In this emotional polemic, Arzu Merali looks at the possibilities of a better world as a result of the US war on Iran and its allies regardless of immediate outcomes. The world she argues, will never be the same again.
What does the near victory look like? We recite the verse of Qur’an, ‘Help is from God and a near victory’, it is in our du’as, but can we actually visualise what it means, what it could be?
On 28 February, the US (the regime that occupies Turtle Island) and the Zionist Entity massacres some 170 children at their school, using Tomahawk missiles. This means of death is so brutal, not all the children’s remains have been found. This was the opening salvo in the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was meant to signal destruction. Later that day, a bunker buster eviscerated the Bait – the home and office of the leader of the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei. He, along with members of his family, including grandchildren, attained martyrdom. Many days later, his son, soon to be elected the new Vali el Faqih. Mojtaba, reported that he had seen his father’s body after the killing: his fist was clenched in defiance. Days before people had observed the inscription on the slain leader’s Aqeeq ring: God is sufficient for me. This murder was meant to signify the end of the Islamic Republic, a resounding victory for the two foulest regimes in modern, arguably all history: genocidal in their foundation, and unredeemable in their continued violence. Instead, it has heralded a new age in the world where the US’ hegemony is now in terminal decline, and so-called Israel is on the point of self-destruction. Whatever else happens, it has meant that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been victorious in the moment of the leader’s assassination. Here’s why.
Little Revolutions Everywhere
I was expecting protests in Lucknow, there are always Shi’is who protest in the line of the Islamic Revolution there. Likewise Indian occupied Kashmir, where tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands attend Al-Quds Day rallies every year in support of the Palestinians. Maybe, I thought, some protests in Pakistan too. Instead, the sub-continent has exploded in ways I could not fathom, and of which as an Indian heritage woman, I am immensely proud.
The terror of the Islamophobic environment that has held sway for decades in political life, soon to turn also into violent social and economic control under the Modi regime, is rent. Sunnis and Shi’is marching together in protest as soon as the news of the martyrdom of Imam Khamenei broke. Indian occupied Kashmir is in open revolt. Meanwhile Samajwadi MP Anand Bhadauriya, is recorded, the video going viral, lambasting the Indian government in the Lok Sabha:
“We salute Ayatullah Khamenei Shahib, who never bowed down before America unlike you [Modi]! And embraced martyrdom! while you surrendered to America. The Bharatiya Janata Party government should be told. Which Prime Minister of the world visited Israel after the Gaza-Israel conflict?… when the conflict was going on, has any Prime Minister of the world visited Israel?”
Why indeed has India bowed down before the US? Why indeed did India, and India only, provide diplomatic cover for the genocide ongoing in Gaza? As powerful as the speech is, it is the approbation you hear behind him in the chamber. It is the applause he gets online in ways I could not have imagined even a day before that bring hope. And so too the video of Hindu holy men, Sikh activists, standing side by side with Muslim protestors, at different locations, praising Ayatollah Khamenei, calling for an end not simply to the India kowtowing ot the US, or even US hegemony, but in some cases an end to the US itself. What this latter means we can ponder below.
Protestors and politicians alike pick up the same theme, why has India become this toxic, hateful place? Meanwhile, with the advent of Eid, so many videos of Hindus throwing rose petals on Muslims attending Eid payers. Demonstrable solidarity after years of silencing: it is not that these things entirely stopped happening, it is that they are now celebrated when they had become shamed, now being normalised rather than demonised in social discussions. The hate is still there – the Indian Zionist trolls online celebrate, the real world BJP and RSS folk tear up pictures of Ayatollah Khamenei on the streets, and are in some cases widely subject to uproar in the Islamophobic troll fest that can be Indian X (formerly Twitter).
These are little revolutions. Decades of law and policy aimed at division, the marginalisation of Muslims to the extent of genocide in some cases, gone in seconds, eviscerated by a bunker buster dropped somewhere in Tehran.
The bombers thought they were eradicating their enemy. Instead, they have brought the beginning of the end of the hate they have so successfully exported. Whatever else happens, things will not go back to the way they were before.
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Pakistan, in the minutes after the killing of the leader: US consulates around the country and the embassy in Islamabad came under actual attack from protestors, as they tried to break down doors, smashed windows and demanded the US atone. US security shot and killed at least 8, injured dozens more. This is the seed for revolution within and without borders. People are no longer scared. Not even when their military government is historically the poodle of the US, rushing to nominate its Commander in Chief for the Nobel Peace Prize at a time he has supported, applauded, even directed the livestreamed genocide in Gaza.
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Meanwhile, Europe crumbles. Spain has all but left, citing the illegality of the war on Iran, the EU’s support for the genocidal entity. Threatened with ostracization and de facto sanctions by Trump, the Prime Minister negotiates with Algeria for gas (while the rest of Europe readies for the shortages caused by the war), lands in China for talks and reopens the Spanish embassy in Tehran. Even Italy’s Meloni, whatever you think of her right leaning ways, sees which way the wind is blowing and bends accordingly.
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Even Scotland, or more specifically the independence movement, is invigorated. Is it my imagination, or is the notice of intention to leave the union (with or without Westminster approval and corresponding legislation for a referendum) the result of this freeing from the restrictions of political imagination that the US and its colonial allies have imposed on the world. The motion called on Westminster to be prepared for Scotland’s exit; in other words, get ready to lose the North Sea oil money.
Thought to be down and out, the spectre of Scottish independence is rearing its head in ways that no longer consider Westminster’s legislative control relevant. The law(s) of injustice no longer apply.
It was of course one of the contentions of the English media, just this last year, that Iran was in fact behind the last push for independence. It seemed a ridiculous accusation at the time. This time it may be true, by force of the witnessing of truth by all those martyrs in Iran. Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere.
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As I write, whole villages and towns are being erased from Southern Lebanon, the videos of their destruction being posted proudly by Israeli forces and their supporters alike. It is a rerun of Gaza. Likewise, the double tap attacks on buildings, hospitals, schools, civilian sites – all in violation of every internationally accepted rule, law and norm of war. All part of the Gaza genocide, now not only normalised but accelerated. In the space of the time it took me to start this piece and get to these words, there have been triple and now quadruple attacks. If you still don’t know what these are, this is when after the first bomb hits people – civilians and medics alike – rush to rescue those who may have survived. The second hit kills them. Adding third and fourth layers to this is a level of evil beyond the capacity for description.
Yet, if you look at history this level of atrocity is not new. It is following the normal scale for colonial violence. The only difference now is that we see it for what it is. Ask any Native American activist and they will explain the incessant waves of violence, sometimes military, sometimes biological, sometimes cultural that murdered millions, and is keeping the native peoples of the Americas, especially in the USA, marginalised, besieged, in various states of precarity. Not that there has not been any fight back. Understanding what different iterations of colonial governance in what is now called the US has done to the native population is to understand the Nakba. Others have written about this better than I. Suffice to say here, that this on its own is enough of a reason to understand that when Islamic revolutionaries in Iran called the US the Great Satan and the Zionist entity the Small Satan, it was this model they referred to.
The cycle repeats everywhere. As Randa Abdel-Fattah on these pages noted in the kinship between indigenous communities in Australia and the Palestinians:
Silencing the overarching framework of settler colonialism accounts for why we continually see an inversion of responsibility in Australia and Palestine, whereby the white settler state of Australia, and the Israeli settler state, shift blame from the enactors of state violence to the victims. Palestinians are blamed for daring to refuse to acknowledge Israel’s so-called right to exist as an ethno-religious state that privileges one ethno-racial group over all others; Palestinians are blamed for daring to refuse to acquiesce, accept, stop resisting. All attempts to shift blame are in effect an ‘actively enforced silencing’ of those who continue to testify to ethnic cleansing, depopulation, dispossession, massacres.
In Australia we see the ongoing failure of the state to take responsibility for colonial harms against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, for systemic and institutionalised state violence, systemic oppression, and brutality. Intergenerational trauma and poverty caused by Commonwealth, state and territory race-based welfare laws and policies of successive governments throughout Australia, land theft, stolen wages and blackbirding—Australia’s hidden history of slavery—are never properly and justly accounted for. Poverty, shorter life expectancy, health disparities, rates of incarceration, discrimination are not reckoned with as the ongoing effects of the violence of the settler state. Colonialism is forgotten and the language becomes one of ‘lifestyle choices’.
Big Satan, Little Satan(s). The erasure of the crime and the criminals required the language used. Likewise, when revolutionaries chant, “Death to America, Death to Israel,” it is the systems of colonialism they demand an end to. No more confusion now. Not that there ever should have been.
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How do we get then from the immense sacrifices of the people and their leaders, whether in Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon or indeed anywhere else in the world that martyrs blood colours the soil, to the near victory? Surely there has been enough blood spilled? Is it enough just for people to be killed in the way of Truth and Justice, en masse, again and again? In an critical analysis of the Arab Spring, circa 2013/14, the late Imam Achmad Cassiem spoke brutally to leadership of many of these movements. Sitting on a podium in Istanbul and speaking after a senior Muslim brotherhood member from Egypt described the Rabaa massacre, he stated that if you do not have a serious revolutionary movement, only a rebellion (which he contended all of the Arab Spring uprisings were), you will be simply leading your youth to be slaughtered. In other words, what is your plan? As the examples particularly of Egypt and Tunisia showed, in the words of Reza John Vedadi, those movements represented:
“…collapse or capitulation,.. become[ing] the defining template for what happens when political Islam meets the modern state. Get power, then either be destroyed by the system or absorbed into it. There is, so the conventional wisdom goes, no third option.”
Except of course there is and has been. Demonised, overlooked, hidden alongside the understanding of colonialism is the model for decolonisation that is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its institution building, its models of governance, they all require analysis, and understanding. Some of it is case specific, some of it is consonant with other revolutionary movements. Helyeh Doutaghi’s excellent piece on labor relations, and how class as a stratifying mechanism but also class tensions in a revolutionary society beset by sanctions and external attempts to overthrow it via colour revolutions (and since writing, war) work, is a case in point. Bucking the narrative of police brutality and suppression, she highlights from her fieldwork that the workers striking in the South Pars oilfield last December, did not see the police as their class enemy. To understand this, specifically as critical thinkers, activists aspiring for decolonialisation requires us to ditch the universalising understanding of institutions and political and social cultures that exist in westernised, i.e. colonial centre societies. As she rightly maintains:
“In much of Western political thought and within organizing cultures and spaces shaped by settler-colonial policing, the police are correctly understood as inherently violent institutions designed to repress movements in sustaining the capitalist imperial order. This understanding, while grounded in material histories of racialized and class violence and colonial and imperial repression, becomes a-historical and Eurocentric when universalized.
In the imperial countries, the police function as the domestic arm of the empire. They suppress dissent, criminalize resistance, and enforce accumulation through violence particularly against Black, Indigenous, and other Peoples of Color.”
This cannot be stretched to fit resistance and revolutionary societies. The ones which, as Imam Cassiem maintained, have a plan.
That plan in Iran, is as much to do with the cultural approach to social issues that the martyred leader Ayatollah Khamenei had. That approach can be seen everywhere. Its fruits are being, appropriately, witnessed on the streets of Iran, every night since the start of the war. People gather in defence of their nation, and crucially in support of Palestine and the wider axis of resistance.
Social media is flooded with the videos of women with little or no head covering, riding motor bikes, smoking, and in every way dispelling the hackneyed tropes of ‘women in Iran’. All are standing in defence of the revolution of Palestine. Many have had run ins with the authorities over dress. Listen to what they say. They understand and many have said explicitly that they stand with the Islamic Republic against what is clearly evil and oppression, against their country, against Palestine, across the region, even world-wide. Whatever grievance they have, that is a matter for civil space, and that conversation and those struggles are ongoing: but they are between themselves and their government alone.
It is the incredible vision of the martyred leader that is being expressed here. I do not just mean his very public defence of women who wear no or ‘bad’ hijab. I mean his vision that the Islamic Republic but also the wider resistance that has developed around it, is for all who wish to join. In his letters to the youth in the west, particularly on the issue of Palestine you see this. He thanks all those in encampments and on demonstrations, congratulating them for choosing the right side of history. They too, he maintains, are part of the resistance.
You see it from the earliest days of the revolution where he advocated for the rebuilding of the armed forces, maintaining that those left after the departure and or prosecution of those in the Shah’s upper echelons responsible for the murder of protestors and activists, were in fact good and sincere people. This was 1979 / 1980. What a vision. It was not a popular one. But as he saw it, this war that is unfolding was always going to happen if the revolution stayed true to its principles. The Imposed War of 1980 – 88 was the first salvo in this battle. We are living through maybe the fourth, fifth, sixth iteration depending on how you count the actual and hybrid wars waged against Iran. The resistance axis, the resistance economy (sanctions ironically pushed Iran far down the road of self-sufficiency, knowledge production and future proofing), and the resistance culture (for want of a better word) that we currently see cutting through cultural barriers in the Lego video, and other memes winning the propaganda war, are all in some way attributable to his vision.
That vision and those plans have energised the region.
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But victory, promised and near, is still not easy. I end with the caveat given by Sheikh Bahmanpour during the 12 Days War of 2025. He speaks of Surah Yusuf, and the lessons we must learn. Things will without a doubt get very bad before they get better, before the victory is complete. They will be so bad, that even the staunchest believers will be despondent. When after a few days the 12 Days war ended in what appeared to be a capitulation by the Zionist entity, as amazing this humiliation of the Israeli forces was, most of us knew this would not be the end. As I conclude this, a bizarre ceasefire not ceasefire exists, again asked for in moments of humiliation this time by Uncle Big Satan himself. But whatever happens, whatever happens, nothing will be the same again. Victory is nearer. Never let that belief go.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. Find her on X, Instagram @arzumerali and her website www.arzumerali.com.