If you are among those mourning Khamenei this week and waving Iranian flags from the comfort of an Arab capital, consider the following inventory of what the regime you are celebrating has actually done to the Muslim world you claim to care about – not according to its enemies, but according to the historical record that no amount of “Death to Israel” chanting can erase.

If you are Afghan, your liberator-in-chief is the same Islamic Republic that provided intelligence to the United States during Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001 – handing the CIA maps of Taliban positions, suggesting optimal bombing targets, allowing American military personnel to operate alongside Iranian-backed Northern Alliance forces, and permitting US humanitarian shipments through Iranian territory. At the Bonn Conference that December, it was Iran’s envoy Javad Zarif who personally brokered the deal that installed Hamid Karzai as head of the US-backed interim government. Tehran did not resist the American invasion of Afghanistan. It facilitated it, served as its intelligence partner, and shaped its political outcome – then spent the next two decades arming Taliban factions through the IRGC’s Quds Force when it suited its interests to destabilize the very government it had helped create. Iran did not save Afghanistan. It helped destroy it twice, from opposite directions, depending on which destruction served Tehran’s agenda that year.

If you are Iraqi, the ledger is even bloodier. Iran did not oppose the American invasion of 2003; it benefited from it more than any other state on earth. The removal of Saddam Hussein – Iran’s existential enemy who had waged an eight-year war against the Islamic Republic – was a strategic gift that Tehran exploited with ruthless efficiency. As the Americans dismantled the Sunni-dominated Ba’athist state, Iran filled the vacuum with Shia militias, political parties, and intelligence networks that effectively converted Iraq into an Iranian client state. The Popular Mobilization Forces – the Hashd al-Shaabi – were built, funded, trained, and directed by the IRGC’s Quds Force under Qasem Soleimani, and their record against Iraqi Sunnis in Mosul, Fallujah, Tikrit, and Diyala constitutes a catalog of sectarian atrocities documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations. Iran did not liberate Iraq. It inherited the country the Americans broke and turned it into a province governed from Tehran.

If you are Syrian, Iran is the reason your country is a graveyard. When the Arab Spring reached Damascus in 2011, it was Tehran that made the strategic decision to keep Bashar al-Assad in power at any cost – dispatching IRGC advisors, Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, Shia militias from Iraq, the Liwa Fatemiyoun recruited from Afghan Hazaras, and the Liwa Zainabiyoun drawn from Pakistani Shia communities. These foreign sectarian armies, fighting under the banner of Wilayat al-Faqih, helped Assad barrel-bomb Aleppo, gas Ghouta, starve Yarmouk, and displace twelve million Syrians – half the country’s pre-war population. Iran spent an estimated thirty billion dollars sustaining the Assad regime while its own citizens queued for bread under sanctions. The Islamic Republic did not defend Syria.  It occupied it by proxy and called it defending the haraam of Sayyida Zeinab – as though a single shrine (tomb) in Damascus justified the destruction of an entire nation.

If you are Lebanese, Iran is the architect of your state’s disintegration. Hezbollah – founded in 1982 with direct IRGC supervision, funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually from Tehran – has operated as a parallel state within Lebanon for four decades, maintaining its own army, its own intelligence service, its own telecommunications network, and its own foreign policy entirely independent of the Lebanese government. The UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon implicated Hezbollah members in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the single most consequential political murder in modern Lebanese history. Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into the 2006 war with Israel without the consent of the Lebanese government, plunged the country into armed confrontation in 2008 by turning its weapons on fellow Lebanese in Beirut, and has functioned as Iran’s Mediterranean outpost ever since – transforming Lebanon from a sovereign state into what strategic analysts have described as an Iranian aircraft carrier docked on the Levantine coast.

If you are Yemeni, Iran transformed your country’s political crisis into a sectarian proxy war by arming, training, and funding the Houthi movement – an insurgency rooted in Zaydi Shia revivalism that seized Sana’a in 2014 and plunged Yemen into what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. Iranian-supplied ballistic missiles, drones, and naval mines turned the Red Sea into a conflict zone and Yemen into a failed state where people require humanitarian assistance. The Houthis govern through terror and enforce a theocratic order modeled on Tehran’s. And Iran calls them Ansar Allah – the Supporters of God – as though God required child soldiers and naval mines to make His point, while twenty-one million Yemenis wonder what kind of God requires their starvation as proof of support.

If you are Palestinian – and this is the cruelest irony of all – Iran has never fired a single bullet for Al Quds (Jerusalem). Not one. In forty-seven years of “Death to Israel,” the Islamic Republic has never engaged in direct military confrontation on behalf of Palestinian sovereignty. It has funded Hamas and Islamic Jihad – both Sunni organizations whose theological foundations Iran’s own clerical establishment considers deviant – not because it cares about Palestinian statehood but because Palestinian suffering is the single most effective instrument of regional legitimacy available to a Persian Shia theocracy seeking to project influence across a predominantly Sunni Arab world. Palestinians are not Iran’s cause. They are Iran’s currency – spent lavishly in propaganda and sparingly in actual support.

If you are Moroccan, Iran has treated your country’s territorial integrity as expendable currency in its regional power game. In 2018, Morocco severed diplomatic ties with Tehran for the third time – the first was in 1981, the second in 2009 – after presenting evidence that Iran, operating through its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah and its Cultural Attaché in Algiers, Amir al-Mussawi, had funneled surface-to-air missiles – SAM-9, SAM-11, and Strela systems – to the Polisario Front, the separatist movement seeking to dismember Morocco’s southern provinces. Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita detailed how Hezbollah operatives had traveled to the Tindouf camps in Algeria to provide military training and urban warfare instruction to Polisario fighters. By 2022, a Polisario representative publicly boasted that Iran would supply the group with kamikaze drones, and Morocco’s UN ambassador subsequently presented imagery confirming the transfer of Iranian drones and advanced weaponry. Iran has never forgiven Morocco for sheltering the exiled Shah in 1979 – an act of hospitality that Khomeini’s regime interpreted as a declaration of enmity – and has pursued a slow-burning campaign of destabilization against the kingdom ever since, including documented efforts to recruit young Moroccans into Shia conversion networks in cities like Al Hoceima. The Islamic Republic does not care about Sahrawi self-determination. It cares about punishing a Sunni monarchy that refused to bow to its revolution. In 1982, King Hassan II convened Morocco’s Supreme Council of Ulema – the highest religious authority in the kingdom – and the council issued a fatwa (decree) labeling Khomeini a heretic and an apostate. In a later interview with the French media, he described Khomeini as a “deviant heretic,” and the phrase that would echo through history was attributed to him in various forms: “If Khomeini is Muslim, then I am not.”

If you are Algerian, Iran’s shadow over your country is older and darker than most Algerians care to admit. Former Algerian Prime Minister Sid Ahmed Ghozali stated publicly that Iran had a hand in supporting Islamist terrorism during Algeria’s Black Decade of the 1990s – a civil war that killed an estimated 200,000 people and scarred an entire generation. Tehran’s interest in Algeria has never been altruistic; it has used Algiers as a logistical corridor for its Hezbollah networks across North Africa and as a diplomatic staging ground for operations targeting Morocco. Iran’s embassy in Algiers served as the operational node through which Hezbollah weapons reached the Polisario – a fact that implicates not just Tehran but the Algerian state’s willingness to tolerate Iranian intelligence activity on its soil. Algeria’s relationship with Iran has always been transactional: Algiers tolerates Tehran’s networks because both share hostility toward Morocco, and Iran exploits Algeria’s Polisario obsession as a vector for projecting power into the Maghreb. The result is that Algerian sovereignty has been quietly compromised by the very regime its citizens are now mourning in the streets – a compromise that may carry concrete consequences, given that the bipartisan Polisario Front Terrorist Designation Act (H.R. 4119), introduced in June 2025 by Republican Congressman Joe Wilson and Democratic Congressman Jimmy Panetta, now sits before the House Foreign Affairs and Judiciary Committees with seven co-sponsors and growing momentum. The bill documents the Polisario’s operational ties to Iran, Hezbollah, and the IRGC dating back to 1980, and if enacted, would classify the Polisario alongside Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hezbollah as a designated foreign terrorist organization – placing Algeria, as its primary host, funder, and diplomatic shield, in an extraordinarily uncomfortable position under US sanctions law.

If you are a citizen of any Gulf state – Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Emirati, Saudi, Qatari, or Omani – Iran has spent four decades trying to subvert your government, infiltrate your society, and ultimately redraw the political map of the Persian Gulf in its own image. In 1981, just two years after Khomeini’s revolution, the Iranian-backed Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain attempted a full-scale coup to overthrow the Al Khalifa monarchy and install an Iranian-aligned ayatollah as supreme leader – the plotters were trained by the IRGC, armed with weapons manufactured in Iran, and dressed in counterfeit Bahraini police uniforms sewn in Tehran. In 1996, Bahrain uncovered another Iran-linked cell of forty-four operatives from a Hezbollah offshoot trained by the Revolutionary Guards. Iran has sponsored Saraya al-Mukhtar and the al-Ashtar Brigades – both designated terrorist organizations by the United States – to wage a campaign of bombings and assassinations inside Bahrain that has killed dozens and injured thousands of policemen since 2011. In Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, Iran has cultivated Shia militant networks for decades. In Kuwait, Iranian agents were convicted of bombing the US and French embassies in 1983. And now – this very week – Iranian missiles are striking Bahraini neighborhoods, Kuwaiti airports, Emirati hotels, and Saudi oil infrastructure, killing the very citizens whose coreligionists are weeping for Khamenei on social media. Iran is not defending Islam. It is bombing Muslims – and the Muslims it is bombing are the same ones holding its flag.

And if you are simply a Muslim who takes your own scripture and tradition seriously, consider this: the Islamic Republic has institutionalized the veneration of shrines and imams to a degree that Sunni jurisprudence from every school of thought – Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali – has consistently classified as ghuluww, theological excess bordering on shirk. It has legalized mut’ah – temporary marriage – which Sunni scholars unanimously consider prohibited since the Prophet’s explicit abrogation. It practices taqiyyah – religiously sanctioned dissimulation – which every major Sunni authority regards as incompatible with the prophetic imperative of truthfulness. It has maintained a shrine in Kashan to Abu Lu’lu’ah, the assassin of Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, as a deliberate provocation to Sunni sensibility. And yet there is not a single Sunni mosque permitted in Tehran – a capital of fifteen million people – while churches, synagogues, and Zoroastrian temples operate freely. The message is clear: Iran’s pluralism extends to every faith except the one practiced by the majority of the world’s Muslims.

This is the regime the Arab street is mourning. This is the axis of resistance whose Supreme Leader they now canonize. Not because he defended Islam – he butchered Muslims from Kabul to Sana’a. Not because he liberated Palestine – he never tried. But because he pointed missiles at Israel, and in the Arab world, that single gesture absolves every sin, erases every atrocity, and converts a Shia heretic into a Sunni saint overnight.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)