Iran Is Burning From Within. Trump Didn't Light the Match

The Regime That Had to Import Its Killers

In January 2026, the Islamic Republic of Iran killed thousands of its own citizens in the street. Or rather, and this is the detail that should stop you cold, it outsourced the killing. Iran International has confirmed that a significant portion of the deaths on January 8 and 9 was carried out not by Iranian soldiers but by Afghan fighters from the Fatemiyoun Brigade, Iraqi militiamen from the Popular Mobilization Forces, and Pakistani nationals from the Zainabiyoun Brigade; an IRGC proxy group that Pakistan's own government has designated a banned terrorist organisation. The regime did not trust Iranians to shoot Iranians. That single fact tells you more about the state of the Islamic Republic than any diplomatic cable or think-tank report. Death toll estimates range from 6,000 confirmed by human rights activists to 12,000 assessed by Iran International to over 36,000 cited in leaked IRGC intelligence reports. The fog is deliberate. The scale is not in dispute.

The Flag That Says Everything

This week, on university campuses across Tehran, students are back. They are carrying the Lion and Sun flag, the pre-revolutionary symbol of Persia, banned since 1979, at Sharif University of Technology, at the University of Tehran, at Amirkabir. In the Islamic Republic, raising that flag is not a political act. It is a civilisational declaration: we were something before this, and we will be something after it. Many of these students have no particular attachment to monarchy. They carry it because it is the one symbol that says, simply and completely, Iran without the Islamic Republic. That distinction, between the country and the regime, is now so wide that the regime had to import foreigners to defend it.

Persia Reclaiming Itself

Reza Pahlavi, the Pahlavi Pretender to the Iranian Throne, understands this. His recent statement is addressed not to secular Westernised Iranians but specifically to devout Shia believers, telling them their faith has been stolen and weaponised. When he invokes Zahhak; the tyrant of the ancient Shahnameh who grew serpents from his shoulders and fed them on the brains of young men, he is not making a speech. He is reaching for a civilisational memory older than Islam in Iran, older than that arrived with the Arab conquest in the seventh century. It is the language of Persia reclaiming itself. Whether Pahlavi is the right vessel for what comes next is a genuine question; his willingness to countenance foreign strikes on Iranian soil is a line many patriots cannot forgive, and there are moments when his attachment to the crown seems to exceed his attachment to the country. But the students raising that flag on campus this morning are not waiting for his permission.

What Harvard and Tehran Have in Common

Now consider what was happening simultaneously here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, one of the most celebrated scientists in the world, author of books that sell in airport bookshops from London to Singapore, maintained nearly a decade of contact with Jeffrey Epstein, flew on his private jet in 2014, and visited his private Caribbean island, according to documents released by the US Department of Justice. This continued years after his 2008 conviction. She is not alone. Harvard has expanded its probe to include geneticist George Church, string theorist Andrew Strominger, former university president Larry Summers, who has effectively retreated from public life, alongside major donors including retail billionaire Leslie Wexner and Hong Kong investment scion Gerald Chan, whose family's $350 million gift named the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. A gravity conference on Epstein's island. Hundreds of emails. Rides on the jet. The question "how's your air conditioning working?" sent to a convicted sex offender on house arrest.

The Same Transaction, Two Continents

What these two stories share is a structure. Both involve institutions, the Iranian clerical class, the American academic establishment, that claimed moral authority while quietly trading it for proximity to power. The mullahs performed piety while the state performed murder. Some of the world's most brilliant minds performed intellectual rigour while looking past what a man was doing to children. The transaction in each case was the same: access and resources in exchange for silence and legitimacy. When that transaction becomes visible, and in both cases it has become very visible, the institution does not recover quickly.

Trump's Patience

Which is where Trump enters, and where his instincts, whatever one thinks of his methods, have shown something his critics rarely credit: strategic patience. He has applied the noose to Iran without tightening it. Maximum economic pressure, a carrier group in the Gulf, rhetorical support for the protesters; but no shot fired. He is letting Khamenei exhaust the regime's remaining legitimacy against its own population. He did something structurally similar with Harvard; withdrawing federal funding, applying pressure, letting the institution's own contradictions do the work. In both cases the move is the same: don't attack directly, starve the oxygen, wait. China cannot build an alternative economic architecture in the Middle East fast enough to matter. Russia will not antagonise Israel. The IRGC's coalition is contracting. The tectonic plates moved in January. Trump did not cause the Iranian people's rage; that was forty-five years in the making. But he is, with some shrewdness, holding the match.

What Comes After

A friend’s friend in Iran, one of the calmest people he knows, now wants accountability from everyone who served this regime. Not reform. Accountability. That word, arriving from that person, tells you something about the temperature. A post-regime Iran is not a prediction. It is already under way, in the streets and on the campuses and in the language people are using to describe what they want. The Lion and Sun is flying. The question is not whether the Islamic Republic survives this. The question is what Persia, that is Iran, looks like on the other side.