Iran’s Supreme Leader Is Dead. The War Didn’t End With Him.
Ali Khamenei is dead, and the two things happening on either side of that fact are not the two things Western coverage keeps trying to merge into one story. On one side: PMOI Resistance Units launched a nationwide campaign of defiance on 10 July, following what the same outlets describe as lavish, militarised state funeral ceremonies for a man whose regime spent decades disappearing and executing its own dissidents. On the other side: the United States is now nine consecutive nights into a bombing campaign that has nothing to do with Iranian civil society and everything to do with a strait oil needs to move through. These are not the same story wearing two faces. One is Iranians deciding, on their own terms, what comes after a dead theocrat. The other is a foreign military using the resulting instability as cover to keep dropping ordnance on Bushehr and Jask.
I will not perform grief for Khamenei, and I will not pretend the Islamic Republic’s cruelty toward its own population, including the Muslims and ethnic minorities it has repressed hardest, is somehow beside the point. It isn’t. But cruelty by a government toward its own people has never once been the actual criterion the US applies before deciding whether to bomb a country, and this week supplied fresh proof: the UK formally designated the IRGC a terrorist organisation the same week Washington kept striking population centres that have nothing to do with the IRGC’s chain of command, and the same week two US service members were killed and a third went missing in an Iranian strike on a base in Jordan, a retaliation entirely predictable to anyone not invested in pretending bombing campaigns end wars rather than widen them. Designating an organisation a terrorist entity is meant to look like precision.
Nine nights of strikes across seven cities is a message about who gets to survive a transition of power and who doesn’t, sent from very far away by people who will never live with the aftermath.
What I actually want people organising in solidarity to sit with is that you can want the Islamic Republic gone and still refuse to hand that outcome’s authorship to the same states currently starving Gaza and propping up a genocide in the same region. Regime change engineered from outside, at the cost of civilian neighbourhoods, has never once produced the liberation it promises the population living through it. It produces exactly what it is producing right now, dead conscripts, missing soldiers, a resistance movement inside Iran that has to build its own legitimacy while a foreign air force turns its cities into a proving ground for a completely separate geopolitical argument about who controls Hormuz. Iranians deciding their own future and the US bombing Iranian cities are opposite processes that happen to share a timeline, not two chapters of the same liberation story.
Empire is opportunistic before it is anything else. It does not need to invent the crisis it exploits, a dead supreme leader, a domestic resistance movement, a currency in freefall somewhere else on the map; it only needs the crisis to already exist, and it will insert a bombing campaign, arms shipment, or a debt instrument into whatever gap that crisis opens. What gets lost in that insertion, every time, is the population who was actually trying to build something for themselves before the opportunist arrived.
None of that population is waiting on Washington, London, or a supreme leader’s funeral to eat this week, and neither should the people reading this. Below is this week’s mutual aid requests list. It includes requests with no connection to any government’s war aims, just people who need the rent covered or the lights on or a child fed. Move what you can there. Move what you can’t fund further than your own reach. That, unlike anything happening in a briefing room this week, actually reaches someone.
✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨
@Toadlyturtle @ellespeaks @wrzky @devlin @MaskedRyder @thereaders @OshunThaGreat @cycletherapyHam @AnthonyJK @ashporter93
✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨
Helping Malak to provide food and safety for the children.
Malak was a teacher before the war destroyed her home and income in Gaza. Now a mother without a safe home or stable income, she’s raising directly for food, warmth, and safety for her children.
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Help Eman’s Family Survive and Protect Her Unborn Child
Eman lost everything to war and is raising funds directly for food, treatment, and safe housing for her children, sick and malnourished from sustained deprivation. Redistribute what’s possible, share the rest.
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From each according to their capacity, to each according their needs.
Feel free to tag me in your mutual aid requests for a boost.
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