By Noah Rothman
Friday, January 16, 2026
Valiant Western efforts to undermine the Iranian regime’s internet lockdown notwithstanding,
the flow of information out of the Islamic Republic over the last week has
slowed to a trickle. We know that the regime’s security forces engaged in a horrific massacre of anti-regime demonstrators, but the
scale of the slaughter cannot be known. There are, however, disturbing
indications that the massacre was so intensely brutal that it sent the protest
movement’s survivors into hiding.
Citing human rights activists and unnamed sources
anonymously ferrying dispatches to the outside world, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Iranians
are “reporting an eerie quiet after days of escalating violence”:
The number of new
protests verified by Human Rights Activists in Iran dropped to zero for the
first time on Tuesday and continued at zero on Wednesday, the rights group
said. It acknowledged that this could be because of the severe communications
restrictions, which include disruptions to phone service.
“The regime has created a bloodbath. They brought down
the iron fist without precedent,” the International Crisis Group analyst Ali
Vaez told the Journal’s reporters. “That creates a chilling effect among
protesters.”
Reuters appeared to confirm the Journal’s
assessment.
“Iran’s deadly crackdown appears to have broadly quelled
protests for now, according to a rights group and residents,” that outlet revealed on Friday. “With information flows
from Iran obstructed by an internet blackout, several residents of Tehran said
the capital had been quiet since Sunday. They said drones were flying over the
city, where they’d seen no sign of protests on Thursday or Friday.”
These reports raise a variety of solemn questions, many
of which likely have profoundly dispiriting answers.
Has the Iranian regime slaughtered its way through this existential crisis? Has the protest movement been decimated
to the point that its most audacious elements are dead or in hiding? Did Donald
Trump’s valuable expressions of support for the demonstrators and
his efforts to goad them into the streets contribute to the demonstrators’
boldness, even though the support he promised over a week ago never
materialized? How much was the United States hamstrung by its operations in Venezuela — a country led by
a regime that frustrates American strategic objectives but did not represent an
imminent threat? Did the uncommon absence of an American carrier group from the
Gulf region preclude taking maximum advantage of the opportunity to liberate
the Iranian people and topple the world’s most malignant regime?
Many of the president’s backers still have hope that the
moment has not been lost, even if the U.S. has been unable to respond to it
with the alacrity it objectively deserves. They maintain that the regime has
permanently sacrificed its legitimacy and that the protesters’ seething outrage
toward their oppressors will not abate — even if humanitarian intervention
(which could take the form of military strikes on regime targets, disruptive
cyberwarfare operations, or covert initiatives undermining Iranian security
forces) might reignite the protest movement. Time, they argue, is now on the
West’s side.
Maybe it is. But in the interim, the Islamic Republic
will persist. It will continue to fund and export terrorism around the globe.
It will destabilize its region and demonstrate, as it has time and time again,
that there can be no American pivot from the Middle East while it exists. It
will continue to absorb the West’s time, attention, and resources as it has for
nearly a half-century. And it will now do so after having terrorized yet
another generation of liberty-loving Iranians into submission.
We can only hope the president’s optimistic supporters
are right, and even a belated intervention on the demonstrators’ behalf will
imbue them with the courage to risk their lives once more. If they are wrong,
posterity will not be kind to those who squandered this historic moment.
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