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CHAPTER II

Subverting the Arab Spring

When a 26-year-old fruit peddler in the rural Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid set himself on fire in December 2010 to protest government corruption and a lack of economic opportunity, it ignited a regional firestorm. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation touched off escalating protests against the long-serving Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, first in Sidi Bouzid, and subsequently throughout the entire country. Within less than a month, Ben Ali stepped down and fled the country in the face of widespread and sustained opposition to his rule.

Egypt was next. Beginning in January 2011, Hosni Mubarak, Cairo’s immutable authoritarian sphinx for more than three decades, also found himself in the public crosshairs. Millions of disgruntled Egyptians took to the streets, congregating in the capital’s Tahrir Square to call for release from the political stagnation and economic malaise that had come to characterize Mubarak’s rule. In an effort to cling to power, the Egyptian president proffered a number of compromises and power-sharing arrangements. But by then, the crowd was seeking more fundamental change, and Mubarak was forced to resign.

Tunisia and Egypt may be the most dramatic examples of the widespread regional antiestablishment sentiment that became known as the Arab Spring, but they were hardly the only ones. Country after country experienced shockwaves from the political earthquake.

Iran was no different. Publicly, officials in Tehran took an exceedingly optimistic view of the antiregime sentiment sweeping the region. High-ranking Iranian officials repeatedly depicted the regional ferment as an outgrowth of Ayatollah Khomeini’s successful 1979 revolution and the start of an “Islamic awakening” in which the Islamic Republic would inevitably play a leading role.¹ Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even ordered the creation of a special “secretariat” headed by former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati to help bring Islamic movements to the political fore throughout the region.²

Privately, however, officials in Tehran were all too aware that they could become the next casualty of the Arab Spring. The controversial June 2009 reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian presidency had brought millions of protesters into the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities—a groundswell of popular outrage that coalesced into the so-called Green Movement. Months of unrest aimed at the ruling clerical regime followed, presenting the Islamic Republic with its most fundamental political challenge since its 1979 revolution. Although the Iranian government successfully beat back this “green wave,” mostly through the use of widespread brutality and repression, officials in Tehran were all too aware that discontent continued to simmer beneath the surface of Iranian society. They therefore worried that popular revolts taking place in Tunis, Cairo, and elsewhere could easily translate into renewed disorder at home. As a result, they determined that, in keeping with the old axiom that “the best defense is a good offense,” the surest way to prevent a “Persian Spring” was to harness, co-opt, and exploit these same stirrings abroad.

COURTING CAIRO . . . AND SUBVERTING AL-SISI

Egypt presented Iran with its first opportunity to influence the politics of the Arab Spring. During the three decades before Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011, Tehran and Cairo were regional rivals and ideological adversaries. The animus dated back to the early 1980s and stemmed from Iran’s opposition to Egypt’s initiative, codified at Camp David, to normalize relations with the state of Israel. When Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was subsequently assassinated by a gang of militant army officers, the Islamic Republic openly took the side of the extremists, going so far as to name a street in Tehran after the lead gunman, Khalid Islambouli.³

The resulting hostility between the two countries was both deep and enduring. Diplomatic relations, suspended after Sadat’s assassination, remained frozen for the following thirty years, as myriad issues—from Iran’s sponsorship of the Hamas terrorist group to its nuclear ambitions—created tensions between Tehran and Cairo. But Mubarak’s departure and the subsequent rise of a new, Islamist government in Egypt afforded Iran a new strategic opportunity.

Speculation about contacts between Shia Iran and Sunni Islamists, chief among them Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, had been swirling around for years, encouraged by Iran’s cooperation with Hamas and its tactical contacts with al-Qaeda.⁴ The rise of the Brotherhood to political prominence in Egypt following Mubarak’s ouster brought these connections to the fore. In February 2011, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met Kamal al-Halbavi, a senior member of Egypt’s Brotherhood, in Tehran, in what was widely seen as an Iranian effort to position itself at the vanguard of the Arab Spring.⁵ Thereafter, Tehran became a vocal supporter of the Brotherhood’s political agenda and ascent to power in Cairo.

Even before the Brotherhood seized power in 2012, Tehran had already improved its position vis-à-vis the Egyptian state. In mid-February 2011, Iran requested, and Egypt’s caretaker government granted, permission for two warships to transit the Suez Canal, which was the first time in more than three decades an Iranian warship passed through those waters.⁶ In the weeks that followed, the new government in Cairo also agreed to reestablish long-frozen diplomatic ties.⁷ Some Egyptians even went so far as to flirt with the idea of accepting Iran’s long-standing offer of nuclear cooperation, something the Egyptian government under Mubarak had categorically rejected.⁸ These changes transformed Egypt from a hedge against Iran’s regional ambitions into an enabler of them.

The subsequent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Cairo further deepened this budding alignment. Iranian leaders took pains to praise the “Islamic awakening” that had taken place in Egypt and made concrete political steps to normalize the long-unsettled relationship between Tehran and Cairo.⁹

Iran’s ayatollahs found a willing partner in Cairo. In the run-up to his election as president, Mohammed Morsi allegedly conducted an interview with Iran’s FARS News Agency, in which he waxed optimistic about the possibility of reactivating bilateral ties. “We must restore normal relations with Iran based on shared interests, and expand areas of political coordination and economic cooperation because this will create a balance of pressure in the region,” Morsi is said to have told the news channel.¹⁰ Morsi subsequently denied the interview, perhaps to appease his domestic Sunni constituency. But he said much the same thing in more muted tones in September of that year at the annual summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, coincidentally held in Tehran, when he declared that he was handing over the movement’s presidency “to our brothers, the Iranians.”¹¹ (These contacts would come back to haunt Morsi; in February 2014, Egyptian authorities charged the ousted president with espionage and treason, accusing him of conspiring with “foreign powers”—Iran chief among them.¹²)

The Iranian-Egyptian détente turned out to be short-lived, however. In June 2013, Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government was overthrown and replaced with a military clique dominated by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Initially, al-Sisi struck a conciliatory tone toward the Islamic Republic, making a point of inviting Iran’s president-elect, Hassan Rouhani, to attend his swearing-in ceremony—the first time such an offer had been extended since Sadat’s assassination.¹³ Rouhani demurred, sending an official representative in his place. But the incident was enough to fan speculation that Cairo and Tehran were improving ties.

Indeed, early on, al-Sisi’s government appeared genuinely interested in engaging the Islamic Republic. Seeking to fill the void left by the deterioration of the long-standing Egyptian-American strategic relationship, Cairo began courting all manner of new foreign-policy actors—including, most conspicuously, Russia, with which the al-Sisi government signed a multi-billion-dollar deal for arms and defense supplies.¹⁴ Iran figured prominently in this calculus as well; in October 2013, the interim foreign minister Nabil Fahmy said as much when, in an interview with Iran’s Press TV, he called the Islamic Republic a “very important” country with which his government is seeking better relations. “The new Iranian president has sent out to the world some positive signals and the world is interested in engaging Iran,” Fahmy said.¹⁵ Cairo, moreover, continued to thaw chilly relations despite significant domestic opposition in Egypt over the prospects of détente between the two longtime regional rivals.¹⁶

Quickly, however, Cairo soured on the possibility of resetting relations with Tehran and came to view Iran once again as a destabilizing force—and for good reason. In January 2014, Egypt’s chargé d’affaires to Tehran delivered a communiqué to Iran’s foreign ministry formally complaining about Iran’s interference in Egypt’s internal affairs.¹⁷ Egypt’s complaint was a reflection of the Iranian perception that al-Sisi, who launched a very public campaign to clip the political wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, was not a worthwhile ally in their “Islamic awakening” and a response to Tehran’s consequent attempts to subvert his government.

Iran’s efforts in this regard appear to be under way. The Iranian regime reportedly formulated a strategy to train and equip Islamic militants opposed to the Egyptian government.¹⁸ This initiative included training a Libya-based proxy group known as the Free Egyptian Army in northwest Libya and a similar effort by the Islamic Republic’s Quds Force paramilitary to train Muslim Brotherhood militants in Sudan, thereby expanding the lethality and sophistication of the insurgent threat facing the Egyptian government.¹⁹

QUIET SUBVERSION IN BAHRAIN

Egypt was not the only arena in which Iran attempted to improve its regional position. In the Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, Arab Spring–related ferment in 2011 gave Iran a new opening through which to expand its regional influence.

That opening was demographic in nature. The majority (some 70 percent) of Bahrain’s 1.3-million-person population was Shia, while the country’s ruling al-Khalifa family was Sunni. This was an inversion of the prevailing demographic in the overwhelmingly Sunni Gulf region—and one that provided the Islamic Republic an opportunity for leverage.

Beginning in February 2011, inspired by similar protests in Tunisia and Egypt, Shiite Bahrainis took to the streets to protest systemic inequalities and repression and torture carried out by the al-Khalifa regime.²⁰ The regime’s heavy-handed response, including the imprisonment of opposition activists and large-scale crackdowns on protesters, only generated new momentum for Bahraini activists to advocate the government’s overthrow.

They were not alone. Tehran was quick to voice its support of these protests and threw its weight behind the ouster of the al-Khalifa government. “All Islamic countries, as long as they’re not themselves involved in the crime, bear responsibility to support the Bahrainis in their fight,” Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the hard-line imam of Tehran, said in a public sermon that spring.²¹ Iran did not content itself with rhetoric alone, launching a covert campaign to destabilize the Gulf kingdom. The extent of this effort was made public in April 2011, when the Bahraini government submitted a confidential report to the United Nations (which was subsequently leaked to the press) in which it accused Iran’s terror proxy, Hezbollah, of actively plotting the overthrow of the regime and of training Bahraini militants in both Lebanon and Iran for this purpose.²² Just three months later, Bahrain’s high criminal court sentenced three defendants—one Bahraini and two Iranians—for spying for the Islamic Republic and passing along sensitive information regarding military installations to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.²³ That fall, these developments led Bahrain’s foreign minister, Khaled bin Ahmad al-Khalifa, to charge Iran with seeking to subvert Bahrain and make it the “crown jewel” in its larger campaign to penetrate the Persian Gulf.²⁴

Iran’s efforts at subversion made waves in Washington. “We already have evidence that the Iranians are trying to exploit the situation in Bahrain,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in April 2011. “We also have evidence that they are talking about what they can do to try to create problems elsewhere as well.”²⁵ For Washington, this was not insignificant, because Bahrain plays an important role in America’s military posture in the Middle East, hosting a key naval base for the U.S. Fifth Fleet. As a result, Bahrain’s instability had a direct effect upon American plans and raised the possibility that if the al-Khalifa monarchy fell, the United States could find itself shut out of a vital defense arrangement that anchors its regional presence.

Bahrain’s Gulf neighbors were even more worried. Understandably, they saw Iran’s interference as an existential threat—a challenge to their religious authority and an insurgent effort to revise the geopolitical workings of the Gulf. Or, as the New York Times put it in March 2011, Bahrain had become “the latest proxy battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional dominance.”²⁶

The Gulf monarchies responded accordingly. Using the auspices of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a six-member security bloc dominated by Saudi Arabia, Gulf states sent approximately 1,000 troops into Bahrain to quell protests.²⁷ The deployment, ostensibly in response to a “request” by the Bahraini monarchy, was intended to immediately stabilize the government in the capital city of Manama. But just as important was the force’s secondary mission: to protect the country from Iran’s insurgent fundamentalism, by force if necessary. As the commanding officer told the London-based Saudi daily newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, his mission was “to secure Bahrain’s vital and strategically important military infrastructure from any foreign interference.”²⁸

The deployment had its intended effect, blunting Shia protests against the al-Khalifa regime and deterring more significant—and overt—Iranian intervention. In such a way, the GCC succeeded in preventing Iran’s attempts to subvert Bahrain at the height of the Arab Spring. And yet, three years later, Iran’s destabilizing hand was still evident in the Gulf kingdom. In January 2014, Osama al-Oufi, the country’s chief prosecutor, formally charged the Iranian Revolutionary Guards with continuing to provide Bahraini opposition fighters with explosives training. The accusation came on the heels of the Bahraini government’s arrest of five suspected militants and intelligence reports of Bahraini fighters based in Iran planning “terrorist bombing operations targeting institutions and places vital to the sovereignty and security of the kingdom.”²⁹ Tehran, it seems, still has designs on Manama.

TIPPING THE SCALES IN SANA

In today’s Middle East, there is perhaps no more volatile country than Yemen. While Iraq and Syria have captured international headlines of late for their roles as the crucible for the Islamic State’s radical jihadist campaign, it is the impoverished southern Gulf state of Yemen that has the potential to become the region’s next great flash point. And there, as elsewhere in the region, Iran’s destabilizing presence is being felt in dramatic fashion.

Today’s Yemen teeters on the brink of being a failed state—home to not one, but three interlocking security challenges. Most prominently, there is al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al-Qaeda’s most capable regional franchise, which has long sought to overthrow the government in Sana and impose a “just” Islamic government and sharia law throughout the country. Secessionist tendencies abound as well, inspired by deep political and socioeconomic inequality, and a broad secessionist movement in the country’s impoverished south has tried for years to break free of the Yemeni central government. But perhaps the most well-known—and serious—security challenge confronting the Yemeni regime is the one posed by the Houthi ethnic clan in Yemen’s northern province of Saada.

The Houthis, who are Shia Muslims of the Zaydi sect, traditionally enjoyed considerable political and ideological independence, presiding over their own “imamate” from the ninth century until the 1962 officers’ coup that forged modern Yemen. Since then, they have periodically pushed back against the traditional authority of the Sunni elite in Sana in an attempt to reassert their autonomy. The recent tensions between the Yemeni government and the Houthis can be traced back to the killing of the clan’s leader, Hussein al-Houthi, in June 2004—an event that propelled the clan into open revolt against the Yemeni state.

A decade later, this rebellion is on the march. In 2004, the Houthi movement was modest in size, estimated at just 2,000 fighters.³⁰ Since then, it has expanded in both size and geographic scope. In late 2011, its leadership claimed to command more than 100,000 members.³¹ Today, those numbers are estimated to be larger still.

The Houthi rebellion’s resilience and the political and territorial gains it has made despite a massive, sustained crack-down from authorities in Sana have a great deal to do with Iran’s assistance. For years, rumors circulated about the clandestine role the Islamic Republic assumed by financing, assisting, and even coordinating Yemen’s Houthis in their struggle; however, both Iran and the Houthis denied this connection. In a 2011 interview with Dubai’s The National newspaper, Houthi leader Mohammed Abdul Salam insisted that “[t]he people of Yemen are supporting us. Our power is through them and not through Iran.”³²

Nonetheless, Iran’s covert involvement has been unmistakable. A 2012 expose by the New York Times described how Iranian smugglers, backed by the Quds Force, the elite paramilitary unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, were shipping AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and other weapons to the Houthis.³³ The following year provided even more concrete proof of Iranian meddling, with the interdiction by Yemeni authorities of an Iranian dhow carrying weapons, including ten Chinese anti-aircraft missiles. Officials in both Sana and Washington confirmed, in the wake of the seizure, that the weapons were intended to aid the Houthi rebels.³⁴ Iran was also said to be providing sustained logistical, political, and financial support to the rebellion.³⁵

So pervasive did Iran’s meddling become that, in March 2014, President Hadi took the unprecedented step of publicly pinning the blame on Tehran for Yemen’s ongoing instability. “Unfortunately, Iranian interference still exists,” Hadi told the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat. “We asked our Iranian brothers to revise their wrong policies towards Yemen, but our demands have not borne fruit. We have no desire to escalate [the situation] with Tehran but at the same time we hope it will lift its hand off Yemen.”³⁶

This assistance hardened the political posture of the Houthis, who rebuffed repeated efforts on the part of the Hadi government to reach a political compromise. It also helped tip the scales decisively in the Houthis’ favor. The Houthis went on the offensive, seeking to secure key strong-holds in Yemen’s west, including the strategic port of Midi, close to the country’s shared border with Saudi Arabia. Their actions naturally set off alarm bells in Riyadh, with observers describing the Houthi advance as a “grave threat.”³⁷ It culminated in the fall 2014 Houthi takeover of portions of the Yemeni capital, Sana—a move that made the Iranian-supported rebels de facto power brokers in Yemen’s future.³⁸ Today, the Shiite rebels have assumed still greater control and are actively attempting to unseat Yemen’s president and government. This has led neighboring Saudi Arabia to intervene militarily in an attempt to beat back their advance.³⁹

Tehran, meanwhile, is exploiting other fissures in the Yemeni state as well. As one government official told London’s Asharq al-Awsat newspaper in July 2012, “Tehran is providing financial and logistical support to the secessionist movement, whilst it is also working to train some armed movements in southern Yemen, in addition to establishing a network of relations with Yemeni parliamentarians, political activists, journalists and writers. Iran is also funding media operations and political parties with the objective of thwarting the transition of power in Yemen.”⁴⁰

Iran, in other words, is working hard to penetrate, fragment, and destabilize Yemen, using time-tested methodology perfected on other foreign-policy fronts. As it has done elsewhere in the region, Iran is trying to empower the Shia minority in order to challenge Yemen’s established Sunnidominated status quo. And, by all accounts, Iran has succeeded in doing just that.

A PROXY WAR IN SYRIA

In March 2011, the Arab Spring came to Syria. Prompted by antiestablishment protests in Tunisia and Egypt, opposition activists in the southern city of Deraa began their own low-level civic activism, ranging from street gatherings to spray-painting graffiti. Government forces responded with a spate of detentions, which in turn generated massive street protests and an even wider governmental crackdown. Over the course of some six weeks, dozens of activists were killed by government forces. The deepening repression, however, didn’t quell the protests. Rather, it galvanized still greater opposition, which led to the emergence of a constellation of rebel forces and the country’s descent into an outright civil war that persists to this day.

Over time, Assad’s war became Iran’s, too. Syria has long ranked as Iran’s most reliable regional partner, and the two countries (with their joint proxy Hezbollah) make up the “axis of resistance” aimed at fighting the United States and Israel.

Not surprisingly, Syria’s chaos attracted Iran. Since the start of the fighting, the Iranian regime has become a vital—if undeclared—player in the bloody conflict taking place between the Assad regime and its assorted opponents, both domestic and foreign.

Publicly, Iran has sought to portray a constructive political image through its Syria policy. The Iranian regime, for example, has made a very public show of sending large quantities of humanitarian aid to help alleviate the crisis in Syria, and has been doing so despite significant domestic criticism.⁴¹ In September 2013, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif even went so far as to offer the Islamic Republic’s help in ridding Syria of chemical weapons.⁴² Behind the scenes, however, Iran has pursued a decidedly more assertive—and destructive—role.

Most visibly, Iran’s aid has come in the form of foreign fighters. The Iranian regime is thought to have deployed a large contingent of IRGC forces to the Syrian battlefield. Their number includes hundreds of trained snipers, who have reinforced Syrian troops and increased their deadliness against Syria’s opposition.⁴³

Iran, together with its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, has also played a key role by organizing pro-Assad militias among Syria’s Alawite and Shia communities, as well as by organizing foreign fighters from Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon. Iranian officials boast that these “popular committees” now total upward of 50,000 fighters who benefit from training provided in both Iran and Lebanon.⁴⁴

Iran, moreover, is actively seeking to expand its involvement. A May 2014 expose in the Wall Street Journal stated that the IRGC has been actively recruiting thousands of refugees from Afghanistan to join the fight in Syria. In exchange, these “volunteers” are offered a monthly salary of $500 and stabilization of their traditionally tenuous residency status in the Islamic Republic.⁴⁵

Iran is assisting the Assad regime by other means, too. The Iranian regime has been complicit in providing significant amounts of arms and war materiel to the Syrian government.⁴⁶ This transfer includes sophisticated battlefield hardware. Over the past three years, the Islamic Republic has translated its rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology into an export commodity, supplying Syrian regime forces with several variants of its indigenously developed UAVs, including the Pahpad AB-3, the Yasir, and the Shahed 129—equipment that has been used by Assad against his domestic opposition.⁴⁷

Iran’s aid to Syria has also taken on an economic dimension. Iran, still under economic pressure from the West, takes part in “sanctions-busting” by providing the Assad regime with monthly lines of credit worth some $500 million with which to purchase crude oil and other products that the United States and Europe have sought to limit.⁴⁸ Iran has played a more active role here as well, supplying crude oil to the Syrian regime in Iranian-flagged tankers in spite of Western restrictions, thereby providing Damascus with much-needed economic relief.⁴⁹

Over time, Iran’s assistance has helped reshape the contours of the Syrian conflict. Whereas, at the outset, conventional wisdom held that the Assad regime could only cling to power for a short period of time, the contemporary view in both the Middle East and the West is that the Syrian regime has successfully weathered the storm.

The Iranian regime credits itself with this state of affairs. “Thanks to the planning and wisdom of Iran’s leaders, Syria’s regime could enjoy some stability,” a senior commander of the IRGC was cited by the Agence France Presse as saying in the spring of 2014.⁵⁰

For Iran, this represents far more than simply a local victory. Rather, it is perceived to be a direct blow against the nation it calls the Great Satan, the United States. “Since Syria was and continues to be part of the Islamic resistance front and the Islamic Revolution, it provokes the anger of the Americans,” IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari explained on Iranian television.⁵¹ Alaeddin Boroujerdi, the chairman of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, put it more succinctly in May 2014. “We have won in Syria,” he told reporters. “The regime will stay. The Americans have lost it.”⁵²

This effort has come at a high cost for Tehran, however. Perhaps more than any other issue, the Iranian regime’s support for Assad has put it on the wrong side of the prevailing politics of the Arab Spring. As a result, the Islamic Republic has experienced a massive loss of support in the region and a sharpening of tensions with the Sunni Arab states.

The conflict has exacted a more direct toll as well. A number of high-ranking IRGC officers have been killed in Syria, among them several top paramilitary commanders.⁵³ But the impact on Hezbollah has been more pronounced still. Although the Lebanese militia was a belated entrant into the hostilities, joining the fight only in mid-2013, it has since become deeply involved in the unfolding civil war on the side of the Assad regime. In the process, it has sustained massive casualties in what has become a bloody, open-ended conflict, leading some analysts to liken the Syrian civil war to “Hezbollah’s Vietnam.”⁵⁴

Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic persists with what it sees as an important strategic imperative—the perpetuation of Syria as a front line of defense against Western aggression. As Yahya Rahim-Safavi, a senior aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, puts it, Iran’s “border defense is [now] southern Lebanon with Israel and our deep defensive strategy has reached the Mediterranean above Israel’s head.”⁵⁵ In other words, Iran sees its Syrian policy as a way of creating strategic depth in regard to, and expanding its range of options against, Israel and the United States. As a result, its leaders equate participation in the war in Syria with Iran’s “sacred defense” during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s⁵⁶ and are prepared, in the words of Major General Qassem Soleimani, head of the IRGC’s feared Quds Force, to “support Syria to the end.”⁵⁷

REPUBLIC OF FEAR

At home, Iran’s response to the ferment taking place elsewhere in the Middle East was to extend and expand domestic restrictions. Already among the world’s most repressive regimes, during the past four years the Iranian government has cracked down further on human rights, freedom of expression, and political choice within the Islamic Republic.

This is somewhat surprising. During Hassan Rouhani’s bid for the country’s presidency in the spring of 2013, he campaigned on a political platform of forty-six mostly domestic promises. This agenda encompassed pledges to reform and improve the Islamic Republic’s beleaguered economy, reduce tensions with the West, and, most significant from a local perspective, serve as a champion for the embattled human rights of ordinary Iranians.⁵⁸ These promises set Rouhani apart from other presidential hopefuls and allowed him to coast to an easy political victory in Iran’s June 2013 election.

But reality has not matched the campaign rhetoric. In the past two years under Rouhani, Iran has experienced a deepening wave of state-directed domestic repression, including, among other things, a significant spike in the rate of public executions. According to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a watchdog organization based in New Haven, Connecticut, the Islamic Republic executed 522 people in 2012, ranking it among the world’s most active executioners.⁵⁹ In 2013, this figure rose higher still; the Iranian regime is believed to have executed a staggering 665 people, with two-thirds of those killings taking place after Rouhani took office in August.⁶⁰ Today, the situation is even worse. According to the International Human Rights Documentation Center, another Iranian watchdog group, 2014 saw a total of 721 official executions by the Iranian regime, with many more likely going unreported.⁶¹

Iranian officials have embraced their government’s role as executioner. The international community should “be grateful for this great service to humanity,” Mohammad Javad Larijani, head of the Iranian judiciary’s perversely named Human Rights Council, insisted.⁶²

Political prisoners abound in Iran as well. In the fall of 2013, before Rouhani’s inaugural speech to the U.N. General Assembly in New York, the Iranian regime made a show of freeing a large number of prominent political dissidents. That, however, was simply a cosmetic gesture. The United Nations estimates the number of political prisoners in Iran at 850, while Human Rights Watch and other NGOs believe the number is higher—perhaps considerably so.⁶³ Among the incarcerated is Iranian-American pastor Saeed Abedini, as well as Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, both of whom served as leaders of Iran’s abortive Green Revolution back in 2009. Iran’s fractious ethnic politics are reflected in the prison population as well; some 40 percent of political prisoners in Iran are thought to be Kurds.⁶⁴

The ranks of Iranian political prisoners keep growing. Perhaps most prominently, in July 2014, Iranian authorities arrested Washington Post Iran reporter Jason Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, a journalist for the Dubai-based The National newspaper. In the fall of 2014, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon appealed directly to Iranian president Rouhani to secure their release.⁶⁵ Salehi was released from regime custody, but Rezaian remains behind bars and will soon stand trial for “crimes” against the Islamic Republic.⁶⁶

In another repressive move, Iran’s regime constricted the country’s available media space. Democracy watchdog Freedom House estimates that more than forty newspapers have been shut down by the Iranian government since 2009.⁶⁷ Since Rouhani took office in August 2013, the Iranian government has shuttered several more, doing so under various pretexts, including that they were guilty of “spreading lies and insulting the holy precepts of Islam.”⁶⁸

This state of affairs has successfully imposed an intellectual orthodoxy on journalism within the Islamic Republic. A spring 2014 survey of the Iranian press by independent journalist Hadi Anvari found that up to 60 percent of all content featured in the country’s “reformist” media is pulled from sources affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards.⁶⁹ In other words, Iran’s hard-liners increasingly control both the conservative and the liberal narrative in the Iranian press.

Perhaps the most far-reaching media change, however, has been the result of the Iranian regime’s efforts to complicate access to the World Wide Web. In the aftermath of the 2009 Green Revolution, Iran’s leaders have expended extensive time, resources, and effort to isolate the Islamic Republic from the outside world via cyberspace and deny Iran’s citizens access to the Internet as a social, political, and cultural meeting place.

In these ways, Iran’s leaders have tried to dampen prospects for a “Persian Spring” within their own borders, even as they have tried to harness and exploit the currents of the Arab Spring to their advantage elsewhere in the region.