According to the Trump administration’s latest messaging, talks between the United States and Iran are deadlocked because of infighting in Tehran. The military hard-liners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps must be stopping the civilian diplomats from making a deal. Or, to put it in President Trump’s words, “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is!” (This supposition conveniently makes sense of the president’s claim that Iran has “agreed to everything” alongside Iran’s denial that this is so.)

The explanation, which has gained some currency in U.S. media, is at best half-true. Quite a bit of infighting is indeed happening within the Iranian regime. However, it does not map neatly onto a military-versus-civilian divide, and it does not suggest that Iran’s negotiating team is disempowered to speak for the country. Such theories reflect a misunderstanding of Iran’s complex system and do little to advance American diplomatic aims.

If you know a little bit about Iran, you’ve probably heard of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. A militia founded shortly after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, it has mushroomed to a mammoth force of economic, political, and military power within the country. Many informed observers of Iran have long predicted that the demise of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would shift power to the Guards, with authority passing from the clerics to soldiers.

Iran, experts prognosticated, could replace a religious dictatorship with a military one.  

When an Israeli strike killed 86-year-old Khamenei in February, wartime Iran moved to replace him with his son, Mojtaba. Vindicating the experts, the Guards indeed appear to be the power behind the throne in Tehran now. 

Their job is made easier because the shadowy Mojtaba Khamenei, who had next to no public profile prior to his elevation, was injured in the war. Some reports even claim he is in a coma—rumors bolstered by the fact that he has yet to appear in public more than six weeks into his supreme leadership. He has no plan to speak to media “for the time being,” a close relative and friend of Khamenei told me last week, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The Guards are now being treated as the real power in Iran by its adversaries. Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed Mojtaba as “a puppet of the Revolutionary Guards.” 

The younger Khamenei has long had links to the Guards, and the idea that he’d team up with them to run the country isn’t new. As early as 2017, exiled journalist Ruhollah Zam spoke of the force’s “grand plan” to “securitize the country” and pave the path for Khamenei’s leadership. The plain-speaking Zam, who ran a sensationalist social media outlet, wasn’t taken seriously by the more polished members of Iran’s international diaspora at the time. But he proved enough of a threat for the regime to abduct him to Iran in 2019 and execute him a year later, and his most outlandish predictions about the IRGC now appear to be materializing. 

But despite their notoriety, the Guards remain shrouded in mystery. One common misconception is the image of the militia as a unified power player that throws its weight around. This idea gives rise to the facile notion that the force could simply mount a coup and seize power. But the Guards are better understood as a decentralized hodgepodge of various networks. The force’s roughly 200,000 uniformed members don’t always act as one on the order of its top commander. This is why the killings of the force’s top commanders last year and in February—Hossein Salami and Mohammad Pakpour, respectively—haven’t done much to disrupt its day-to-day operations. Its new head, Ahmad Vahidi, commands more authority but even he can’t fully control the Guards’ massive network at will. An average node in this network could include a travel agency in Tehran, a front business in Thailand, a construction behemoth in Iran or Kazakhstan, or a branch of its autonomous volunteer force, the Basij, the millions-strong Brownshirts used to harass Iranian civilians in ordinary times and violently suppress protesters in more dire periods, such as the nationwide demonstrations in January. 

Over the years, a few different centers of power have grown inside the ranks of the IRGC, often around particular personalities. Perhaps the most powerful such figure today is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament who is now effectively running the Iranian war effort. A major commander of the Guards during the 1980 war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Ghalibaf later served as mayor of Tehran and is a perennially unsuccessful presidential candidate. In the last few years, he has developed a relationship with Mojtaba Khamenei that could prove handy now. On May 19, 2024, hours after the then-President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, an associate of Ghalibaf told me that Mojtaba would succeed his father as the new supreme leader (Raisi had previously been the leading candidate for the job). It was obvious then, as it is now, that Islamic Republic elites view the two men as partners.

But no one man, not even the wily Ghalibaf, wields unchallenged control over the Guards. There are rival power centers in the force. One looks to former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on whose mysterious rise and fall within the regime my colleague Graeme Wood has reported extensively. During his presidency, from 2005 to 2013, Ahmadinejad helped the Guards extend their hold over the Iranian government. His falling out with Ali Khamenei made the former president a political castaway, but many within the IRGC still root for him. Another powerful node of Guards revolves around Yahya Safavi, the force’s top commander from 1997 to 2007, whose loyalists still dominate sections of the force.

Guardsmen remain part of the organization’s sprawling network even after they leave their official positions there. They might instead move to a myriad of quasi-state-run bodies such as the Bonyads, entities funded by the public purse but that effectively operate like corporations with little oversight over their activities. One prime example is Saeed Mohammad. After serving as the head of the Guards’ powerful construction behemoth, Khatam al-Anbiya, since 2018, Mohammad had to quit his post in 2021 when he decided to run for the presidency. The clerical vetting body rejected his candidacy and he eventually moved to a top position at a Bonyad. But his political appetite remained. In the 2024 parliamentary elections, a political party he co-founded battled Ghalibaf and fared surprisingly well. 

High-ranking IRGC officials often pass through the same networks. They often have similar educational backgrounds and forge an intimate familiarity with each other, banding together in times of crisis. But they nevertheless have sharp differences when it comes to the Islamic Republic’s direction and ideology—and simply over the pure pursuit of power. 

Which brings me to another misconception: The Guards are often seen as the backbone of the regime’s hardline faction. Some analysts have even written about the spread of Islamist messianism among them. The force’s official statements do seem to confirm this perception, often reeking with belligerent anti-Americanism, a hatred of Israel, and hardcore Islamism. Many still remember how the Guards effectively worked as a hardline opposition party during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005. In response to the pro-democracy student protests of 1999, for example, top Guards commanders penned an open letter to Khatami, threatening to take things into their own hands unless the president suppressed the students. Ghalibaf was a signatory. 

But the “Guards as hardliners” framework doesn’t capture the whole story. Although the IRGC does boast a political and ideological arm that tries to keep the ranks in check, membership in the force is also a vehicle for personal accumulation of riches and power, functioning similarly to the ruling communist parties in China today and the Soviet Union of yesteryear. In those countries, history shows that many opportunists join the parties not due to an ardent commitment to Marxism but simply because they are vehicles of power. With an estimated net worth of more than $28 billion, tech entrepreneur Jack Ma is not exactly a poster child for communism. But he is a longtime member of the Chinese Communist Party. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many longtime members of the ruling communist party adopted new nationalist ideologies overnight and continued to run their now-capitalist states. 

In Iran, too, many people join the Guards in pursuit of power without necessarily sharing their ideological precepts. Ghalibaf might be fulminating against the “shameful life of the Zionist regime” in public. But in private settings, he has been known to gush about the engineering prowess of the Israeli army. When he ran for president in 2024, his team conducted outreach to journalists at foreign media outlets (including me) to present him as a Western-friendly technocrat who could reach a deal with the U.S. Some Guardsmen even supported the reformist candidacy of Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the hotly contested 2009 elections. Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the grandfather of the regime’s West-facing pragmatic faction, had helped the Guards take over postwar reconstruction in the 1990s and still has many loyalists in the force. In short, the Guards are not an ideological monolith, and many of them care more about power than ideology.  

A broader misconception about Iranian politics is linking ideological rigidity to military audacity. But how much of a staunch anti-Western revolutionary you are doesn’t necessarily determine how trigger-happy you can be. Despite stubbornly keeping Iran committed to an anti-Western line, Ali Khamenei remained a cautious, even cowardly, commander in chief, carefully avoiding direct confrontations with the U.S. and Israel in favor of cloak-and-dagger covert operations and deniable terror attacks. His removal from power might allow more militarily adventurous elements of the IRGC to take the helm. Some might even believe that they should do what the elder Khamenei never allowed: dare to build an atomic weapon. During the current war, the Guards have put into practice their fabled strategy of mosaic defense, in which various forces in the Guards determine their own targets and act without contact from the central command. Top regime officials, such as Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and President Masoud Pezeshkian, have already claimed that some of the strikes on neighboring countries were local initiatives. 

The diversity and decentralized nature of the Guards ultimately mean that their accession to power won’t put an end to decades of factional infighting over the Islamic Republic’s policies and direction. Nor does it ensure a continued hardline position. Strategic issues such as the continuation of the war against U.S. and Israel, Iran’s relations with Saudi Arabia and other regional powers, and Iran’s domestic governance will continue to split the ruling elites—even if many of them now share membership in the IRGC. 

Iran might be evolving into a new form of dictatorship. But it will not be a united one. The battle over its future will continue.

The assassination of Ali Khamenei by the United States and Israel wasn’t just a massive event in modern history of Iran. It was also a massive event in the history of Shia Islam. 

Sitting atop Iran’s strange political system, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei was both the head of state of the world’s pre-eminent Shia-majority country and a ranking authority for the global Shiite community, one of the about 30 clerics carrying the title of marja’ or “source of emulation.” 

His death would have been consequential in any case, but the fact that it came violently and as part of a broad war makes it ever more so. Shiite grand ayatollahs often live to a long age and die peacefully (the oldest current one, Vahid Khorasani, is 105.) The last instance of a marja dying a violent death that I can think of is that of Mohammad Sadr, whose shadowy assassination in 1999 is often blamed on Iraq’s then-president, Saddam Hussein. A bete noire of the country’s Shiite majority, Hussein had also executed Mohammad’s cousin, Grand Ayatollah Baqir Sadr, a marja in his own right, in 1980. 

Khamenei’s dramatic death is even more remarkable because he almost seems to have welcomed it. Knowing full well that he could have been a target of American-Israeli strikes, he didn’t hide but was in his home office when he was assassinated alongside a few members of his family, including his young grandchild. Ominously, he hadn’t taken precautions to save the lives of his family members either, perhaps preferring an emblematic martyrdom tale, hoping he could be compared with Imam Hussein ibn Ali. The third Shiite imam died in an Islamic civil war in Karbala, Iraq, in 680, setting the standard of Shiite martyrdom. Since then, with Shiites being a minority sect of Islam and thus often persecuted, there have been many Shiite martyrs. The dispute between Sunnis and Shiites is rooted in the days after the death of Prophet Muhammad, when early Muslims fought over who should succeed him. Sunnis regard the arrangement that separated political and religious leadership as just whereas Shiites believe it unduly deprived the prophet’s family from their right to rule as charismatic religious leaders. Shiites have thus long had an oppositional bent, ready to battle the status quo even at the cost of martyrdom. Khamenei, who knew he had little life left on this earth anyways, perhaps couldn’t resist the temptation of joining these hallowed ranks. 

Unsurprisingly, Shiites across the globe have reacted dramatically to Khamenei’s demise. In Pakistan, home to the world’s second largest Shiite population after Iran, the U.S. Consulate in Karachi was attacked by protesters and at least 26 people died as protesters clashed with the police. A Shiite digital activist who organized a vigil to mourn Khamenei called him “our representative … like our pope.” 

In Malaysia, where a tiny Shiite community exists alongside the overwhelming Sunni majority, Khamenei has been hailed by many in the community, with one figure calling him “our imam and rahbar,” using the Persian word for “leader.” In 1996, a fatwa issued by a federal religious committee declared Shiite teachings to be deviant and yet top authorities such as a federal mufti and leader of Malaysia’s main Islamist party have commemorated Khamenei. Their respect seems to be due not to his religious role but to his role as an anti-Western state leader who died fighting the U.S. 

Khamenei might indeed be remembered as a martyr both among most strands of Shia Islamism and the broader anti-Western strands of Islamist politics. But what will be his legacy as a religious leader, and what will Shia Islam look like after his demise? 

The most important consequences of his death have little to do with the image of “martyrdom” or his own station as a religious authority but with the system of governance in Iran. The Islamic Republic is organized around the principle of velayat-e faqih or Guardianship of the Jurisprudent, an eclectic and unprecedented reading of Shia Islam, devised by Khamanei’s predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Based on the system, much of political power in the country belongs to a preeminent jurisprudent who acts as a guardian to the nation. Khomeini’s main stated inspiration in devising this system was Plato’s concept of philosopher-king. In the original 1979 constitution, the supreme leader had to be a marja, the highest ranking Shiite status, attained by few clerics. But when Khomeini died in 1989, it was very clear that no other marja had the political credentials to ascend to the position. The more eligible candidates would have been more political clerics like Khamenei (then serving as president) who lacked the religious credentials. The Islamic Republic thus changed its constitution, allowing non-marja clerics to serve in the position. 

With Khamenei’s death, it is quite likely that this strange position—vali faqih or the supreme leader—with its unusually intimate mix of religion and politics, will go through another transformation, if it survives at all. 

For generations, Shiite clerics boasted significant social power, playing a key role in political events such as the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 in Iran and the Iraqi revolt of 1920. Founders of the Islamic Republic defined themselves in this tradition, but the clerical state they built ironically defanged the clerics. Previously, Shiite clerics had boasted an independent base that allowed them to play such a crucial moral and political role. But by making them all wards of the state, the Islamic Republic has done real damage to the independent standing of the clerics. It even organizes a Special Clerical Court whose job is to prosecute clerics who stray from the regime’s official reading of Islam. Most governments in Iranian history couldn’t have dreamt of such an affront to the independent stature of clergy. Assumption of state authority also means massive unpopularity for the clerical class, which is being blamed for problems of Iranian society. 

On an international level, too, the Iranian state has flexed its muscle, attempting to convert Muslims and non-Muslims around the world to the Shiite faith, spending billions of dollars in sponsoring Shiite institutions. In doing so, Tehran has usurped one of the key functions of marja who’ve long had their own independent global networks, usually anchored in hubs such as London. It is hard for the marja to compete with Iranian state resources, while the Iranian taxpayers have come to despise the resources their government spends on these activities. 

Under Khamenei, the Iranian state also became the sponsor of paramilitary Shiite politics, helping to sectarianize Middle Eastern politics in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Thus emerged the informally named Axis of Resistance, the coalition of mostly Shiite anti-Israel and anti-Western militias led by Iran. But the demise of the Axis preceded Khamenei’s. In the past two years, the Axis has become a shadow of its former self, crushed under dissidence of Shiite communities in the Arab world, Israeli strikes, and the fall of its second main patron: the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Shiites now have to get used to a world without Khamenei, without the Axis, and maybe without velayat-e faqih. 

Another model of Shiite political leadership has long emerged to stand as a contradistinction to Khamenei’s: that of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a cleric of Iranian origin who is based in Najaf, Iraq. He has played a key political role in Shiite politics in Iraq, intervening at crucial moments. One such moment arrived in 2015 when his fatwa called for armed mobilization of Iraqis (not just the Shiites) against the rise of the Sunni jihadist Islamic State. 

What makes Sistani distinct, however, is an aversion to assumption of state authority and avoidance of stooping down to the level of partisan politics. Sistani continues to enjoy his own powerful networks, independent from the Iraqi state and with significant global reach, while he also maintains unparalleled moral authority among Shiites in Iraq and elsewhere. While the Iranian state, led by Khamenei, has furnished Iraqi Shiite militias with arms and financial resources, Sistani operates on another level, his religious authority unsoiled by quotidian realities of governance and state sponsorship. 

Astoundingly, Sistani is accepted as marja by many more Shiites than Khamenei. By some estimates, 80 percent of the global Shiites accept him as the marja. Khamenei’s well-known lack of scholarly credentials and Sistani’s long life partially explain that phenomenon. But it is also a stinging rebuke of the Khamenei model. Even with billions of dollars at his disposal and the symbolic position of leading the world’s main Shiite state, Khamenei had not attracted as many religious followers compared to the old man in Najaf who barely appears in public. 

The future of the Islamic Republic, and with it the future of velayat-e faqih, is still very much in the air. The ferocious American-Israeli war on Iran might yet overthrow the republic or deeply transform it. But it’s clear that the future of the Shiite world will be in flux. Khamenei is gone and Sistani, at 95 years of age, will be gone sometime soon too. Without their sponsor in Tehran, Shiite political parties will have to embed themselves differently in their national contexts. Lebanon’s decision this week to ban the military activities of Hezbollah, once the jewel in the crown of the Axis of Resistance, is telling. 

Shiites will thus have to live in a world with two new realities: transformation and perhaps overthrow of the Islamic Republic, which has fundamentally rearranged the Shiite world since 1979, and, soon, the passing of the world’s leading marja, Sistani, without a clear successor. 

It will be a period of decentralization and experimentation for Shiites—and an opening for existing and newly emerging marja to offer a different model of spiritual and political leadership to the devout.

Killing thousands of protesters last month was apparently not enough for the Islamic Republic, which followed up by arresting prominent internal critics, too. The Iranian regime wouldn’t have gone after these figures if it didn’t fear them—perhaps even as much as it fears the royalist movement that has surged around former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. Its sensitivity about both groups is a reminder that uniting them remains the Iranian opposition’s best move, if only activists would take it.

On January 31, the domestic oppositionists Abdollah Momeni, Mehdi Mahmoudian, and Vida Rabbani were swept up and sent to prisons in northern Iran, far from their Tehran residences. They were released on bail on February 17. Mahmoudian’s case attracted international attention because he is the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Jafar Panahi’s 2025 film, It Was Just an Accident. All three figures were once associated with the regime’s internal movement for incremental reform; all three long ago abandoned that stance to advocate the wholesale transformation of the system instead.

On January 2, Raha Bahloulipour watched Sentimental Value, the latest film by the Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier, in her dorm room at the University of Tehran. It was the first film she viewed in 2026, and she liked it very much.

I know this because Raha was, like myself, an avid user of the film-cataloging app Letterboxd. With its tag system and diary, she jotted down when, where, and in what context she watched movies and what she thought of them. She started her diary in August 2023 and logged a total of 795 films during her 888 days on the app. She gave Trier’s film a heart, indicating that it was a favorite. She also tagged it with “protests,” to note that she’d watched it as anti-regime demonstrations rocked her country.

When Shahrzad went to demonstrate in the streets of Tehran on January 2, she was buoyed by one fact: The day before, President Trump had promised that if Iran killed protesters, “the United States of America will come to their rescue.”

“We were all so hopeful,” the 29-year-old woman, who left Iran a few days ago for a nearby country, told me. Like many of those I spoke with for this article, she used a pseudonym for fear of reprisals against her family. “But when Khamenei started threatening us the day after, we were shit-scared. What if they came to a deal with Trump over our heads?”

Under the cover of a total internet shutdown that has now lasted more than 100 hours, Iran’s security forces have unleashed bone-chilling brutality on protesters, killing at least 2,000 people, according to Iranian officials. Rather than hiding its crimes, the regime has broadcast footage from a morgue on state television. Corpses overflowed the facility, where relatives searched for their loved ones. The news anchor casually declared that the bodies were mostly those of “ordinary people.”

This is not another incidence of the Iranian regime crushing a mass protest. Rather, it might just be the end of the Islamic Republic. But the Iranian opposition could still blow it.