Every night, thousands of fervent, flag-waving supporters of Iran’s Islamic Republic take to the streets to vent vitriolic rage at their American and Israeli attackers.
They celebrate surviving 40 days of war, a fragile ceasefire, and now negotiations in which they believe Iran has the upper hand.
The chants also herald another change: The ascendance of a new hard-line cadre of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has stepped up as the United States and Israel have assassinated scores of senior military and political figures, including the longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Why We Wrote This
After the U.S.-Israeli war’s “decapitation” strikes against top Islamic Republic political and military leaders, who is this new generation that has taken the reins in Iran? They are more hard-line than their predecessors, and less willing to compromise.
U.S. President Donald Trump, invoking an initial and oft-cited war aim, says he has achieved “regime change” in Iran, and that the new leaders are “less radical and much more reasonable” than before.
But analysts say the decapitation campaign has, instead, enabled the rise of the most hard-line elements of the IRGC, which now feel freshly emboldened and less willing to compromise to end the war.
One apparent example? Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced on the social platform X Friday that the critical Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” to shipping, after weeks of strict limitations imposed by Iran. Yet on Saturday, the IRGC fired on two commercial ships, and someone identifying himself as a member of the IRGC navy issued a message on marine radio, recorded by crews in the strait: “We will open it by the order of our leader, Imam Khamenei [Iran’s new supreme leader], not by the tweets of some idiot,” the Wall Street Journal reported. That message came in the context of a hard-line backlash in Tehran against Mr. Araghchi’s statement.
Still, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth referred repeatedly Thursday to what he called the “new regime” in Iran, and told leaders to “choose wisely” as they continued “digging out” their disabled missile launchers. Iran’s motivation to continue the ceasefire was “very high” to avoid further attacks, he said, and U.S. forces were “locked and loaded” to resume strikes.
Such rhetoric has yet to deter Iran’s regime loyalists, much less the IRGC, which U.S. intelligence reportedly believes may still retain half its missile arsenal.
“Moms, dads, take your children’s hands and join the [pro-regime] street gatherings,” Hossein Yekta, an IRGC ideologue believed close to Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his slain father, told state-run television this month. “Don’t you want your kid to become a man? Let them feel like a hero in the middle of the battlefield.”
The night before, appearing on state television, the grey-bearded Mr. Yekta likened the war to a fight between Shiite Muslims and Jews, foretold in the ninth century:
“The infallible Imam [Mahdi] said Iranians will enter Jerusalem and there will be killing. He said ‘bekosh, bekosh’ [kill, kill]. He said that in Persian,” Mr. Yekta said.
Impact of hard-line messaging
Such hard-line messages have helped shape Iran’s response to the war, and – coupled with Iran’s tight restrictions on the flow of one-fifth of global energy supplies, through the critical Strait of Hormuz – may be complicating ways to end the conflict.
Mr. Trump on April 13 imposed a U.S. naval blockade on top of Iran’s, warning that any ship that left Iranian ports or carried Iranian oil would be stopped. On Sunday he said on Truth Social that U.S. naval forces had fired upon and seized an Iranian cargo ship that was defying the blockade.
After the U.S. fired more than 17,000 munitions and Israel another 19,000 since Feb. 28, Iran’s military capacity has been severely diminished. Its missile arsenal – and the industrial capacity to rebuild that arsenal – has been hammered, and its nuclear program has been more widely damaged than during a 12-day Israeli-U.S. air campaign last June.
But during 20-plus hours of negotiations in Pakistan between U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, Iran budged little on U.S. demands.
The White House wants Iran to suspend its nuclear program, hand over all highly enriched uranium that is currently buried under rubble, limit the range of its missiles, and open up the Strait of Hormuz.
Still, the new hard-line commander of the IRGC, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, was scathing about Iran’s civilian leadership.
“The supreme leader isn’t even buried yet, and yet Qalibaf is already shaking hands with those who killed him,” General Vahidi is reported as saying, suggesting a division at the top in Iran. A front-page cartoon Wednesday in national newspaper Hamshahri, published by the Tehran municipality, depicted Mr. Trump up to his neck in water as he tried to block traffic in the Persian Gulf, with the words, “Drowning in defeat.”
Surge in patriotism
The IRGC claimed that recruiting interest has been so high that it lowered the enrollment age to 12.
Hard-line regime supporters in recent years have been estimated to constitute just 10% to 15% of the population – even less since January, when the IRGC led a brutal crackdown on street protests that left thousands dead.
But Iran’s retaliation against the U.S. and Israel, with volleys of hundreds of missiles and drones fired at Israel, and at military and civilian targets in Gulf states that host U.S. forces, have yielded a degree of national pride for some.
“These guys have been sitting [perilously close to] their launchers … to defend their country. This is their moment,” says an Iranian analyst with close access to policy circles in Iran, who asked not to be further identified.
“The regime change is that someone like Vahidi is the face of the unrestrained IRGC, of using all-out force,” says the analyst. “What we have really seen is regime change, in the sense that there is no longer restraint in military operations.”
Still, that may not translate into the IRGC making all decisions, at the expense of civilian leaders like Mr. Qalibaf – himself a former ranking IRGC commander and national police chief – or the new supreme leader, who is close to the IRGC. Reportedly wounded in the Israeli strike that killed his father, Mr. Khamenei has not been seen in public since the start of the war.
“I am convinced that we have not moved away from the institutionalized way that Iran works,” says the analyst. He notes that the majority of leading figures in Iran’s delegation to the talks in Pakistan were Ministry of Foreign Affairs diplomats, and the rest were from the Supreme National Security Council and advisers.
“All that shows you have continuity in how the state functions, but of course with some primacy right now of the military establishment,” he says. “The hard-line element of the IRGC can sabotage, but they cannot veto any new deal.”
The toll of the war has been high for Iran, with 1,701 civilians killed, including 254 children, out of a total of 3,636 deaths, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. Iran has demanded reparations, and plans to charge a toll for ships passing through the strait.
Younger, less cautious commanders
“Iranian commanders who have replaced those killed are, in many respects, more dangerous than their predecessors,” wrote Narges Bajoghli, an Iran expert at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in a recent analysis in Foreign Affairs.
“They are younger. They fought the Americans in Iraq. They fought Israelis in Lebanon and Syria alongside Hezbollah. They believe – with considerable justification – that they helped defeat the most powerful militaries on earth in those theaters [and] do not share the caution of the older generation of leaders,” wrote Dr. Bajoghli.
“They face the institutional pressure that new leaders everywhere face: the need to prove themselves,” she wrote. “The predictable result is that rather than being deterred, Iran’s military will become more aggressive.”
Indeed, the IRGC has warned that it will target U.S. Navy ships enforcing the American blockade, and any vessels attempting to bypass Iran in the strait.
“We do have IRGC hard-liners that are sticking to their mandate to protect regime security and stability through a very resistance-based approach,” says Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Chatham House think tank in London.
“There has been an internal debate for quite some time about moving away from being defensive, and perhaps predictable, to taking a more offensive posture,” she says. “That is what we have seen play out for the past 40 days. They recognize that the caution invited way too much presumption from the Israeli side that Iran was weak. So they are changing up their game plan.”
Dr. Vakil suggests there is a “good cop, bad cop approach” in which the IRGC plays an “outsize role” because of its security mandate, but is not likely able to dictate terms.
“I do think there is a negotiation, a process of consensus-building and persuasion playing out within the ruling system … because the system always required a degree of balance and compromise to be stable,” she says.
“We are not in the room, but I can imagine they have fiery debates about what to do,” she says. “Qalibaf has the authority to make a deal, but certainly calling Vahidi and understanding red lines from others in the ruling system would be important.”
An Iranian researcher contributed to this report.
