A 2026 analysis of Iran conflict history — proxy wars, domestic insurgencies, and the Israel confrontation.
Iran’s conflict history spans nearly 80 years of revolution, authoritarian rule, regional wars, and geopolitical rivalry. Following the 1953 US- and UK-backed coup that restored the Shah to power, Iran underwent the 1979 Islamic Revolution, fought the Iran–Iraq War, and became deeply involved in regional proxy conflicts, nuclear disputes, and tensions with the United States and Israel.
In 2025, Iran’s conflict deaths stemmed overwhelmingly from the June interstate confrontation with Israel, alongside low-level fighting with Jaish al-Adl and PJAK insurgents. UCDP recorded 1,268 battle-related deaths in Iran, including 463 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Iran’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Iran is a large, mountainous country in southwestern Asia, bounded by the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in the south — a narrow sea passage through which a large share of the world’s oil moves. At its centre sits a high, arid plateau, ringed by the Zagros and Alborz mountain ranges, which historically shielded Iran from easy conquest while still leaving its frontiers exposed to repeated invasion. The population is a mosaic — a Persian-speaking majority alongside sizeable Azeri, Kurdish, Lur, Baluch, and Arab communities — held together less by a single ethnicity than by a shared political and religious inheritance: since the sixteenth century Iran has been the great homeland of Twelver Shi’ism, a branch of Islam followed by only a minority of the world’s Muslims, which sets Iran apart from every one of its Sunni-majority neighbours. Mainstream historians read Iranian history as the long interplay of an old, continuous civilisation, a state repeatedly remade by outside intervention, and a recurring willingness to overturn that state through revolution whenever its rulers are seen to have surrendered the country’s independence.
Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017); Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (2008).
Five thresholds shaped the structure of the modern Iranian state. The first came in 1501, when the Safavid dynasty made Twelver Shi’ism the empire’s official religion, giving Iran a distinct religious identity that has outlasted every government since. The second was the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, when merchants, clergy, and reformers forced the ruling Qajar monarchy — weakened by decades of debt and foreign commercial concessions — to accept an elected parliament, the country’s first real check on royal power. The third was the rule of Reza Shah, an army officer who seized power in 1925 and built a strong, centralised, secularising state, a modern army, and a national bureaucracy largely from scratch. The fourth was the 1953 overthrow of the elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a coup organised by the American and British intelligence services after he nationalised the Anglo-Iranian oil industry, which restored the Shah to full power and left a lasting popular memory of foreign interference. The fifth was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which replaced the monarchy with a clerical state, followed almost immediately by the devastating Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88, which hardened the new republic’s institutions under the pressure of total war.
Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017); Ali M. Ansari, Modern Iran Since 1797: Reform and Revolution (2019).
In the mainstream account, Iran is unusual in that a recognisable state and a shared sense of civilisation are extremely old, while the modern nation-state, and nationalism in today’s sense, are comparatively recent. Persian monarchy and administrative practice stretch back over two millennia, and the adoption of Twelver Shi’ism under the Safavids in 1501 gave the population a durable common identity distinct from its Ottoman and Central Asian neighbours, long before anything resembling a modern citizenry existed. What changed in the twentieth century was the form of the state: Reza Shah, who seized power in 1925, built the apparatus of a modern nation — a conscript army, secular law codes, state schools teaching a standardised, Persian-centred history — deliberately fusing an ancient civilisational memory with a new, centralised nationalism. This makes Iran a comparatively rare case in which an old state and an old, religiously defined community came first, and a modern, self-conscious nationalism was built on top of them within a single generation, rather than the reverse.
Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017); Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (2003).
The single long-term force mainstream historians point to is a recurring cycle: strong, centralising rule pursued at the cost of popular legitimacy, followed by mass revolt once that rule is seen to have sold the country’s independence or dignity to a foreign power. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11 rose against a monarchy that had mortgaged the country’s resources to Russia and Britain; the oil nationalisation crisis of the early 1950s, and the coup that ended it in 1953, turned on the same grievance, this time against Britain’s grip on Iranian oil; and the 1979 revolution, though carried out under religious leadership, drew much of its force from decades of resentment at the Shah’s dependence on American backing. Each time, a ruler who concentrated power at home while appearing to answer to a foreign patron abroad eventually faced a coalition of clergy, merchants, and the wider public demanding independence in fact as well as in name. What best explains Iran’s trajectory, on this reading, is this repeated collision between centralised authority and a national demand for genuine sovereignty — a pattern that recurs under strikingly different regimes and ideologies.
Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (2008); Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (2003).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist reading resists the idea that Iran’s modern history is best told as a story of things done to Iran by outside powers, and argues instead that Iranians themselves — clergy, bazaar merchants (Iran’s traditional marketplace-based commercial class), and the professional and middle classes — have repeatedly been the decisive actors in their own history, even at moments usually credited to foreign intervention. On this account, the most influential foreign-intervention story of all, the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, deserves a harder look: the diplomat-turned-historian Darioush Bayandor has argued that the American and British intelligence services set events in motion but could not control what followed, and that internal Iranian dynamics — above all the withdrawal of support by senior Shia clergy, including the country’s leading religious authority at the time — did more to bring Mossadegh down than the foreign plotters themselves. A parallel argument reframes the 1979 revolution and the government that followed it: the historian Ervand Abrahamian contends that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the senior cleric who led the revolution, is better understood as a populist mobiliser of Iran’s middle and lower-middle classes than as a purely religious fundamentalist. Both arguments are contested, and both shift weight from foreign actors and pure theology toward Iranian social forces.
Darioush Bayandor, Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited (2010); Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (1993).
The revisionist backbone keeps the same run of turning points the mainstream uses — the Safavid adoption of Shi’ism, the Constitutional Revolution, Reza Shah’s centralisation, the 1953 coup, the 1979 revolution — but shifts the weight decisively at the two most contested thresholds. At 1953, Bayandor’s account credits the collapse of Mossadegh’s government less to the American and British-run operation, codenamed Ajax, than to a home-grown crisis of clerical and popular support once the era’s leading religious authority, Ayatollah Boroujerdi, withdrew his backing; on this view the foreign operation exploited a fracture that was already opening rather than manufacturing Mossadegh’s downfall from nothing. At 1979, Abrahamian’s account keeps Khomeini as the pivotal figure but recasts him as a populist reformer channelling the grievances of shopkeepers, clergy, and the urban poor against a Westernising elite, rather than as a fundamentalist restoring seventh-century religious law. Because both readings reinterpret accepted events rather than inventing new ones, they stand as serious history — though mainstream scholars continue to dispute how much agency to hand to internal Iranian actors as against a foreign intelligence operation whose planning is extensively, and separately, documented.
Darioush Bayandor, Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited (2010); Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (1993).
In this reading, the “nation” that emerged from 1979 was less the reawakening of an ancient religious community than a new coalition assembled from specific, and unequal, social interests. Abrahamian’s class-based account describes the revolutionary coalition as an alliance between the traditional bazaar merchant class, the Shia clergy who depended heavily on the bazaar’s donations, and a rapidly growing but politically excluded urban middle and lower-middle class squeezed by the Shah’s rapid, unequal modernisation. What bound this coalition together, on this view, was not primarily theology but shared economic grievance and exclusion from power, with religious leadership supplying the organisation and language capable of uniting groups that might otherwise have had little in common. The state that resulted, the Islamic Republic, then had to build a specifically religious nationalism on top of this originally economic alliance in order to hold it together once the Shah was gone. This corrects a purely religious account of Iranian nationhood, though it can understate the genuine, centuries-old depth of Shia identity that the cultural perspective treats as a cause in its own right rather than a convenient organising language.
Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (1993); Darioush Bayandor, Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited (2010).
The force this school foregrounds is class conflict and popular mobilisation, channelled through religious and merchant networks, rather than the mainstream’s story of foreign intervention answered by revolt. Time and again, in this reading, decisive change in Iran came from coalitions of bazaar merchants, clergy, and an aggrieved middle class organising against a state seen as both authoritarian and out of touch — with foreign powers acting as opportunists exploiting cracks that Iranian society had already opened, not as the prime movers of events. This departs deliberately from the mainstream’s emphasis on the 1953 coup and Western backing for the Shah as the central engines of modern Iranian history. Its strength is that it restores agency to Iranians at moments — the fall of Mossadegh, the fall of the Shah — that are often told almost entirely as stories about Washington, London, and Moscow; its contested point is how far this reweighting should go, since the CIA’s own declassified planning records for 1953 describe a deliberate, well-funded operation to engineer Mossadegh’s removal, which most historians still treat as decisive rather than merely opportunistic.
Darioush Bayandor, Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited (2010); Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (1993).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through faith and collective memory, Iran is the great centre of Shia Islam, and this single fact distinguishes it from almost every neighbour. Where most of the world’s Muslims are Sunni, Iranians overwhelmingly follow Twelver Shi’ism, a branch of the faith that reveres twelve successive spiritual leaders called Imams, descended from the Prophet Muhammad, the last of whom is believed to be in hidden concealment and destined to return. Central to Shia identity is the memory of Karbala, where in the year 680 the Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, was killed by the ruling Sunni caliph’s forces after refusing to submit to what he saw as illegitimate rule. His martyrdom is commemorated every year in the mourning ritual of Ashura and supplies Shia political culture with a recurring template — the righteous, outnumbered resister against an unjust ruler. This story has shaped Iranian politics for centuries, giving dissenters a ready-made language of righteous suffering to draw on against the Shah, against foreign domination, and, for the state’s many domestic critics today, against the clerical government itself.
Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (1985); Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (2006).
Seen through religion, the turning points are moments when Shia identity and political authority were fused or refashioned. The Safavid dynasty’s decision in 1501 to impose Twelver Shi’ism as the state religion was the founding act, carried out partly to mark Iran off sharply from the Sunni Ottoman Empire next door, and it gave the country a clergy with independent religious authority and a landed, financial base separate from the throne. Over the following centuries this clergy built its own seminaries, courts, and networks of patronage, becoming a power the state had to bargain with rather than simply command. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11 — the uprising that forced the monarchy to accept an elected parliament — saw many clergy side with reformers against royal excess, invoking Islamic justice as their standard. The most consequential turn came in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini’s doctrine of velayat-e faqih — rule by a senior Islamic jurist, acting as guardian over the state until the hidden Imam’s return — gave clerics direct political power for the first time, ending centuries in which religious and royal authority, though intertwined, had remained formally separate.
Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (1985); Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival (2006).
On this reading, a shared religious identity bound Iranians together as a distinct people long before the modern state took its current shape, and did more of that binding than ethnicity ever could. Iran’s population is genuinely diverse in language and ethnicity — Persian, Azeri, Kurdish, Baluch, Arab, and more — a diversity that might easily have pulled the country apart, as it has pulled apart other multi-ethnic states nearby. What held it together instead, on this account, was Twelver Shi’ism, adopted as state religion in 1501 and absorbed over generations into education, law, storytelling, and the rhythms of the ritual calendar, from Ashura’s mourning processions to pilgrimage at the Shia shrine cities. To be Iranian, in this sense, has long meant belonging to the Shia community first and to a particular ethnic group second — an identity resilient enough to survive the collapse of dynasties, foreign occupation, and revolution alike. The 1979 revolution then completed this fusion formally, building a state whose constitution explicitly rests its legitimacy on Shia religious law, so that religion supplies exactly the binding agent that ethnicity, on its own, could not provide.
Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival (2006); Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (1985).
The enduring force this lens identifies is the fusion, and periodic re-fusion, of religious authority with political power. For roughly five centuries, ever since the Safavids made Twelver Shi’ism the state religion in 1501, Iranian rulers have needed the cooperation, or at least the acquiescence, of a powerful and independently financed clergy; when that cooperation broke down, as it repeatedly did, rulers found themselves fatally weakened. The Qajar shahs lost ground whenever leading clergy sided with popular grievance; the Pahlavi shahs, who tried to sideline religion in favour of secular nationalism, were ultimately undone by a clerical-led revolution invoking the same Karbala imagery of righteous resistance to unjust power that Shia Iranians had drawn on for thirteen centuries. Since 1979, the doctrine of velayat-e faqih has placed a senior cleric directly atop the state for the first time, formally completing a process centuries in the making. What best explains Iran’s long-run development, on this account, is this unbroken expectation that legitimate authority must answer to religious sanction — a template that has outlasted monarchy and now defines the republic that replaced it.
Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (1985); Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival (2006).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
Iran’s geography sets the terms of its economic life. A vast, arid central plateau, much of it desert, is enclosed by the Zagros mountains in the west and the Alborz range in the north, leaving only narrow bands of fertile, habitable land around the edges; historically this scattered the population into cities separated by difficult terrain, favouring strong local identities and making the country hard to unify by force alone. To the south, Iran holds one shore of the entire Persian Gulf and the whole eastern side of the Strait of Hormuz, a sea passage only about 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil traded by sea must pass. Beneath this landscape lie some of the largest oil and natural gas reserves on Earth. On this reading, Iran’s history is best explained by the collision of two geographic facts: a difficult interior that resisted easy central control, and colossal energy wealth concentrated along its Gulf coast, which has repeatedly drawn foreign powers in and given Tehran leverage over global trade whenever it has chosen to use it.
Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran: Despotism and Pseudo-Modernism, 1926–1979 (1981); Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle: Iran’s Oil Nationalization and Its Aftermath (1992).
The economic turning points follow the discovery, loss, and recapture of Iran’s oil wealth. In 1908 prospectors struck oil in the southwest, and the following year the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed, giving Britain a dominant and highly profitable stake in Iranian resources for decades, on terms Iranians increasingly saw as exploitative. The nationalisation of the oil industry in 1951, driven through parliament by the popular prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, was an attempt to reclaim that wealth for the state; Britain’s response — an economic boycott that crippled Iran’s oil exports — helped create the conditions for the 1953 coup that removed him, after which a Western-led consortium regained effective control of production. The 1979 revolution then nationalised the industry again for good, but decades of international sanctions, imposed in waves from the 1980s onward and tightened repeatedly since, have kept Iran from freely selling that wealth on world markets, forcing successive governments to build a distinctive sanctions-adapted economy of barter, alternative shipping routes, and client markets. Each threshold answers to who controls the oil and who can move it to market.
Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran (1981); Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle (1992).
On this reading, control over resources and the Gulf coastline did much of the work of binding the modern Iranian state together. The nationalisation movement of the early 1950s was not only an economic dispute but a nation-forming moment: for the first time, Iranians across region, class, and ethnicity rallied around a single, shared demand — that the country’s oil, and by extension its sovereignty, belonged to Iranians rather than to a foreign company. That episode fixed control of natural resources as a central test of national legitimacy ever since; no Iranian government, whatever its ideology, has been able to survive being seen as surrendering the country’s oil or its access to the Gulf to outside control. Geography reinforced this: holding the eastern shore of the Strait of Hormuz gave Tehran a lever over the wider world’s economy that ethnic or religious identity alone could never supply, and successive governments have used the threat of contesting the strait as a bargaining chip precisely because the resource and the chokepoint sit together on Iranian territory. State and nation, on this view, were fused around the ownership of oil and the command of a chokepoint.
Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle (1992); Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran (1981).
The long-run force this lens identifies is the struggle to control, and to capture the benefits of, Iran’s hydrocarbon wealth and its position astride a vital global chokepoint. From the 1901 concession that first opened Iranian oil to foreign capital, through nationalisation, coup, counter-nationalisation, and now decades of Western sanctions, the same contest recurs: who owns the oil, who can sell it, and who controls the sea lane it must pass through. Sanctions imposed since the 1980s, and tightened sharply after 2006 and again after 2018, have not ended this contest so much as displaced it, forcing Iran to build alternative markets, shipping networks, and a heavily state-directed economy resilient to isolation. Iran’s repeated use of pressure around the Strait of Hormuz — threatening or briefly restricting the world’s oil traffic — is, on this account, simply the geographic expression of the same underlying leverage that oil itself provides. What best explains Iran’s economic and diplomatic behaviour over the long run, then, is this doubled asset: enormous energy wealth paired with a stranglehold on the route much of it, and much of the wider Gulf’s oil, must travel by.
Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran (1981); Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle (1992).
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The 1953 coup is the sharpest dispute. The consensus and cultural readings treat it chiefly as a foreign-engineered removal of a nationalist prime minister — a wound to Iranian sovereignty inflicted from outside. The revisionist reading agrees the coup happened and was real, but credits much of Mossadegh’s actual downfall to an internal collapse of clerical and popular support, with the foreign operation exploiting rather than manufacturing that collapse. Same event, different weight given to Iranian versus foreign agency.
The character of the 1979 revolution divides the lenses again. The cultural account reads it as the culmination of a centuries-old Shia political tradition — righteous resistance to unjust rule, finally seizing the state itself through the doctrine of velayat-e faqih. The revisionist account reads the same revolution as, at root, a populist class alliance of bazaar, clergy, and squeezed middle class, for whom religion supplied organisation and language rather than the primary cause. Both agree on the events; they disagree on what was driving them underneath.
On one point all four perspectives agree: Iran’s modern state has repeatedly been convulsed by the same underlying tension between centralised authority and a demand — expressed alternately as nationalist, religious, or economic — for genuine independence. They part on what supplies the real engine: foreign intervention, internal class conflict, religious tradition, or the pull of oil and geography.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017); Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (2008) and Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (1993); Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (2003); Ali M. Ansari, Modern Iran Since 1797: Reform and Revolution (2019 edition); Darioush Bayandor, Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited (2010); Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (1985); Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival (2006); Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran (1981); Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle (1992). Bayandor’s revisionist account of the 1953 coup is a minority position within Iranian historiography, disputed by most historians of the coup on the grounds that declassified CIA and MI6 planning records still support a decisive foreign role; it is presented here as a challenge to, not a replacement for, the mainstream account.
Iran enters the second half of the 2020s in the gravest crisis of the Islamic Republic’s near half-century. In June 2025 Israel struck Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure over twelve days — hitting the nuclear sites at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan and killing senior commanders and nuclear scientists — before the United States joined with its own bunker-buster strikes on the same facilities; a ceasefire held from 24 June 2025, by which point Iranian monitoring groups reported well over a thousand dead inside Iran. That September, Britain, France, and Germany triggered the “snapback” mechanism built into Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal, restoring United Nations sanctions on Iran’s nuclear programme over Russian and Chinese objections. A collapsing currency then fed a nationwide uprising beginning 28 December 2025 that lasted roughly three weeks and was met with a crackdown widely described as the deadliest in the Islamic Republic’s history, though casualty figures remain disputed. Fighting resumed on a far larger scale on 28 February 2026, when renewed United States–Israeli strikes reportedly killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, among dozens of senior officials. On 8 March 2026 Iran’s Assembly of Experts — the clerical body responsible for choosing the supreme leader — elected his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the Islamic Republic’s third Supreme Leader; state media has since described him, using a term normally reserved for Iran’s disabled war veterans, as injured, and he has not appeared at the funerals of commanders killed in the same strikes. President Masoud Pezeshkian remains in office, publicly disputing any suggestion that Iran’s leadership is divided or incapacitated. Iran’s allied militias in Lebanon and Yemen responded to the 2026 strikes only with limited, largely symbolic fire, both networks already weakened by earlier Israeli campaigns and no longer central to Iran’s deterrence posture. In June 2026 Washington and Tehran signed a fourteen-point memorandum addressing navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, the nuclear and missile programmes, and sanctions, but fighting resumed in July after Iranian strikes on commercial vessels that had bypassed an approved shipping lane; as of the final days of July 2026 strikes have paused again, but Iran’s foreign ministry says no negotiations are currently under way, insisting Tehran alone will decide the timing of war and peace. UN sanctions remain in force, dozens of political executions have been carried out since the war resumed, and waves of protest continue nationwide amid deepening economic hardship. The country’s oldest tension — centralised authority tested again and again by demands for independence and legitimacy — is, at the time of writing, more acute than at any point since 1979.
Endpoint facts verified against 2025–2026 reporting (Al Jazeera, CNN, NBC News, Britannica, Euronews, Iran International, Foreign Policy, the Stimson Center, Arms Control Association, the UK House of Commons Library, and UN Security Council press releases). This is an unusually fast-moving and sensitive set of facts — the reported killing of a Supreme Leader, his son’s succession while reportedly injured, and disputed mass-casualty figures from the January 2026 crackdown chief among them — and every one of them should be independently re-verified before publication.
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Soon after World War II, Iran became a focal point in the global Cold War rivalry because of its vast oil resources. When the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh pushed through the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, which had been dominated by the British‑controlled Anglo‑Iranian Oil Company, Britain lost its highly profitable access to Iranian oil and viewed this as an intolerable loss of strategic and economic influence. The United States, initially hesitant, was persuaded by Britain during the early Cold War that Mosaddegh’s weakening position might open the door to the communist Tudeh Party and greater Soviet influence in Iran. As a result, the United States and Britain orchestrated a coup to overthrow Mosaddegh and strengthen the rule of the pro‑Western Shah.
However, the Shah’s increasingly authoritarian rule — marked by political repression, corruption, dependence on Western powers, and rapid Westernization — created a deep crisis of legitimacy that ultimately contributed to the broad popular Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Iran (formerly called Persia) became an Islamic republic in 1979 after the monarchy was overthrown. A new theocratic system was created, where a Supreme Leader holds ultimate authority while elected institutions operate with limits. Relations with the US worsened after the 1979–81 hostage crisis, followed by sanctions. Iran’s 1980–88 war with Iraq also shaped politics and security, strengthening the post-revolution state.
According to UCDP, violence has often centered on peripheral minority regions, especially Kurdish areas in the northwest and Baluchi areas in the southeast. Armed groups such as PJAK and KDPI have carried out low-intensity insurgency, while the Baluchi group Jaish al-Adl escalated attacks again from 2019 and intensified in 2024. Iran has also faced large protests since 2019, with security forces using lethal repression.
Iran’s tensions matter beyond its borders because they connect to regional wars and rivalries. Since 2018, UCDP records an interstate conflict with Israel, mainly through strikes on Iranian-linked targets in Syria, with the US supporting Israel at times. In 2024, direct Iran–Israel exchanges marked a major escalation. Civilians have also been heavily affected, including deaths during protest crackdowns and an IS bombing in Kerman.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Since President Ebrahim Raisi’s presidency from 2021 until his death in May 2024, Iran’s foreign policy has centralized under the Supreme National Security Council and IRGC, emphasizing anti-Westernism, militarization, and authoritarian control. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ role has diminished, with the IRGC’s Quds Force driving extraterritorial operations. Abandoning JCPOA revival hopes amid US sanctions, Tehran pivoted to ‘Look East’ ties with Russia and China via SCO and BRICS. Missile strikes on Iraq and Pakistan in January 2024 exemplify militarized diplomacy, supporting the Axis of Resistance while risking escalation and isolation. These trends persist post-Raisi.
Sources: Middle East Council on Global Affairs, CSIS
Iran has deepened strategic partnerships with Russia and China to counter Western isolation, enhancing military, economic, and diplomatic ties. The SNSC Secretary engages in SCO and BRICS security talks, bolstering Iran’s ‘Look East’ policy. However, during the 2024 12-Day War, neither provided direct military aid, exposing alliance limits and prompting strategic hedging toward diversified engagement, including pragmatic Western outreach. Iran leverages these ties for sanctions resilience, air defense restoration, and global connectivity, while capitalizing on BRICS antagonism with US policies under President Trump.
Sources: Middle East Council on Global Affairs, Middle East Institute (NUS), Security in Context
Iran’s IRGC Quds Force sustains the Axis of Resistance through proxy support in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and beyond, using asymmetric warfare for deterrence and leverage against rivals like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Militarization manifests in missile diplomacy and intensified regional aid, as in 2024 strikes on Iraq and Pakistan. Post-12-Day War, proxy limitations surfaced amid economic fragility and domestic criticism, shifting toward conditional regional cooperation with Arab neighbors. This blends ideological defiance with pragmatism, risking isolation but enabling influence amid US presence downsizing and Abraham Accords.
Sources: Middle East Council on Global Affairs, Middle East Institute (NUS), IEMed
Known as Persia until 1935, Iran became an Islamic republic in 1979 after the ruling monarchy was overthrown and Shah Mohammad Reza PAHLAVI was forced into exile. Conservative clerical forces led by Ayatollah Ruhollah KHOMEINI established a theocratic system of government.
Ultimate political authority was vested in a religious scholar known as the Supreme Leader, who is accountable only to the Assembly of Experts, an elected 88-member body of clerics.
US-Iran relations became strained when Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held embassy personnel hostage until mid-January 1981. The US cut off diplomatic relations with Iran in April 1980.
From 1980 to 1988, Iran fought a bloody, indecisive war with Iraq that expanded into the Persian Gulf and led to clashes between US Navy and Iranian military forces. Iran has been designated a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984.
After the election of reformer Hojjat ol-Eslam Mohammad KHATAMI as president in 1997 and a reformist Majles in 2000, a political reform campaign was initiated in response to popular dissatisfaction. Conservative politicians blocked reform measures while increasing repression.
Municipal and legislative elections in 2003 and 2004 saw conservatives reestablish control, culminating in the 2005 inauguration of hardliner Mahmud AHMADI-NEJAD as president. His reelection in 2009 sparked nationwide protests over allegations of electoral fraud that persisted until 2011. In 2013, centrist cleric Dr. Hasan Fereidun RUHANI was elected president, but protests in 2019 over a sudden gasoline price increase were violently suppressed. Conservatives won the majority in Majles elections in 2020, and hardline cleric Ebrahim RAISI was elected president in 2021, resulting in a conservative monopoly across the regime’s elected and unelected institutions.
Iran remains subject to international sanctions and export controls due to its involvement in terrorism, weapons proliferation, human rights abuses, and concerns over the nature of its nuclear program. Iran received nuclear-related sanctions relief in exchange for nuclear concessions under the JCPOA Implementation Day beginning in 2016, but the US reimposed nuclear-related sanctions after terminating its JCPOA participation in 2018. In October 2023, the EU and the UK decided to maintain nuclear-proliferation-related measures on Iran, as well as arms and missile embargoes, in response to Iran’s non-compliance with its JCPOA commitments.
As president, RAISI has emphasized deepening relations with anti-US states, particularly China and Russia, to weather US sanctions and diplomatic pressure, while supporting negotiations to restore a nuclear deal that began in 2021. He also contended with nationwide protests that began in September 2022 and lasted over three months following the death of Mahsa AMINI in morality police custody, with young people and women leading demands focused on regime change.
UCDP data for Iran captures both internal and external conflict dynamics. Internally, the Government of Iran is in state-based intrastate conflicts with armed groups including IS, Jaish al-Adl, and PJAK, reflecting a pattern of militant violence and state counterinsurgency. Externally, Iran is also listed in an interstate dyad with the Government of Israel, showing that regional rivalries can register as armed conflict alongside domestic security threats.
In this dataset segment, civilian harm appears in two main ways. UCDP records 6 civilian deaths as collateral (unintended) fatalities linked to intrastate state-based fighting in Iran. It also records 95 one-sided deaths (deliberate killings of civilians), attributed mainly to IS (94) and to a smaller extent to the Government of Iran (1). These figures reflect reported incidents in the dataset and do not capture every form of harm civilians may face.
The actors listed around Iran point to a regional security setting where conflicts connect across borders. Alongside Iran’s internal dyads, the dataset includes the Government of Israel–Hamas conflict and the Government of Pakistan–BRAS conflict, which sit in the same broader neighborhood and can influence threat perceptions, cross-border movement, and escalation risks. Iran’s interstate dyad with Israel highlights how regional confrontation can exist alongside domestic insurgencies, complicating civilian protection and security responses.
Sources: UCDP data.
Iran’s government is engaged in counterinsurgency against multiple armed groups and is also a party to an interstate dyad with Israel. UCDP records both unintended civilian deaths in intrastate fighting and a smaller number of deliberate killings of civilians attributed to state forces in this dataset segment.
Israel appears in the dataset through an interstate dyad with Iran and a separate state-based conflict with Hamas. This dataset segment does not attribute recorded one-sided civilian killings to Israeli forces for Iran, but it does not by itself capture all civilian harm associated with wider regional hostilities.
IS is an armed extremist organization fighting Iranian state forces. UCDP attributes the large majority of recorded one-sided civilian killings in this dataset segment to IS, indicating a high level of direct targeting of civilians.
Jaish al-Adl is a non-state armed actor in an intrastate conflict with Iran. UCDP’s Iran segment does not list one-sided civilian killing totals for this group, but its operations and counter-operations can still expose nearby communities to insecurity and displacement.
PJAK is a Kurdish armed group engaged in conflict with Iranian state forces. Even where one-sided killings are not recorded for the group in this dataset segment, fighting and security measures in contested areas can disrupt civilian movement and livelihoods.
Hamas is listed in the dataset through its state-based conflict with Israel, which is part of a wider regional confrontation that also involves Iran. Civilian harm attributed to Hamas is not broken out in this Iran-focused dataset segment, but escalation can still heighten risks for civilians across the region.
Pakistan appears in the dataset because it fights BRAS in a separate intrastate conflict that is regionally relevant to Iran’s border security environment. This Iran page segment does not record one-sided civilian killing totals for Pakistan in the same way as for Iran and IS.
BRAS is a non-state armed actor fighting the Pakistani state, included here as part of the wider conflict environment connected to Iran’s neighborhood. The dataset segment provided does not specify one-sided civilian killing figures for BRAS under Iran, but its violence can still affect civilians through fear, disrupted travel, and reprisals.
Iran’s conflict landscape combines internal armed challenges from insurgent and extremist groups with a broader regional confrontation involving Israel and Iran-aligned networks. Fighting is shaped by state security campaigns, cross-border militancy in neighboring areas, and escalation dynamics linked to wider Middle East rivalries.
Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh is overthrown in a coup backed by the United States and Britain, restoring Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s authority. The episode entrenches anti-Western sentiment that later drives revolutionary politics and shapes Iran’s distrustful posture toward Western and Israeli regional influence.
The Shah launches land reform and modernization under the White Revolution, centralizing power and repressing dissent. Rapid change, inequality, and curbs on religious leaders fuel opposition networks, including Ayatollah Khomeini’s movement, laying social and ideological foundations for the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Mass protests and defections from security forces topple the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeini establishes the Islamic Republic with a theocratic-republican system and Revolutionary Guard. The new regime adopts anti-U.S. and anti-Israel policies, setting long-term regional confrontation patterns that persist in today’s Iran–Israel rivalry.
Kurdish and Baluchi groups seek greater autonomy and rights after the revolution. Revolutionary authorities deploy forces and suppress insurgencies. The heavy-handed response entrenches Sunni and ethnic grievances in peripheral regions, providing historical context for today’s low-intensity Baluchi insurgency and securitized governance in the southeast.
Militants seize the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding hostages for 444 days. Washington cuts relations and imposes sanctions. The crisis solidifies Iran’s revolutionary foreign policy, encourages reliance on non-Western partners, and frames later confrontations over missiles, nuclear issues, and alignment with anti-Israel armed groups.
Iraq invades Iran, sparking an eight-year war with massive casualties and economic damage. Surrounded and often diplomatically isolated, Iran builds self-reliant military industries and regional networks. This experience underpins today’s missile capabilities and support for allied militias challenging Israel and Western presence.
Sunni-Baluch militant networks, beginning with groups like Jundallah, organize against Tehran over alleged discrimination, executions, and underdevelopment in Sistan and Baluchistan. Iranian security crackdowns radicalize elements, helping give rise to Jaish al-Adl, which continues low-intensity insurgent attacks on Iranian forces in the southeast today.
Disclosure of undeclared nuclear sites triggers inspections, UN and unilateral sanctions, and covert attacks on Iranian scientists. Iran expands its missile and proxy networks as deterrents. This long standoff shapes Tehran’s reliance on regional armed allies and missile forces now used in confrontations with Israel.
Following Syria’s uprising, Iran deploys advisers, militias, and resources to back Bashar al-Assad. Israel responds with repeated strikes on Iranian and allied targets in Syria. These clashes gradually normalize indirect Iran–Israel confrontation, setting the stage for later, more direct missile exchanges beyond Syrian territory.
Iran and world powers sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, limiting Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The agreement modestly reduces regional tensions, but its fragility means strategic rivalry, especially with Israel and Gulf states, remains unresolved and easily reignites after U.S. policy reversals.
Washington withdraws from the nuclear deal, reimposes sweeping sanctions, and targets Iran’s oil exports and Revolutionary Guard. Tehran expands nuclear activities and regional deterrent tools, including missiles and allied groups, intensifying shadow conflict with Israel and contributing to the current cycle of cross-border strikes and escalation.
Israel openly acknowledges and intensifies airstrikes on Iranian and allied positions in Syria to counter Tehran’s entrenchment and weapons transfers. These repeated clashes institutionalize an ongoing low-level war, which later spills into more direct missile exchanges between Iran and Israel in 2024.
Economic grievances, fuel-price hikes, and later the death of Mahsa Amini spark large protests across Iran. Security forces respond with lethal repression, arrests, and internet shutdowns. This approach entrenches one-sided state violence against dissent, forming the backdrop to today’s protest dynamics and securitized domestic politics.
A suicide bombing in Kerman kills over 90 civilians, claimed by Islamic State, highlighting Iran’s internal security vulnerabilities. In parallel, Iran and Israel exchange direct missile and drone strikes, marking a dangerous escalation beyond proxy warfare and crystallizing the intertwined domestic and regional conflict environment.
