It looks like a dozen separate enemies on a dozen borders. It is one network, funded, armed and directed from Tehran, built to encircle a single country.
When rockets come from Lebanon, missiles from Yemen, drones from Iraq and an invasion from Gaza, it is tempting to see unrelated conflicts. They are not. They are the spokes of one wheel. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, through its Quds Force, has spent decades and tens of billions of dollars building a ring of proxies, what Tehran itself calls the “Axis of Resistance,” for a single declared purpose: the destruction of Israel. Here is the network, and the money behind it.
Iran's crown jewel: a Shia militia richer and better-armed than the Lebanese state itself, built with a stockpile of well over 100,000 rockets aimed at Israel. It opened a second front the day after October 7.
Sunni Islamist movements, yet armed and bankrolled by Shia Iran against a common enemy. Hamas launched the October 7 massacre; Palestinian Islamic Jihad is even more directly an Iranian creation, near-wholly funded by Tehran.
Iran's newest long-range arm. From a thousand miles away they fired ballistic missiles and drones at Israel and choked global shipping in the Red Sea, all with Iranian weapons and targeting.
An array of Shia militias under the IRGC's wing (the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq”) that launched drones and rockets at Israeli and American targets, embedded inside Iraq's own security forces.
For years the spine of the network ran through Syria: under Bashar al-Assad, propped up by Iranian money and Hezbollah fighters, it was the corridor that smuggled Iranian weapons overland to Lebanon. Assad's fall in late 2024 severed that artery, a rare and serious blow to the project. Coordinating it all is the Quds Force, the IRGC's external arm, whose late commander Qassem Soleimani spent two decades stitching these fronts into one. The point of the architecture is that Tehran can wage war on Israel on every border at once while keeping its own hands at a distance.
The IRGC's deadliest war is the one it wages at home. In 1979, Islamists seized one of the world's oldest civilizations, and Iranians have been trying to take it back ever since. In January 2026, the largest uprising since the revolution swept more than 200 cities. The regime answered, on Khamenei's orders, with live fire and a nationwide internet blackout built to hide the killing.
The true toll is unknowable, and that is by design. Tehran admits barely 3,000, but the regime cut the internet to hide the count, burned bodies to keep them off the ledger, and threatens the families who dare to mourn aloud. Independent monitors put the figure far higher: the diaspora agency HRANA has named over 7,000 of the dead with more than 11,000 further cases still being verified; Iran International reported at least 12,000; and Iranian medical and local-health sources cited estimates of 20,000 to 30,000. In Rasht, the Guards trapped protesters inside the bazaar and set it ablaze, finishing off the wounded in the hospitals; near Tehran, Amnesty verified footage of an overflow morgue holding the bodies the official one could no longer fit, as morgues and hospitals filled past capacity. Believe none of the regime's arithmetic: the published numbers are a floor, not a ceiling, and this is already the deadliest crackdown in modern Iranian history.
And the record is still being buried. Iran's blackout became the longest nationwide internet shutdown ever recorded. Even now, after a partial return of connectivity, the regime keeps social media blocked and access curated for favored groups, so the civilian footage and the full toll have still not surfaced. The worst of what was done may only be seen when the lights finally come back on.
And here is the point too often missed: the Iranian people are not Israel's enemy. The same Guard Corps that arms Hamas and Hezbollah turns its rifles on Iranian teenagers chanting for freedom. Many Iranians are the regime's bravest opponents, and quiet friends of Israel. زن، زندگی، آزادی — Woman, Life, Freedom.