“Either death or Khamenei,” Ali, a hardline supporter of the Islamic Republic in Iran, tells me.

Ali, a 20-year-old volunteer in the regime’s Basij militia, has spent the past 10 days attending pro-regime rallies in Tehran. “Our job is to hold the streets from the Zionist enemies,” he states, mimicking the words of senior regime officials.

As the US and Israeli military operation against the Islamic Republic began, the regime put out a call to action for its supporters to deploy to the streets. Ali is one of thousands who fervently answered this call.

Images and video footage of large crowds – holding Islamic Republic flags, Hezbollah banners and images of the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, – are being continuously aired on Iranian state-TV propaganda channels. These videos have then been regurgitated by parts of the mainstream media in the West and used to criticise Donald Trump on the basis that the US-led war has supposedly “rallied Iranians around the flag”.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

This is not to suggest the videos we are witnessing are AI (though some have no doubt been manipulated). The people we are seeing on the streets are certainly real, but they represent a very narrow and extreme segment of Iranian society, what is known as the “hard base” (hasteyeh sakht) of the regime.

Over the course of almost five decades, a combination of forceful social Islamisation, economic corruption, political suppression and human rights violations has resulted in the Islamic Republic gradually losing the support of almost all social constituencies in Iran.

All but the hard base. It represents the fanatical minority which supports the Islamic Republic for purely ideological reasons. This support is rooted in the most radical ideological policies of the regime.

At home, these include blind obedience to the supreme leader (or velayat madari), the Islamisation of Iranian society, and the strict imposition of the mandatory Islamic hijab on women. Abroad, it encompasses support for the so-called “Axis of Resistance” militias, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, anti-Americanism and, perhaps most importantly, the objective to eradicate Israel, driven by innate anti-Semitism.

Crucially for the hard base, however, regime survival is not the end goal. Instead, its members view the existence of the Islamic Republic and the pursuit of its ideological policies as a necessary means to facilitate the return of the so-called messianic Hidden Shia Imam, Mahdi.

According to the apocalyptic doctrine of Mahdism, the 12th divinely ordained Shia Imam, Mahdi, was withdrawn into a miraculous state of disappearance by God in AD 874. The doctrine claims that the Hidden Imam will one day return to restore justice to the world before the End of Times and, in doing so, will wage an apocalyptic war that will end the lives of infidels and Jews everywhere. Historic Shia narrations, on which this doctrine is based, claim that there will be rivers of Jewish blood, after which justice will be restored globally and the world will be divided into 313 provinces – representing the number of Mahdi’s so-called special commanders.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s constitution was built around this doctrine. Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, it states, was to pave the way for “Mahdi’s Global Revolution”. The supreme leader rules, as per the constitution, as the Hidden Imam’s Deputy (nayeb-e imam).

From 2009, Ali Khamenei began to double down on this doctrine, not least in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the ideological army of the regime. In doing so, his goal was to nurture more radical generations both within the IRGC and the hard base, which forms the core recruitment pool for the Guard. Thereafter, this apocalyptic and militaristic doctrine of Mahdism became the focal point in the IRGC’s formal programme of indoctrination, making up more than half of the training in the Guard.

The IRGC’s indoctrinators began to assert that there were barriers to the return of the Hidden Imam and that the IRGC was the “militaristic vehicle” to remove those barriers and speed up his return. According to this doctrine, crafted by some of the regime’s most extremist Islamist clerics – not least the late Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, who supervised the new supreme leader’s clerical studies – the biggest barrier is the existence of the state of Israel. Indeed, this is the lens through which the IRGC and the hard base viewed and communicated the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.

Likewise, according to this doctrine, one of the signs of the nearing of Mahdi’s arrival is the apocalyptic destruction of the world, not least Iran. This is precisely why members of the hard base are ideologically stimulated to take to the streets despite the regime being targeted militarily in the ongoing war.

The hard base represents around 10 per cent of the Iranian population, or eight million – according to a leaked recording from a senior IRGC official Sassan Zare, a figure close to the new supreme leader. This figure can also be corroborated by the number of Iranians who rejected Western Covid vaccines and opted for the regime’s own questionable domestically-produced jab.

The hard base does not represent the broader Iranian population, which overwhelmingly not only opposes the regime but also seeks to topple it. In fact, the hard base was deployed en masse to violently suppress the Iranian population after they took to the streets in anti-regime protests only a month before the outbreak of war with the US. This resulted in the brutal massacre of more than 40,000 unarmed protestors. The hard base justified the violence through an ideological lens: claiming that, according to scripture, it is necessary to cleanse the streets of infidels and “Zio-Jews”.

Thus much of the Western mainstream media is being deceived. Images of large crowds in Iranian cities are not evidence that ordinary Iranians are setting aside their objections to the regime and rallying around the flag.

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The regime was genuinely concerned that ordinary Iranians would use the military operation as an opportunity to take to the streets to topple the Islamic Republic. To mitigate this, the IRGC not only declared domestic martial law from the moment the war began, but worked closely with the regime to deploy its hard base onto the streets to deny space for dissenting Iranians to take part in anti-regime protests.

As the regime’s propaganda has spelt out explicitly in its call to action to the hard base: “Holding the streets is more important than holding our military bases. If the streets are emptied, the enemy can exploit sleeper cells and organised networks … but if the streets are filled with people, unrest is neutralised before it begins.”

If anything, therefore, pro-regime rallies are not an indication of the Islamic Republic’s strength or support. They are a clear sign of a weak and vulnerable regime – one that can and must be toppled.