What the Islamic Republic Learned About Repression From Syria, by Holly Dagres – 18 March 2026

From New Lines Magazine

Iran helped the Assad regime crush unarmed protests with staggering violence starting 2011. Now, it has turned those same tactics on its own people

“Death or Khamenei,” threatened a banner placed prominently at the entrance of Tehran University on Jan. 21, about two weeks after Iran’s bloody crackdown on widespread protests against the regime. A reference to the since-killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the message chillingly echoed the infamous slogan of Iran-backed loyalists to the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian uprising: “Assad or we burn the country.”

Indeed, some of what unfolded during the Dec. 28-Jan. 9 protests bears an unsettling resemblance to Syria early in its own revolt, when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) provided intelligence and logistical and moral support to Assad. Like Assad, the Iranian regime responded to mass dissent by committing atrocities that amount to crimes against humanity, while advancing a narrative that protesters were foreign-backed “terrorists and spies.” These parallels matter because the mechanisms of repression that were tested and learned in Syria indicate how far the leaders of the Islamic Republic are willing to go to ensure their continuing power.

Before Operation Epic Fury began on Feb. 28, Iranian officials and regime-aligned analysts leaned heavily into rhetoric that echoed Syria’s civil war. The protests, they claimed, were not organic but the crafty work of foreign agents working for enemies — namely the United States and Israel — determined to break Iran up into fragments and plunge it into chaos by ousting its government.

Ironically, this narrative conveniently ignores Tehran’s own role in Syria for more than a decade before Ahmad al-Sharaa and his Islamist rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, ousted Assad in December 2024. The IRGC Quds Force was instrumental in propping up Assad, their top regional ally, enabling numerous massacres of Syrian civilians. Iranian officials, such as the IRGC’s new commander Ahmad Vahidi and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, seemed to copy and paste Assad-era rhetoric, blaming “terrorists” and the Islamic State group for the deaths inflicted by state security forces — the IRGC and its Basij paramilitary force. The fearmongering by Iranian officials was meant to silence Iranian protesters and those operating in the “gray space” — Iranians who don’t want the clerical establishment but worry that protests will fail and leave them in prison. Meanwhile, those already on the streets chanted, “Basij, IRGC, you are our Islamic State.”

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Holly Dagres, an Iranian American, is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the curator of The Iranist newsletter.

What the Islamic Republic Learned About Repression From Syria, by Holly Dagres – 18 March 2026

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