Following the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, the Iranian regime appears to be applying isolation and repression in an attempt to preserve its stranglehold on its own people.
That’s the conclusion of Fox Digital reporting Friday, citing sources and experts on the rogue Islamic country rocked by Israeli air strikes and the U.S. military’s destruction of its nuclear program.
Kasra Aarabi, director of IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) research at United Against Nuclear Iran, told Fox News Digital that the Islamic Republic is speeding toward what he called a “North Korea-style model of isolation and control.”
According to Aarabi, “We’re witnessing a kind of domestic isolation that will have major consequences for the Iranian people. The regime has always been totalitarian, but the level of suppression now is unprecedented. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.”
Fox News Digital also cited an unnamed source inside Iran who told the news outlet “the repression has become terrifying.”
Aarabi maintains direct lines of contact in Iran. He said citizens are stopped at random where their phones confiscated and searched.
“If you have content deemed pro-Israel or mocking the regime, you disappear,” he told Fox Digital. “People are now leaving their phones at home or deleting everything before they step outside.”
Isolating the the people of Iran was already underway during the 12-day war. Last month, Breitbart News featured a report that Iranians were subject to a near-communication blackout, unable to connect not only with the outside world but also with their neighbors and loved ones across the country.
Aarabi said that was to block Israeli evacuation alerts and to push propaganda that Israel was attacking civilian targets.
“It was a perverse objective,” Aarabi told Fox. “They deliberately cut communications to instill fear and manipulate public perception. For four days, not a single message went through. Even Israeli evacuation alerts didn’t reach their targets.”
He said the regime’s aim was to keep people off the streets and dissipate a “surprising bond” that was forming between the Iranians and Israelis. He said:
At the start of the war, many Iranians welcomed the strikes. They knew Israel was targeting the IRGC — the very forces responsible for suppressing and killing their own people. But once the internet was cut and fear set in, some began to question what was happening.
The Fox report also featured analysis from Dr. Afshon Ostovar, a leading Iran scholar and author of “Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.”
He said domestic repression remains the regime’s sure fire strategy for survival.
“Repressing the people at home is easy,” he told the news outlet. “That’s something they can do. So it’s not unlikely that Iran could become more insular, more autocratic, more repressive — and more similar to, let’s say, a North Korea — than what it is today.”
He added, “That might be the only way they see to preserve the regime: by really tightening the screws on the Iranian people, to ensure that the Iranian population doesn’t try to rise up and topple the regime.”
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