Israel is attacking Iran where the regime fears most

Telegraph

12 hours ago

A towering inferno blazed where Tehran's main oil reservoir once stood, turning the skies over the city black.
Ordure cascaded through the streets from a mysterious rupture in the sewage mains. Cars exploded in rapid succession as onlookers screamed in fright. Many residents fled; others lined up outside petrol stations, desperately trying to source dwindling fuel supplies as they prepared to join the exodus.
As Israel's war on Iran raged into a third day on Sunday, rumour and chaos subsumed the capital. Whatever Israel's military objectives, its operation had clearly taken on a broader dimension, targeting not just the economic foundations of the state, but the psyche of its people.
For years, Israel has sensed that Iran's restive population was turning on its Islamist masters. Now it is sowing the seeds of mayhem in the hope of pushing them over the edge.
Regime change, by Benjamin Netanyahu's own admission, is one of Israel's desired outcomes. It 'could certainly be the result because Iran is very weak,' he told Fox News.
Quite what the Israelis were behind – and what they were not – no-one knew for sure.
Perhaps the sewage mains had burst of their own accord; maybe some unknown group was exploiting the fraying sense of order to blow up cars.
Yet given this is a country whose spies remotely detonated thousands of Hezbollah's pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon last year, anything was possible.
Only one thing can definitively be pinned on Israel: a series of attacks on Iran's oil and gas facilities. The likely motive was not hard to discern.
After they shivered in the dark through one of the harshest winters in recent memory, exasperated Iranians have increasingly vented their anger at the regime in recent months.
It seemed a scandal that a country with a sixth of the world's gas and ten per cent of its oil could be mired in such a cataclysmic power crisis that even major roads were plunged into darkness for lack of electricity.
As government offices shut down and school pupils twiddled their thumbs at home, angry Iranians took to the streets in more than 150 towns and cities to denounce the corruption and mismanagement behind the crisis – protests that continued into this month.
Little wonder, then, that over the past 24 hours, Israel struck not just Iran's nuclear facilities and missile bases, but also its electricity and gas plants.
On Sunday, fires raged in the South Pars gas field and a nearby oil refinery in the southern province of Bushehr. A dozen storage tanks at Tehran's main fuel depot exploded one after another, setting the surrounding hills ablaze.
There are plenty of reasons why Iran's energy infrastructure is under attack. Israel hopes to deny Iran the fuel it needs to support military operations. It quite possibly also hopes to goad Iran into retaliating against Saudi or Emirati energy assets – thereby potentially drawing the United States, with its bunker-busting bombs, into the war.
But perhaps most crucially, Israel appears to have concluded that if it is to fight alone, its best chance of dismantling Iran's nuclear programme lies not in bombing deeply buried enrichment facilities, but in destabilising the regime that built them. Toppling the regime from within may, some officials believe, just be Israel's best bet for survival.
If so, Iran's rotting domestic energy sector is arguably its most vulnerable point. The country is seething. Power rationing has shuttered factories, left workers unpaid, prevented bakers from making bread, students from sitting exams and farmers from irrigating their crops.
Many blame the mullahs – and the elite Revolutionary Guards who not only protect them but also control much of Iran's power generation and distribution.
Fury over reports that electricity has been diverted to power-draining Bitcoin mining operations linked to the Guards has fuelled a popular chant in Iran's cities: 'Crypto for the Guards; Blackouts for the People!'
Mr Netanyahu clearly believes that Iran's people can be persuaded to topple the regime themselves. Israeli strikes on their country, he told them on Friday, would 'clear the path for you to achieve your freedom.'
Such a move, he told Fox News, would clearly be a justified outcome of Israel's offensive: 'We can't let the world's most dangerous regime have the world's most dangerous weapons.'
Rallying around the flag
Yet not everyone is convinced the strategy will work. In fact, it could misfire, potentially helping to re-galvanise support for an unpopular regime, warns Sanam Vakil, the Middle East director at Chatham House, an international affairs think-tank in London.
'Iranians tend to be quite nationalistic and as civilian casualties mount and life becomes harder, they are more likely to rally around the flag,' she said. 'The unintended consequence could be the re-legitimisation of the Islamic Republic – a devastating outcome for Iranians and the broader region, let alone Netanyahu.'
Whatever they think of the regime, few Iranians will relish seeing destruction on their homeland, says Farzan Sabet, a Middle East security researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute, who hails from the Iranian city of Shiraz.
'In my own city, the electronics industry that contributed to the military's radar systems has been destroyed,' he said.
'It was a military target, but also a centre of technology and an important source of employment. A lot of people who were not especially pro government are quite upset at seeing it destroyed.
'If Israel continues to expand such operations, you're going to see many people who don't like the government offer it begrudging support. They might not like the government, but they don't like what's happening to the country either.'
Before the operation began, there was little doubt just how unpopular Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his fellow mullahs were among a large segment of the population. Middle class liberals have always loathed them.
Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran had one of the most westernised populations in the Middle East: unveiled women wore trousers, danced in nightclubs, drank cocktails and canoodled with unmarried men.
Such sophisticates were at the forefront of the first significant anti-government protests in 2009, led by the so-called Green Movement. Later, waves of unrest drew in a more diverse range of Iranians – particularly women – frustrated by the regime's strict Islamic codes, corruption and the economic toll of sanctions and isolation.
Yet while these protests alarmed the regime, they ultimately changed little. The ayatollahs successfully crushed the most serious uprising, triggered in late 2022 after a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died in police custody for allegedly showing her hair.
In part, the regime has survived by relying on a fanatically loyal core of supporters.
'The regime's popularity has steadily declined over time,' Mr Sabet says. 'But its support, at least among its core base, for now remains relatively solid – and this is the core group that the system has relied on to survive.'
But this is not the only reason why Israel may struggle to initiate regime change.
As the Israeli bombs began to fall, Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son and heir to the shah toppled in 1979, urged Iranians to overthrow the regime, blaming it for 'dragging Iran into war.'
Yet although many Iranians feel nostalgic for their 2,500-year monarchy, Mr Pahlavi leads what many analysts consider the weakest of five often bitterly divided opposition movements – a fragmentation the mullahs have successfully exploited.
Until there is a more unified opposition, calls for a popular uprising, particularly from abroad, are unlikely to have a significant impact, argues Meir Javedanfar, Iran lecturer at Israel's Reichman University. History, particularly in the Middle East, suggests they rarely do.
'Everybody in Israel wants regime change and I think 80 per cent of people in Iran want better leaders,' he said. 'But I'm not sure regime change can be instigated from abroad. It has to come from within. It needs local leadership – and I just don't see the opposition in Iran organising around a single leader or party.'