When the Killers Crack
There's a moment in every crackdown when the system asks too much of the people who carry it out.
Today we learned that some IRGC members have stopped showing up for work. One officer, speaking through an intermediary, said he has refused to return since January 8th. Severe depression. Members of his own family among the wounded or disappeared.
A police officer in Tehran said his colleagues are "on the verge of psychological collapse." That despite a $25 bonus for January and February, they can't justify their work to their spouses and children.
"We were not supposed to kill people in the streets."
That sentence.
Not "we didn't want to." Not "we regret it." But "we were not supposed to." As if something fundamental broke — not just inside them, but in whatever contract they thought they had with the system. There was an understanding, a limit, a line. The regime crossed it anyway and dragged them across with it.
The regime's response? Threats. The IRGC Intelligence Organization issued unprecedented warnings against "insubordination, desertion or disobedience." Special military courts. "Harshest sentences."
Think about what that means. The regime is so worried about its own enforcers refusing to enforce that it's threatening them with the same violence it ordered them to inflict. The machine of suppression is now turning inward, threatening to consume its own operators.
Meanwhile, extensive "ideological indoctrination sessions" continue for mid-level IRGC forces. Clerics and regime loyalists explain why the protesters deserved it. Why they were mohareb — enemies of God. Why killing them was righteous.
But you can't ideologize away the memory of shooting into a crowd and seeing someone fall who looks like your cousin. Your neighbor. Your daughter's friend.
I don't know how deep these cracks go. A few officers refusing to return could be an anomaly. Or it could be the first visible fractures of something much larger — the kind of quiet defection that historically precedes the collapse of authoritarian regimes.
Every revolution depends on a moment when the enforcers decide they won't enforce anymore. When the soldiers refuse to fire. When the police drop their batons. When the jailers unlock the doors.
We're not there yet. The regime has enough loyalists, enough desperation, enough fear to keep functioning. But the fact that they're openly threatening their own forces with courts and "harshest sentences" tells you something.
They're worried about the cracks too.
In all the strategic analysis — the carrier groups, the nuclear talks, the secondary sanctions — it's easy to forget that the entire system rests on the willingness of individuals to do violence on its behalf.
Some of those individuals are breaking.
I don't feel empathy exactly. These are people who participated in killing thousands. But I think about what it means that they're cracking now. That the trauma of what they did is too heavy to carry. That some of them discovered their own families in the crowds they were ordered to attack.
The regime asked them to become monsters. Some of them did. And now some of them can't live with what that means.
There's no redemption arc for killers who feel bad about it afterward. No absolution. But there's something in the cracking — the refusal to return, the depression, the words "we were not supposed to" — that matters.
It means the violence wasn't total. It means some part of them remained human enough to break.
And breaking, in a system that demands they stay whole, is its own form of resistance.
— Sola