After 10 days of punishing airstrikes by the U.S. and Israel, Iran’s leadership is battered but showing signs it is still in control and able to fight.
Senior Iranian political figures, while hunted from the air and limiting their appearances in public, are regularly posting messages that reflect recent developments and project unity and defiance. Iran’s military continues to hit high-value targets across a wide front encompassing Arab Gulf countries, Israel and beyond, though it is firing fewer missiles than in the first days of the war.
On the streets of Iranian cities, security forces maintain a heavy presence, and there has been no significant recurrence of the sorts of protests that shook the regime in January.
The inner workings of Iran’s leadership is opaque, and it is hard to get a solid read on its status, particularly when the U.S. and Israel aren’t putting boots on the ground. But observable evidence of their effectiveness makes clear the U.S. and Israel’s hopes for a quick regime collapse aren’t yet panning out.
The degree of resilience shown by the country’s leadership raises the question of how long the U.S. and Israel can sustain their war from above and at what cost if their enemy doesn’t fold.
One reason Iran’s leaders have been able to withstand the overwhelming military pressure is because they had been planning for a new war since they suffered heavy losses during the 12-day war with Israel and the U.S. in June.
“They were prepared,” said Mohsen Sazegara, a founder of Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now living in exile in the United States. “Even if their military capacity and their buildings are being destroyed, they believe that airstrikes alone can’t destroy the regime.”
On Monday, President Trump told CBS that the war was “very complete, pretty much,” citing the severe damage to Iran’s navy, air force and communications.
But there are no signs of serious cracks or institutional breakdown in Tehran, a person briefed on the military campaign and a foreign diplomat responsible for Iran said. The regime’s goal appears to be to hang on as the consequences of the war accumulate and put pressure on Trump to move on, the diplomat said.
Iran’s leaders quickly expanded the war into a regional conflict, drawing in Gulf states whose defenses are less robust than Israel’s. The fighting is disrupting global trade and travel and has pushed oil prices above $100 a barrel for several hours Monday, raising the cost of keeping the war going.
Iran is firing an average of 45 missiles toward its Persian Gulf neighbors and Israel over the past three days, down from 420 on the second day of the war, according to data from the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security of America. The pace has stabilized, however, and Iran is also firing hundreds of drones at targets including oil facilities, airports and embassies.
The intensity and pattern of the Iranian strikes indicate a clear strategy and coordination behind the attacks, analysts and Arab officials said. Iranian forces have consistently targeted U.S. diplomatic and military sites, as well as energy and transportation infrastructure. They have also repeatedly attacked armed Iranian Kurdish groups based in Iraq and in border areas, to dissuade them from joining the war with ground forces.
In Oman, Iranian forces went after targets at ports and other facilities that were involved in providing fuel supplies to the U.S. military. Drones intercepted by the Omani air force on Wednesday were headed toward a refinery near Muscat where a contractor supplies fuel for the U.S. Navy, an Arab official said. The official’s assessment is that Iran’s chain of command is still functioning.
The joint U.S.-Israeli war strategy is based on a core assumption: that by decapitating Iran’s political and military leadership, and destroying the physical infrastructure that surrounds them, the regime will be forced into collapse or at least surrender. U.S. officials have pointed to the elimination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other Iranian leaders as a measure of the war’s success.
But Iran’s state apparatus was built to outlive individual leaders, thanks to layered and overlapping centers of political and military power. The clearest sign of confidence in the regime’s survival was the appointment of the late Khamenei’s hard-line son—Mojtaba Khamenei—as the Islamic Republic’s new supreme leader.
Iran’s political and religious establishments have rallied around the new ruler, with officials publicly pledging their allegiance. Iran’s national-security leader, Ali Larijani, over the weekend said Iran would continue to pursue a broad-front war.
“Countries in the region must either prevent the United States from using their territory against Iran themselves, or we will do it,” Larijani said in a televised interview from an undisclosed location.
Many Iranians publicly celebrated the killing of Ali Khamenei. But little evidence suggests so far that Iranians are ready to rise up to topple their government.
The strikes haven’t stopped security forces from going on patrol and setting up checkpoints in Tehran and elsewhere. In the city of Isfahan, a large number of the Basij militants have been roaming the streets on motorcycles, brandishing guns and flags of the Islamic Republic, one resident said.
The Iranian government has sought to prevent another popular uprising also by imposing a near-total communication blackout and threatening would-be protesters.
Street protests “will be considered an example of direct cooperation with the enemy,” the intelligence branch of the Revolutionary Guard said in a text message sent Sunday to millions of Iranian mobile-phone users.
A Revolutionary Guard commander, Salar Abnoush, last week warned parents not to let their children take to the streets: “If they show sympathy for the enemy, there is a shoot-to-kill order.”
Iran’s leaders, however, will face heavy pressure as they try to hold on.
Israeli and U.S. forces have worked on creating the conditions for a popular revolt by hitting targets linked to the regime’s repressive apparatus. Iran’s leadership is also widely despised internally after the deadly crackdown earlier this year that weakened whatever support it had.
“Resilience should not be mistaken for strength,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group. “The regime looks more brittle than broken, relying less on legitimacy than on repression, institutional discipline, and a shared sense among elites that their survival is now existential.”
Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com and Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com