Class, Faith or Fear: What Drives the Iran Regime’s Supporters?

Internal documents from 2023 that were obtained by Kasra Aarabi and Saeid Golkar, of United Against Nuclear Iran, detail the department’s five-year plan to “organise at least four million people into 800,000 small groups across all cultural and societal fields”, and to have 5 per cent of each neighbourhood ready to enter the “domestic battlefront” during times of popular unrest. . . . Aarabi described the hard base as a “society within a society”, with members of the IRGC typically living within their own compounds and villages and their children often attending elite schools. . . . Adherents of Mahdism believe that the Mahdi’s return will be presaged by apocalyptic destruction. The bombing campaign by Israel and the US “will only energise the hard base because they view destruction as a sign of the nearing of their messianic hidden imam,” Aarabi said. . . . “I think that the West has underestimated the ideological commitment of this hard base,” Aarabi said. “That’s not to say that the military operation can’t succeed in toppling the regime. But in order to do so, it will require a comprehensive operation. And it will require weakening the willingness and the capabilities of not just the IRGC and the Basij, but ultimately the hard base more widely.”