One Year After the Twelve-Day War: What Changed in Iran

Israel attacked Iran at around 3:00 AM on June 12. This war, which lasted twelve days, began without a single siren. Throughout the entire duration, no air raid sirens were heard, and no bomb shelters had been prepared for the public. This unfolded despite a subsequent statement by the spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), emphasizing that “since January of last year, the Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters considered war to be an absolute certainty.” Yet, in Israel’s initial strikes, the Islamic Republic’s most prominent commanders, including the commander of Khatam al-Anbiya himself, the Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC, the head of the Aerospace Force, and the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, were killed. Tehran was visibly caught entirely by surprise.

Over the past year, Iranians have witnessed two separate wars. Even now, some on the streets believe that 52 total days of warfare were not enough and that the fight must continue until “final victory” is achieved. Over the last year, as negotiations collapsed repeatedly, pro-war factions have found their voices amplified. Politically, these wars have yielded few, if any, tangible achievements domestically, but economically, they have devastated countless lives. While the Twelve-Day War was not the origin of the Islamic Republic’s tensions with regional countries and the West, it marked a turning point that fundamentally transformed Iran’s political, social, and economic spheres.

Politics and Society Subordinated to Militarism

The war initiated by Israel on June 12 sent shockwaves through Iran’s power structure. The assassination of the core leadership of the IRGC and the General Staff of the Armed Forces in Operation “Dawn of Lions” last June did more than just create an unprecedented command vacuum; it threw the regime’s capacity for narrative-building and political maneuvering into deep crisis.

For several hours, the Islamic Republic lost its military operational capacity and could not execute decisions. From media narrative control to missile retaliation, officials, including a member of the government’s Information Council, later admitted to severe failures in these areas, though they asserted they had “learned their lesson.”

This twelve-day war prompted the Supreme National Security Council to revive the long-defunct “Defense Council” to serve as the country’s central decision-making hub. Following the creation of this body, IRGC and regular army forces effectively seized control of the political and economic apparatus during and after the war.

Ali Khamenei, the late Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, remarked on this shift: “The Islamic Republic demonstrated the unparalleled stability of the foundations of the system and the country to the world.” With military and security forces taking the upper hand, the civilian government was relegated to a mere auxiliary role supporting the military establishment.

President Masoud Pezeshkian, who ran on promises of “de-escalation” and “lifting the shadow of war,” not only failed to withstand the regime’s war machine over the past year but effectively became a mouthpiece for the status quo and a staunch defender of the war effort.

Pezeshkian, whose supporters once took pride in him because he had refused to brand public protests as “riots” or align fully with hardline rhetoric, pivoted to labeling protesters as “terrorists.” He stated: “Protest is the right of the people, but rioting, attacking public spaces, and burning mosques and the Book of God is certainly an Israeli plot.”

The January 2024 Crackdown and the Battle for the Streets

The obvious supremacy of the military and security apparatus in Iranian society and politics culminated in the massacres of January. Although the January protests originated in the Tehran Bazaar as a reaction to skyrocketing dollar exchange rates, they were ultimately the result of overlapping, accumulated crises in the economy, governance, and political legitimacy. The protests spread rapidly, bringing people to the streets across 203 cities.

From the outset, the slogans were radical, directly targeting and rejecting the entirety of the political structure and ruling establishment. Following a call to action by Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s late Shah, the regime responded on January 8 and 9 with widespread, lethal force. To suppress the crowds, the Islamic Republic deployed a vast array of lethal weaponry, including Kalashnikovs, G3 rifles, and snipers.

This terror campaign extended beyond the streets. Security forces raided medical centers, arrested the wounded directly from hospital beds, and disrupted medical treatments. The peak of this state-sponsored violence manifested in the execution-style “coup de grâce” shots fired at wounded demonstrators.

While regular citizens have taken to the streets for major protests only a handful of times over the past year, the Islamic Republic has repeatedly organized mass rallies for its loyalists. It can be argued that the street has become the primary arena of confrontation this year. During the Twelve-Day War, across more than a hundred days of the Forty-Day War, and during state rallies on January 12 and in February, the regime consistently mobilized its supporters.

State-aligned newspapers and sociologists framed the streets as an arena showing “the people’s alignment with the system,” while dissidents faced slaughter. Nevertheless, protests persist. In the wake of the Forty-Day War, high school students in various cities protested a decree by the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council regarding the heavy weight of GPA scores on the Konkur, or university entrance exam. These protests were fueled by the fact that online schooling over the past year had been of abysmally low quality due to infrastructure disruptions.

The Internet as a State Privilege

In addition to street-level suppression, the regime has relied on communication blackouts as a fixed strategic tool to manage crises since the Twelve-Day War. The past year saw three total internet blackouts:

During the Twelve-Day WarDuring the January protestsThe longest blackout, beginning on February 28, lasted for 89 days during the second war involving Israel and the United StatesThese prolonged shutdowns demonstrated that post-war security agencies view internet access purely as a security threat. Connectivity is no longer treated as a right but rather as a “government privilege.”

Political Succession and Factional Feuds

The most critical moment for the Islamic Republic, and the most monumental shift following the Twelve-Day War, was the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026. His death, coinciding with the outbreak of the second war and followed shortly by the deaths of Ali Larijani and Ali Shamkhani, two former secretaries of the Supreme National Security Council, ignited fierce rivalries among various factions within the Islamic Republic, particularly between the clerical establishment and the IRGC.

These internal rifts did not end with the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new leader on March 8. According to a high-ranking individual within the office of a prominent Grand Ayatollah: “The IRGC has placed the offices of all senior clerics in both Qom and Najaf under surveillance to ensure not a single word is uttered in opposition to the so-called ‘leadership’ of Mojtaba Khamenei.”

Meanwhile, various officials, including the new leader, constantly stress the need for unity, stating: “The enemy’s blind plot following the imposed war, economic pressure, and propaganda and political siege is to create division and social fragmentation to compensate for their military defeats and bring the nation to its knees.”

This precarious environment mirrors President Pezeshkian’s remarks on November 11, when he stated:

“The pillar of this tent is the Supreme Leader. Back during the [Iran-Iraq] war, I had no fear of what might happen to me, but I dreaded that, God forbid, something would happen to the Leadership. If that happens, we will just fight among ourselves. Israel won’t even need to come here.”

Livelihoods That No Longer Exist

One year after the Twelve-Day War, Iran’s economy is suffering from a severe exacerbation of its structural crisis. Price acceleration, which previously moved within predictable channels, has now reached a phase of consecutive leaps that even official indicators register as a grave warning. While in June 2025, annual inflation stood at 34.5% and point-to-point inflation was 39.4%, by May 2026, the Central Bank announced annual inflation at 53.9% and point-to-point inflation at 77.2%. The Statistical Center of Iran estimated these same figures even higher, at 57.7% and 83.9%, respectively. A 113.8% growth in the commodity index within a single year indicates that the country’s economy is facing not just rising prices, but a total collapse of purchasing power within the middle layers of society.

In response to this chaos, the government resorted to several major measures to manage a treasury grappling with budget deficits and sanctions pressure. Eliminating the preferential currency rate of 28,500 tomans was introduced as an “economic surgery” aimed at cutting off currency rents.

President Pezeshkian labeled this subsidized exchange rate as a breeding ground for corruption. It was during the implementation of this policy and the subsequent plunge of the rial under inflationary pressure that Mohammad Reza Farzin was removed from the presidency of the Central Bank and replaced by Abdolnaser Hemmati. In his inaugural speech on December 31, following his appointment, Hemmati stated: “I promise the people that we will provide economic stability. Controlling inflation is our duty, and the cause of inflation is the budget deficit, which must be controlled. I will crack down on imbalanced banks.”

Following the Twelve-Day War, another initial government measure was an attempt to slash subsidies. The Minister of Cooperatives, Labor, and Social Welfare had announced in September: “In September, we will eliminate the subsidies for three income deciles, about 25 million people.” However, the government effectively backed down from this policy and took the opposite route. It decided instead to expand electronic welfare system coupons, or Kalabarg, as a compensatory tool to aid the less fortunate, whose numbers were rapidly increasing.

Simultaneously with this shift in the political order, reports from June 2026 show that credit purchases via these welfare coupons are being used just to secure a household’s daily protein needs. An employee paying installments this month for meat purchased last month has essentially spent next month’s income before even receiving it. A primary driver of this is the growth of poverty.

Economist Hojat Mirzaei estimates that the population living below the poverty line has crossed the 40% threshold. Furthermore, between 130,000 and 140,000 people employed in the fishing sector directly lost their jobs due to the war. Pre-crisis forecasts predicting a two-million-person increase in the impoverished population for 2025 have, according to Mirzaei, “significantly worsened” due to recent events.

On June 6, the National Trust Party (Hezb-e Etemad-e Melli) wrote in a statement that “the experience of two aggressive wars, the spread of regional insecurity, the continuation of sanctions and the recent economic blockade, heavy and eroding inflation, the decline in people’s purchasing power, and dwindling employment opportunities” are driving the growing anxieties of society. One of the most acute dimensions of this crisis today is the severe shortage of medicine.

Explaining the situation, Hossein-Ali Shahriari, the head of the Parliament’s Health and Treatment Commission, states: “People are reporting that they can no longer afford to buy the medicine and equipment they need.” Emphasizing that out-of-pocket healthcare expenses for citizens have reached 55% to 70%, he clarifies that the government’s currency policies, including eliminating the preferential exchange rate and replacing it with higher rates, have drastically driven up the final cost of pharmaceutical items. Despite claims of maintaining strategic reserves, medicine shortages persist. Shahriari stresses that this situation requires an immediate infusion of 150 trillion tomans in essential funding, a figure whose realization remains highly uncertain under current budget constraints.

The Erasure of the Middle Class

This environment has dragged the middle class into an abyss of existential livelihood collapse, where “daily survival” has replaced any form of planning for the future. While purchasing durable or new goods has become a distant dream, forcing many households to rely on costly and hazardous repairs of worn-out appliances just to delay total breakdown, the struggle has escalated to securing foundational items at a macro level.

The widespread return of “ledger accounts and buying on credit” at supermarkets and bakeries, even for minimal staples like bread, eggs, and tomato paste, alongside the shift by educated professionals and salaried employees from buying fruit by the kilogram to buying it by the individual piece, serves as the starkest evidence of the collapse in collective purchasing power.

Ultimately, what remains in Iran after twelve months and the outbreak of two wars is not proximity to strategic peaks or the prospect of becoming the world’s fourth-largest power. Instead, it is an economy in which the majority have become poorer, managing economic pressure has become the top priority, and the daily lives of citizens are increasingly overshadowed and, in many cases, shattered by the regime’s defensive survival tactics.