Iranian Popular Protests Faced with US Economic Sanctions and Military Intervention

Detail of Nazgol Ansarinia, Article 55, Pillars, 2016. Image courtesy of Green.Art.Gallery website.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s confrontation with the US began almost half-a-century ago when Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers took hostage the US embassy in Tehran and its staff, releasing them 444 days later when the face-off with the US no longer served their post-revolutionary regime consolidation. In retaliation, US President Jimmy Carter imposed comprehensive trade sanctions on Iran, effectively putting the two countries on a war path. In addition to earning American enmity and onerous sanctions, the Hostage Crisis would cost Iran dearly, as the Khomeini regime’s international isolation allowed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to invade the country. Iran and Iraq then plunged into a long war that lasted eight years, caused close to a million casualties and ran up a trillion-dollar price tag. The US and Israel were involved in this war, trying to prolong it by intervening against the side which would gain the upper hand. 

Iran emerged from the war a battered and impoverished country, having endured a reign of terror in which thousands of mostly young Muslims and secular leftists were either executed or killed in the streets or languished by the tens of thousands in prison. During the post-Khomeini Reconstruction era of the 1990s, Iran and the US experienced a relative détente, when the Bill Clinton administration slightly loosened but never removed the noose of sanctions choking the Iranian economy. After September 11, 2001, Israel and its US lobby managed to place Iran on top of President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” list of countries due to its alleged nuclear bomb-making project and sponsorship of terrorism. Thus, in the new century, the American stance against Iran hardened, with economic sanctions reaching a new peak during Barak Obama’s first presidential term. At the same time, massive protests broke out in Iran in response to alleged fraud in the 2009 presidential negotiations, disrupting Obama’s secret negotiations with Tehran just as they were beginning to bear fruit. This was Iran’s “Green Movement,” whereby millions came out into the streets asking for peaceful political reform within the framework of the Islamic Republic. When the regime brutally suppressed the Green Movement, the lesson seemed to be that peaceful political change within the Islamic Republic was not an option. Thereafter, a cycle of mass protests, in 2017-2018, 2019 and 2022-2023, voiced anti-regime demands, at times resorting to violence against its symbols and personnel. To quell these protests, the regime killed hundreds and imprisoned thousands of ordinary citizens, all the while claiming they were instigated by Iran’s enemies, namely the US and Israel. In 2015, however, US-Iran relations witnessed a breakthrough when the Obama administration partially lifted American and international sanctions in exchange for Iran keeping its nuclear fuel cycle within limits for peaceful purposes and under stringent UN supervision. The “Obama Deal” was accomplished despite ferocious opposition by Israel and its backers in Washington, who vowed to repeal it under a Republican administration.

Coinciding with a massive rise of oil revenue, the Obama Deal led to a tangible improvement of living standards, but the economy’s downturn continued, steadily battering the livelihood of working and middle classes. This was due to decades of sanctions, as well as the Islamic Republic’s corrupt and predatory political economy dominated by an oligarchy tied to the regime. Forming a para-state, the oligarchs, with structural ties to the Revolutionary Guards, had become adept at circumventing international sanctions by operating a shadow economy dealing in multi-billion-dollar financial transactions, forming dummy corporations abroad, money laundering and selling oil under the table. Although they were supposedly aimed at weakening the Islamic Republic, US sanctions, in fact, had helped create a powerful Iranian deep state whose key operatives and shareholders, euphemistically called “sanction merchants,” reap enormously rich rewards managing the sanctions regime.

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This brings us to the immediate background of the January 2026 protests, i.e., the major events of the past three years. The Biden administration failed to revive a version of the Obama Deal, no doubt because of its catering to Israel, whose genocide of the Palestinian people Biden fully supported militarily, financially and diplomatically. Blaming Iran for the October 2023 Hamas attack, Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus in April 2024. Refraining from direct retaliation for years of Israeli cyber-attacks and assassination of its scientists and military personnel, the Islamic Republic finally responded by missile and drone attacks against military targets inside Israel. The two countries were now at war. In July, Israel raised the stakes by assassinating Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. The Islamic Republic’s response came in October 2024 with a barrage of ballistic missiles fired at Israeli targets, most of which were intercepted by Tel Aviv’s Iron Dome, the US Navy and Jordanian air defence. In late October, Israel retaliated with three waves of strikes against twenty locations in Iran, targeting air defence batteries and ballistic missile production sites. The attack involved more than one hundred Israeli aircraft, some penetrating Iran’s air space, and all returning unscathed. At the same time, during 2024, deadly Israeli blows against Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, had broken the so-called Axis of Resistance, a network of political-military alliances Iran had helped construct around Israel at great cost. Having lost its regional allies, the Islamic Republic was now much more vulnerable to direct military strikes by Israel and the US. 

The balance of forces shifted even more against Iran when Trump was re-elected and wrote to Supreme Religious Leader Ali Khamenei proposing negotiations which Tehran accepted, along with Trump’s deadline of sixty days for reaching a new nuclear deal. On June 13, 2025, one day past Trump’s deadline, Israel unleashed a massive barrage of cyber-attacks and aerial bombardment on Iran, hitting sensitive military sites and nuclear infrastructure and assassinating dozens of high-ranking military and intelligence leaders and scientists working in the nuclear program. Israel also bombed civilian targets including Iran’s energy infrastructure, hospitals, residential neighbourhoods, and the state broadcasting building. Close to five thousand casualties were reported on the Iranian side, with over one thousand deaths, including hundreds of civilians. The Islamic Republic retaliated by sending hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones toward Israel, most of which were intercepted though some passed through Israeli and American defences to hit military targets and inflict hundreds of casualties and a few dozen deaths, mostly among civilians. On June 22, the US directly joined the war, carrying out a highly complex long-range aerial bombardment, dropping twelve thirty-thousand-pound “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear sites.

When the US-Israeli war against Iran ended with a ceasefire after twelve days, the Islamic Republic declared victory, though, in fact, the regime was badly damaged and quickly lost whatever sympathy it had garnered from an Iranian public buckling under enemy bombardment. In the war’s immediate aftermath, a plethora of public statements and open letters by scholars, human rights and civil society activists, lawyers, former and current political prisoners, trade unionists, women’s organizations, repressed ethnic and national groups, and purged regime dissidents demanded a “paradigm change in the ruling system.” They also demanded freedom of political prisoners, parties, and associations, ending state control of the media, the transfer to the government of massive economic assets controlled by the Supreme Leader and unelected institutions, and ending the involvement of military institutions – primarily the Revolutionary Guards – in economic affairs. All statements also condemned the US-Israeli invasion of Iran and rejected “regime change” through foreign intervention or violent uprising. This could have been the perfect opportunity for a regime besieged by mounting public dissatisfaction, an economy on the verge of collapse, and powerful enemies waiting at the gates to at least suggest openness to some form of peaceful structural change. But nothing of that sort ever transpired. Refusing to accept responsibility for the country’s dire dilemmas, Khamenei doubled down merely offering his worn-out rhetoric of defiance.

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On December 28, protests and strikes broke out in the bazaar of Tehran after a sudden plunge in the exchange rate of Iran’s forever sinking currency. This occurred in the context of a persistent inflationary spiral of at least 40%, rampant electricity, water and gas shortages, poisonous air pollution, the general deflation of battered middle- and working-class living standards and ongoing rolling strikes by workers, teachers, and pensioners. As during previous cycles, the protests quickly spread and intensified, soon involving hundreds of thousands across the country. Digitally-captured images of angry crowds spread globally, leading the government to shut down the internet and cut off the country from the rest of the world, as it had done during previous protests. Initially, Khamenei responded with a mix of conciliation and threats, declaring the regime would listen to public “grievances,” but would not tolerate “disturbances.” He also claimed that American and Israeli agents were among protesters trying to steer them toward disturbance and violent confrontation. The question of violence then became paramount as most slogans were unmistakably against the regime, and many called for its overthrow. There were also reports of violent attacks on government offices, mosques and security personnel, though it was not clear who the perpetrators were. Meanwhile, government forces were firing on crowds, inflicting scores of casualties at first and then killing hundreds and eventually thousands. The latter figure was confirmed by Khamenei who claimed unspecified numbers among them were government personnel. The horrific figure of thousands of casualties inflicted on protesters is unprecedented even by the brutal standards of the Islamic Republic. Another unprecedented feature of recent protests is the appearance of slogans in favour of monarchy as an alternative to the Islamic Republic. For decades, monarchism, embodied by Reza Pahlavi, son of Iran’ deposed king, has been a phenomenon largely confined to the Iranian diaspora, particularly in the US, where it is a marginal rather than popular trend. Moreover, Reza Pahlavi is unabashedly aligned with the most right-wing American and Israeli factions, championed by Trump and Netanyahu. In recent years, his message has resonated in Iran thanks to Persian-language satellite television outlets widely believed to be funded by Saudi, Israeli and American governments or individual donors. Far from unanimous in recent Iran protests, monarchist slogans are tied to foreign influence, especially since Reza Pahlavi openly advocates American and Israeli intervention in Iran. He welcomed last summer’s US-Israeli invasion of his country and clearly favours foreign military support to topple the Islamic Republic. Still, slogans such as “Long Live the Shah” appear to be angry slaps in the face of the current regime rather than programmatic endorsements of monarchy. Nevertheless, the recent surge of monarchism, even if and especially because it is backed by American and Israeli governments, must be taken seriously and not dismissed as mere reactionary illusions. No comparable political alternative exists outside Iran, while the Islamic Republic, for decades, has systematically and violently prevented the emergence of any alternative in the country, even among its own reformist factions.

Although, presently, the protests have been forcibly contained once again, the political impasse the Islamic Republic has imposed on an increasingly restive and by now desperate society persists. Addressing this impasse requires a significant political change, of course, something the Islamic Republic adamantly refuses to even consider. Meanwhile, Trump’s crude posturing as Iran’s saviour and bombastic promises of “helping” the protesters has had no tangible effect, except playing into the regime’s hands and bolstering its narrative of tying the protests to foreign machinations. Israel, too, openly boasts of Mossad involvement in the protests, an allegation whose specific validity is hard to gauge but, ironically, is the linchpin of the regime’s official justification of its violence being a defensive strategy against armed foreign agents. It remains the daunting task of the Iranian people and their progressive international allies to figure out the basic contours of a viable roadmap out of the country’s horrible current impasse.

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