Iran is once again on fire.

Protests have broken out in every one of Iran’s 31 provinces, and thousands of protesters have reportedly been killed and many more arrested.

This, of course, is not the first time that the Islamic Republic has faced mass protests. Since the Green Movement protests in 2009 that erupted after reformists accused then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of stealing the elections, Iranians have come out to the streets regularly, often to be crushed with deadly force by state security forces, while the world does nothing to help.

The “woman, life, freedom” protests in 2022 brought millions of furious Iranians out for months, but were squelched after hundreds were killed and over 20,000 arrested.

This time, both the regime and the protesters know that the protests are different.

“It’s denser, more widespread, larger numbers of the smaller groups of people, and it’s more diverse,” said Farzin Nadimi, senior fellow at The Washington Institute. “There are groups of young students, very young people, both men and women, young boys and girls, and older people, retirees. Still, there are not very many civil servants, which was expected.”

Though the protests started with merchants in Tehran’s bazaar over the collapse of the rial, they quickly took on clear anti-regime and even occasionally pro-monarchist tones.

The growing unrest comes at the Islamic Republic’s weakest moment since the 1979 revolution.

In the years since the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has hammered Tehran and its terror proxy network. Hamas is still very much in control of Gaza’s population but in no position to attack Israel anytime in the foreseeable future. Hezbollah was beaten into agreeing to a humiliating ceasefire that provides for its own disarmament. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime fell shortly afterward, depriving Iran of its major state ally in the Middle East.

Even worse for Tehran, Iran itself was hit hard by Israel and the US in June and proved unable to defend itself or deter its attackers.

“The regime has never appeared weaker,” said Michael Makovsky, CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. “Israel, and the US, humiliated the regime in the 12-day war. Imagine — Israel achieved air supremacy within 48 hours, meaning for 10 days [Israeli Air Force] planes flew over Tehran........

© The Times of Israel