to verify it. But regarding Iraqi military training of the Mojahedin—what is your source for that? Do you have reliable sources on this point?
Expert witness: “If you refer to the sources in my expert report, they are specified there…”
Plaintiffs’ Counsel: So, if it is established that the sources you relied on, and the information you obtained, were not reliable, then your conclusion and theory regarding overall control would also collapse. Isn’t that correct?
Expert witness: “Exactly.”
In effect, a strange reversal had taken place. The charge of the massacre of thousands of political prisoners was tied to establishing a war crime, and the Mojahedin were finding themselves challenging the very premise that sustained the charge: the international character of the conflict and Iraq’s control over their operations. The prosecutor, the expert witness, and the counsel for the plaintiffs were all finding themselves in a trap of imagined unities and fractures between war and revolt.
The contradictions evident in Nouri's trial were neither exceptional nor exclusive to the Mojahedin. They marked the fate of all political forces involved in the revolution. This urges for analysis of war and revolt as an entangled phenomenon and a trap. Throughout Iran's contemporary history, wars have repeatedly led to mass mobilisation for the defence of a homeland, relegating class conflict and other social struggles to the background as secondary concerns. What followed was executions, surveillance, and the militarisation of public space, the loss of the street, the site and condition for the emergence of political subjects. They have shaped not only the wartime economy of the 1980s but also the post-war order of reconstruction.
In this sense, the Iran-Iraq war never truly ended. It was reconfigured into a prolonged cold war of sanctions imposed by the West, extending through the decades to the bloody winter of 2026. It is perhaps no coincidence that the institution responsible for coordinating Iran's economy is known as the Economic War Headquarters. The late Supreme Leader, Khamenei, offered a theological expression of this continuity when he declared: "The God of today is the God of the 1980s."
For the late Supreme Leader, the return to the 1980s represented the restoration of a constitutive moment that shaped his vision of the future, forged his political identity, and reaffirmed his legitimacy. For a fragmented people, however, the same decade evokes the repression of revolutionaries, the foreclosure of revolutionary possibilities, and defeat. Confronting this history has long been deferred. Their defeat is not one imposed from without, reducible to an external other, a repressive state or an imperial power, but one that emerges from within and therefore demands critique and self-reflection. Such a reckoning requires ending the obsessive and compulsive reinterpretation of the Revolution of 1979, whether its day before or its day after.
The courage of hopelessness, the willingness to turn toward the past and stare into the piles of dead that history has left behind through cycles of war and revolt, is a beginning. What follows is the task of inheriting defeat rather than seeking escape from it. Only then can the conditions for new life be rebuilt. This also requires reckoning with the experience of living under a repressive state whose foreign policy is explicitly anti-imperialist. It is precisely from this contradiction, rather than in spite of it, that new political subjects can emerge. History will continue to pose the same questions and traps. Only through such a courageous act of inheritance can the conditions of life be remade without once again falling captive. The words of a small communist group resonate:
“The Revolution is dead, Life to Revolution”
