Can the Islamic Republic of Iran Survive to 2030?

by Hugh Fitzgerald

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps commander, Brigadier General Esmail Qaani, has advised the Jews of Israel to “go back” to “your houses” in Europe and the United States, while there is time, because, he says, the Jewish state is sure to be destroyed. After all, didn’t Hamas just win a great victory, proving it can remain standing after all the IDF threw at it? Like Hamas itself, General Qaani has a rich fantasy life.

But Iran may soon find that it is not the Israelis, but the Iranians themselves, who are going to have to “go back” from where they are now. That would mean, first of all, that Iran end its interference, by providing money and weapons, to help the Shi’a in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon. The economic cost of such foreign adventures may simply become too much for the Iranians to bear. The political cost is also great: Iran has made itself detested by all of its Gulf Arab neighbors; Syria is Iran’s only Arab ally, and that is not worth very much, for Syria needs $375 billion in reconstruction aid just to be put back into the position it was in before the civil war began.

Along with this economic misery leading to popular disaffection with the regime in Tehran, there is another weakness that must worry the Iranian mullahs. It threatens not only the regime, but the very existence of the country within its current borders. That internal weakness is the result of the ethnic divisions within Iran that threaten the rule of the majority Persians. For fewer than half of the Iranian population of 82 million consists of Persians; there are also Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds, and Arabs, all of whom harbor, with various degrees of fervor, and violence, separatist hopes. Each poses a threat to Iran’s continuance as a state within its present borders.

After World War I, the Kurds were promised by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) a large degree of autonomy, with the promise of future independence. But Ataturk managed to undo that promise in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), and the Kurds — who number about 45 million people — were instead split among Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

There are about ten million Kurds in Iran, more than 12% of the population. Iran must worry that any success by Kurds in Syria, Iraq, or Turkey to achieve greater autonomy will only encourage Kurdish separatists in Iran. A few years ago, it seemed that the Kurds in Iraq, having enjoyed autonomy under American protection during the last years of Saddam Hussein’s reign (when American air cover prevented Saddam’s air force from bombing the Kurds), and during the first years after his overthrow, might be moving toward independence. It hasn’t happened; the regime in Baghdad has so far managed to keep the Kurds from rising in open revolt.

In Turkey, Erdogan’s army has been suppressing the Kurdish PKK, and in recent years the Turkish military has established bases in both Syria and in northern Iraq to keep the local Kurds in check; this has naturally discouraged the Kurdish separatists in Iran. But their failure to obtain greater autonomy in Iran, much less independence, has not reconciled the Iranian Kurds to their situation. They are waiting for a more opportune time. Their threat to the Iranian state remains. And the rulers in Tehran remember with dread the last violent uprisings by Iranian Kurds, in 1979, which were ferociously crushed, with at least 30,000 Kurds killed. Iran has to keep troops in the Kurdish areas, and must continually worry about help arriving from Kurds elsewhere, and the possible threat of peshmerga volunteers from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, who might make their way to join their Kurdish brothers in Iran.

There are 20 million Azeris in Iran, or about 23% of the population. There are, in fact, twice as many Azeris in Iran than in Azerbaijan itself. They, too, chafe under the rule their Persian masters, so that they might join an enlarged state of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s recent military victory over Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh has been a source of encouragement for the Azeris in Iran wishing to join Azerbaijan. If they rose in rebellion, they would be hard to suppress, given their numbers, especially if they could call on Azerbaijan, just next store, to supply them with weapons and fighters.

The Azeris in Iran have not been well treated. The Iranian government has banned the teaching of the Azeri language and literature in Iranian schools. When, in 2015, the Iranians broadcast programs that mocked the Azeri accent and language, this alone led Azeris, already on the edge, to demonstrate in many cities, shouting such slogans as “stop racism against Azeri Turks,” “long live Azerbaijan,” and “end the Persian racism,” in Tabriz, Urmia, Ardabil, and Zanjan, and even Tehran itself. Civil unrest among the Azeris is a given. And independent, newly victorious Azerbaijan, full of Azeri fighters, is just on the other side of the porous border with Iran.

The Baluch people in the east of Iran, bordering the Province of Baluchistan in Pakistan, are Sunni, and have suffered terrible discrimination in Shi’a-ruled Iran. Only 2,000 of the 3.3 million college students currently in Iran, for example, are Baluchis. On the other hand, Baluchis make up 55% of those who have been executed in recent years by the Islamic Republic. The last execution of a Baluchi militant in Iran took place this past January: “Iran hangs Baloch militant for killing of two Revolutionary Guards,” Reuters, January 30, 2021 :

Iran executed on Saturday an ethnic Baloch militant convicted of killing Revolutionary Guards members, the judiciary’s official website reported, a day after the United Nations urged Iranian authorities to spare his life.

The Mizan site said Javid Dehghan, who it said was a leader of the Sunni militant group Jaish al-Adl, or the Army of Justice, was hanged for shooting dead two Guards five years ago in the southeastern Sistan-Balochistan province….

The impoverished Sistan-Balochestan province, which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan, has long been the scene of frequent clashes between security forces and Sunni militants and drug smugglers. The population of the province is predominantly Sunni Muslim, while most Iranians are Shi’ite.

Jaish al-Adl, which says it seeks greater rights and better living conditions for ethnic minority Balochis, has claimed responsibility for several attacks in recent years on Iranian security forces in the province.

The Baloch separatists in both eastern Iran and western Pakistan are fighting to create an independent Balochistan on land carved out of both countries. While Jaish al-Adl says it merely wants to improve living conditions and greater rights for the Baloch people, this understates the threat to Iran; Jaish al-Adl’s ultimate aim is to create an independent state. The authorities in Tehran know this perfectly well.

The Iranian regime has forbidden the exclusive use of the Baluchi language in writing — that means any Baluchi text must always include a Farsi translation. It’s a way to keep track of what the Baluchis are saying to one another, a part of intelligence gathering. In 2002 Baluchis founded the Jundullah, a religious and political organisation that has claimed rights for the Baluchis in eastern Iran. It has carried out both attacks on the Iranian military, and suicide bombings of Shi’a mosques. It is also suspected of kidnapping an Iranian nuclear scientist. Like the Kurds and the Azeris, the Baluchis can count on aid, including men, money, and materiel, coming from the other side of a porous Iranian border. In the case of the two million Baluchis in Iran, there are another nine million Baluchis in Pakistan, who are keenly aware of the mistreatment of their fellow Baluchis — all of them Sunnis — by the Shi’a government in Iran.

The final minority that has been mistreated by the Persians are the Arabs in Khuzestan, the oil-producing southern province on the Gulf that was devastated in the Iran-Iraq war, with much of the area left in ruins. The Iranians claim there are only two million of them; the Arabs claim there are five million Arabs in Khuzestan. Whatever their number, the Khuzestanian Arabs have long complained of discrimination by the Persians. In 2005, there were mass riots and mass arrests of 25,000 people in Khuzestan, and many Arabs were summarily executed. Arrests, torture, and executions have continued to imperfectly keep the peace. There were more riots in 2007, followed by more repression; in 2015, there were a wave of arrests made so as to head off any tenth-anniversary revolt; the rage remains. But if those Khuzestanian Arabs were supplied directly with arms, and with the money to buy additional arms, and to pay Arab fighters from outside, they could cause a great deal of destruction to the oilfields and thus to the Iranian economy. Given that Iran has sent arms to the Houthis in order to establish an Iran-backed Yemen that would serve as a base for anti-Saudi activities (including whipping up the Shi’a in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province), why should the Saudis, and other Arabs, not do likewise, and supply the Khuzestanian Arabs with weapons and “volunteers” to fight their Persian masters?

Were Iran to lose control of Khuzestan, it would also be losing the region from which 85% of its oil, and 60% of its gas, is produced. In other words, the loss of Khuzestan would likely destroy the Iranian economy. And even if the territory were not lost to separatists, if the Arabs of Khuzestan rose in revolt, armed with weapons bought or supplied by Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich Gulf Arab states, the destruction unavoidably wrought on the oilfields and pipelines, either by the Arabs in revolt, or by the Iranians fighting those Arabs, could put much of Iran’s oil production out of commission for years. The prospect of this is no doubt causing nightmares in Tehran. From the viewpoint of the Arab members of OPEC, there’s an added bonus to a heavily-armed insurrection in Khuzestan, which is that even when the American sanctions are lifted – which kept sales of Iranian oil low — Iranian oil production could still stay way down as a result both of deliberate sabotage of the oilfields and pipelines, and from interruptions in the flow that would be the result of armed conflict between Iran’s army and the Khuzestanian separatists.

Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, Arabs make up half – a disgruntled half – of Iran’s population. Beyond Mossad agents running circles around the intelligence services of the Islamic Republic, Iran has much else to worry about. This brief response to IRGC commander Essam Qaani fits the bill: The real food for thought, General Qaani, is not that that Jews should leave their tiny state now because “Israel Will Not Survive” – we’ve seen how the Jewish state has managed for 73 years to survive everything its enemies have tried to do to it, and even to thrive. No, a different question is more to the point. And that question is: “Can the Islamic Republic of Iran Survive To 2030”?

First published in Jihad Watch.