The recent U.S. military aggression against Iran showed that the confrontation has entered a new phase of terrorism. In this phase, Iran’s adversaries are seeking to establish a lasting foothold for terrorism inside the country by opening arms-smuggling corridors from border regions to central cities, exploiting ethnic divisions, and deploying suicide teams under centralized command.
Against this backdrop, the Terrorism Studies Scientific Association at Yazd University held an expert discussion featuring Alireza Majidi, a specialist in Arab affairs. The session examined emerging patterns of cross-border and regional terrorism, security threats in the aftermath of the war, and the need to bridge domestic divisions to prevent terrorist recruitment.
Majidi began by arguing that the United States, as the aggressor, pursued four objectives in descending order of ambition. Its primary objective—what he described as the “full-success scenario”—was regime change and the complete overthrow of Iran’s governing system.
Failing that, the second objective was to transform the system from within. Majidi said Washington viewed the Islamic Republic as an ideologically driven state and assumed that eliminating its leader, who was martyred, would pave the way for structural change, ultimately producing an “aging Islamic Republic stripped of its original character.”
The third, less ambitious scenario was to weaken Iran’s capabilities so that its leaders, even if they retained the political will, would lack the means to challenge the U.S.-led order.
The fourth and least ambitious objective, he said, was to accelerate the erosion of the country’s infrastructure. This campaign began with sanctions in the Iranian 2010–11 and continued during the recent military confrontation through the bombing of major industries and smaller workshops, including Mobarakeh Steel and industrial areas in Isfahan and Kerman. The aim, he argued, was to cripple the country’s foundations and push Iranian society toward the kind of gradual collapse experienced by Syria, Libya and Sudan.
Turning to the strategy of severely weakening Iran, Majidi said Washington had combined economic pressure with efforts to disrupt public order by organizing relatively small groups numbering a few thousand and promoting terrorism, having failed to mobilize nationwide uprisings involving millions.
He said an examination of Israeli sources showed that they viewed Iran as a “mosaic society” and sought to exploit ethnic divisions and the aftermath of the unrest in Dey, the Iranian month spanning December and January, to draw young people affected by those events into armed activity.
According to Majidi, the Israeli and U.S. strategy centers on establishing arms-smuggling corridors from Iran’s western and southeastern borders to its central cities, making insecurity a persistent condition across the country.
He also pointed to emerging operational methods in cross-border terrorism, including suicide teams equipped with explosive vests that can be controlled centrally by a team leader. He said this indicated direct training by Mossad.
Terrorist activity along the western and northwestern borders had also expanded through the use of non-Iranian operatives, he added.
Majidi stressed that the principal measure of the threat was not the casualty count from individual incidents. Rather, it was the activation of arms-smuggling routes and their links to organized crime networks, including drug trafficking, which could sustain terrorism inside Iran.
He noted that some rival regional governments had previously invested in exploiting ethnic and sectarian divisions but had since become more cautious out of concern over Iran’s capacity to retaliate. Nevertheless, the potential to exploit those divisions to promote terrorism remained.
At the regional level, Majidi identified the risk of an ISIS resurgence as a major source of instability. Following the capture of Raqqa and the Baghuz area, he said, large numbers of ISIS prisoners came under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). With the change of government in Syria and the establishment of al-Jolani’s administration, however, those prisoners had become geopolitical instruments.
One example, he argued, was the placement of large camps holding terrorists along the Iraqi border to deter Iraqi resistance forces from entering Syria.
Recent developments in eastern Syria had also led to the escape and dispersal of thousands of ISIS members, he said. These militants, operating with specific agendas, were now reorganizing terrorist cells in the deserts of Iraq and Syria.
Given ISIS’s history of operating in Diyala, Majidi warned that the possibility of its members moving closer to Iran’s western borders remained a serious potential threat.
He concluded that the most effective defense against the spread of terrorism into Iran was to counter the adversaries’ strategy of polarization by “bridging domestic divisions.”
Efforts to strengthen public discourse should not deepen social and cultural fault lines, he said. Instead, government policy under these circumstances should create greater space for national unity, preventing terrorist movements from recruiting among people with grievances.
Taken together, the discussion suggested that postwar threats are increasingly taking the form of networked terrorism and suicide teams directed by foreign intelligence services. Breaking this cycle of insecurity requires both deterrence and a structural approach to reducing social divisions. Stronger domestic cohesion can cut the links between terrorist cells and the conditions of public discontent on which they seek to draw.