A top Israeli intelligence analyst said on Monday that Iran’s clerical rulers were likely to survive protests that have swept the country for weeks, and predicted they could stay in power for years to come.
A police motorcycle burns during a protest over the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who died after being arrested by the Islamic republic’s “morality police”, in Tehran, Iran September 19, 2022.
“The Iranian regime will, it seems, manage to survive these protests. It has constructed very, very strong tools for dealing with such protests,” Brigadier-General Amit Saar told the military intelligence think-tank Gazit Institute.
“But I think that even if these protests wane, the reasons (for them) will remain, and thus the Iranian regime has a problem for years to come.”
According to a corresponding report, the US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines on Saturday said the Iranian government does not see the ongoing protests in Iran as an “imminent threat to the regime.”
You may recall that, the Israel’s military intelligence chief said the protests rocking Iran were beginning to resemble a popular uprising, but he sees “no real danger” to the survival of the regime at the moment.
The nationwide protests, which were sparked by the death of 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September in the custody of morality police, have been at their most intense in the areas where the majority of Iran’s 10 million Kurds live.
READ ALSO: Israel Apartheid regime demolishes the village of Al-Araqeeb for the 210th time
Israel, which is locked in a decades-old Cold War-like conflict with Iran, has been watching developments even as it seeks to persuade world powers to toughen up diplomacy meant to curb its arch-enemy’s disputed nuclear program.
“I think the protests have already shifted, to a degree, to the realm of a popular uprising,” Major-General Aharon Haliva, chief of Israeli military intelligence, told Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.
“When you look at some of the incidents, even the hours at which they are taking place, the damage to national institutions, to symbols of the state, at the number of fatalities, there is something different happening here that is greatly troubling the regime.”
“At this point in time I see no real danger to the regime,” he added, but cautioned that “prophecy, in the context of the conduct of societies, is not something that is up to the chief of military intelligence, good though he might be.”
The Post
