The Iranian regime, under pressure from mass protests threatening to escalate into a full-blown revolution, is behaving like a snake in a frying pan, trying to both appease the protesters and regroup to crush them. The first step they should take is to liquidate the so-called morality police, whose actions, particularly the murder of Mahsa Amini in a police station, sparked this uprising. By the way, many have presented this incident as if she was killed for not wearing a headscarf, although those who understand Iranian realities know that in that case they would have to kill half the country, if not more. The real reason behind this violence, as reported, was that the victim was Kurdish, which exposed the issue of inter-ethnic conflicts in the country and the systemic Persian racism against non-Persians.
Nevertheless, the issue of the hijab, specifically the lifting of the compulsory wearing of the hijab, is being actively used by both the protesters and their many sympathizers in the non-Islamic world. We should not expect sympathy for these slogans from us, but our (Sunni) interest lies elsewhere — in the overthrow of the militant Rafidite regime, which not only fights against Sunni peoples and countries in the region, but also oppresses Sunni minorities within Iran itself.
However, as is often the case with such dictatorial regimes, these concessions are used by them to calm the protests, after which they can regroup and crush the remaining protesters, as well as remember and punish those who initially protested but then stopped, falling for these promises. This is evidenced by the fact that Iran is actively seeking support in various dictatorial and gendarmerie international organizations in which China and Russia and their satellites are involved. First, it was the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with the participation of China, but now it is the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) of Russia and the post-Soviet countries that remain under its influence. In particular, a delegation of Iranian parliamentarians participated in the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly in Moscow, and its head, Vahid Jalalzadeh, declared that Iran is ready to develop relations with this military-political alliance.
Of course, on the one hand, this can be laughed off, as the CSTO itself is falling apart along with Russia, which is incapable of handling Ukraine, let alone helping Iran suppress mass protests. On the other hand, the danger of this cooperation for its neighbors should not be underestimated, as was the case in Syria and recently in Ukraine, where Iranian drones spilled a lot of blood, including literally.
In addition, attention should be paid to the Russian-Armenian propagandist Semyon Bagdasarov’s call for Russia and Iran to move decisively into the South Caucasus and «bring order there» by neutralizing those who would hinder this, primarily Azerbaijan.
In this regard, it is important to remember that such regimes often prefer to solve internal problems by transferring them to the outside, especially by turning the energy of revolutions and protests into the energy of wars. And if the Putin regime burns the protest potential of the Russian people in a war against Ukraine, why shouldn’t Iran try to burn its own protest potential in the fight against the Turkic union of Azerbaijanis and Turks?
In this context, Iran’s accession to the CSTO or its maximum rapprochement with the CSTO is quite logical, because both Iran and Russia are trying to disrupt a peaceful solution of the Karabakh-Nagorno-Karabakh problem by Azerbaijan and Turkey and drag them into a new war with the help of Armenia.
The Iranian regime has nothing to lose. The options are revolution and overthrow or prolonging its agony thanks to a new war — this is the choice it may be facing at the moment. That is why we support the first option — revolution.