Christopher de Bellaigue
Since October 7, 2023, the long arm of Iran has seemingly been everywhere in the crises that have beset the Middle East. With its eye on Hezbollah, Iran’s heavily armed Shiite ally in Lebanon, Israel was wholly unprepared for the devastating ground assault launched from Gaza by Hamas, a Palestinian militant group that was also backed by the Islamic Republic. Nor had the West anticipated that the Houthis in Yemen, a supposedly ragtag militia that had received a large arsenal of missiles from Tehran, would be capable of bringing global shipping in the Red Sea to a near standstill.
The conflicts unleashed by these regional allies have not been particularly kind to the Iranian leadership. Among Iran’s serial humiliations have been the July assassination, in a Tehran government guesthouse, of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader—a stark demonstration of the extent to which Israeli intelligence had penetrated the Iranian security forces—as well as the damage done to Hezbollah and the elimination of most of its senior ranks, including its formidable leader Hassan Nasrallah. In addition, Israel has carried out the largest airstrikes it has ever launched against Iran, reportedly weakening the country’s air defenses, and the Islamic Republic has witnessed the rapid fall of its longtime close partner, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.
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