The Basij Is Falling Apart: this Is What the End of the Islamic Republic Looks Like

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by one of our passionate readers, Ms. Sara Rahmati, an international relations graduate currently based in Berlin with an interest in Public International Law. The opinions expressed within reflect only the writer’s views and not necessarily The European Sting’s position on the issue.

For forty-seven years, Iranians have been told the same thing. Protest and you will be beaten. Resist and you will be arrested. Defy the Islamic Republic and you will disappear into Evin Prison or into the ground. The Basij was the enforcement arm of that message. A militia a million strong, embedded in schools, mosques, workplaces and street corners. They were the regime’s answer to every uprising: overwhelming force, delivered fast, with total impunity. That instrument is now breaking apart. Not slowly. Not metaphorically. Literally, in real time, in ways that have no precedent in the history of the Islamic Republic.

On March 17, Israel announced the killing of Gholamreza Soleimani – the head of the Basij since 2019 and the man personally responsible for overseeing the brutal suppression of Iran’s protest movements. He was found hiding in a makeshift tent camp. His headquarters had already been destroyed in earlier strikes. His deputy was killed alongside him. The majority of the Basij’s entire senior leadership was eliminated in a single overnight operation. Think about what that means. The man who commanded Iran’s domestic repression apparatus – who directed the snipers, who ordered the crackdowns, who built the network of checkpoints and informants and detention centres – was living in a tent. Running. Hiding. He did not die in a command centre. He died like a man who already knew the game was lost.

This did not happen in a vacuum. Khamenei is dead. The IRGC chief is dead. The intelligence minister is dead. The national security adviser is dead. The regime’s new nominal supreme leader has barely appeared in public. Iran’s foreign minister insists the political structure is “solid”. Regimes that are solid do not hide their leaders in tents.

Ideology only stretches so far. Many Basij members were not true believers – they were young men who joined for a stipend, a university preference, a government job, a leg up in a collapsing economy. Those incentives are gone. Salary payments to police special units have now been delayed for a third consecutive month. Army retirees have gone without pay for two months. When the latest delay was announced, some personnel simply refused to show up to pro-government rallies. They did not stage a rebellion. They just did not come. That is how institutions collapse, not always with a bang, but with an empty car park and unanswered phones. In desperation, the IRGC has begun recalling retirees to fill the gaps and offering prisoners amnesty in exchange for cooperation with security forces. Read that again. The regime is staffing its security apparatus with inmates. This is not the behaviour of a confident, functioning state. This is a government cannibalising itself.

A video has been circulating. A man who says he is a Basij member films himself inside a deserted barracks, formerly a school. The corridors are empty. His colleagues are gone. “Everyone is leaving”, he says. “I’m going home too. It seems like the regime is finished and we should surrender. I just hope the people don’t take revenge on us.” That last sentence is worth sitting with. A Basij member,  the foot soldier of 47 years of terror, is not worried about the regime’s enemies. He is worried about ordinary Iranians. He knows what his organisation has done. And he is afraid of the reckoning.

The Islamic Republic has survived every previous uprising for one reason: the credible threat of violence. Take that away and the regime has nothing. No genuine popular support. No economic competence. No moral authority. It has only ever had the Basij at your door at 3am. The Green Revolution of 2009 failed because the Basij showed up. The Mahsa Amini protests of 2022 were crushed because the Basij showed up. The January 2026 protests were massacred – between 30,000 and 36,500 people killed in two days — because the Basij showed up. What happens when the Basij does not show up? What happens when the men with the guns have not been paid, when their commander is dead, when their barracks are rubble, when their colleagues are quietly going home? The calculation changes. For the first time in decades, Iranians may be approaching a moment when the street belongs to them.

None of this is clean. The path to freedom does not run through rubble without cost and no serious person should pretend otherwise. But the window opening right now is unlike anything that has appeared in a generation. Every previous uprising crashed against the same wall: the regime’s willingness and ability to kill its own people. That wall is cracking. History does not send invitations. Regimes that seemed eternal, the Soviet Union, Ceausescu’s Romania – projected strength until the moment they could not. Then they fell. Fast.

The Islamic Republic built the Basij to answer one question: what do you do when your own people stop believing in you? The answer is standing in an empty barracks, filming itself, hoping the people will not take revenge. The Basij built its power on making Iranians afraid. Now its own members are afraid. That reversal is not a footnote. It is the story. And for the first time in 47 years, it ends differently.