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The year 2024 was not a good one for Iran, which saw much of its proxy army across the Middle East decimated by Israel, its puppet dictator Bashar Assad ousted in Syria, and its old enemy Donald Trump return to the White House.

Iran’s year of disaster truly began on October 7, 2023, when its terrorist proxy Hamas perpetrated unspeakable atrocities against Israeli civilians and launched the Gaza war. Iran had spent decades, and billions of dollars in aid to terrorist groups, preparing for such a moment — only to watch helplessly as Israel dismantled first Hamas and then Hezbollah in Lebanon, acting with absolute determination despite frantic calls for a ceasefire at the United Nations.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Monday gave the first official confirmation that Israel carried out the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July. Haniyeh was killed by a remote-controlled bomb shortly after attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Pezeshkian.

Haniyeh’s death was a massive blow to Hamas morale, and a huge embarrassment for Tehran, which had offered protection for the terrorist boss. Katz deepened Iran’s humiliation on Monday by casually confirming Israel’s role in the assassation while he was threatening another Iranian proxy, the Houthi insurgents of Yemen.

“In these days, when the Houthi terror organization is firing missiles at Israel, I want to convey a clear message to them: We have defeated Hamas, we have defeated Hezbollah, we have blinded the defense systems in Iran, and damaged the production systems,” Katz said on Monday.

“We have overthrown the Assad regime in Syria, we have dealt heavy blows to the axis of evil, and we will also severely strike the Houthi terror organization in Yemen, which remains the last one standing,” he said.

“We will strike strategic infrastructure and decapitate its leaders. Just as we did to Haniyeh, Sinwar, and Nasrallah, in Tehran, Gaza and Lebanon — we will do in Hodeidah and Sanaa,” he said.

Hodeidah and Sanaa are two cities in Yemen controlled by the Iran-backed Houthi insurgents. In addition to dropping Haniyeh’s name, Katz also referred to the deaths of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, killed by Israeli troops while attempting to flee Gaza in October, and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, eliminated by an Israeli bunker-buster bomb in September.

Katz’s remarks were a neat summation of Iran’s bad year, since he also mentioned Israel’s swift and devastating air attack on Iran in October — an attack conducted in response to Iran’s two largely ineffective missile strikes on Israel in April and October.

Iranian propaganda has struggled to portray its missile attacks on Israel as fearsome and devastating blows, but in truth they caused only minimal damage despite Iran launching a huge number of missiles and drones. Israel, in return, waltzed through Iranian airspace and eliminated its air defenses with surgical precision. 

Taken together, the air and missile exchanges between Israel and Iran were an impressive display of near-total superiority by the Israelis – which is very bad news for Iran, whose defensive strategy is heavily based on having a huge inventory of missiles that could ostensibly wreak havoc upon any attacker. The biggest consolation for Iranian military planners is that their ineffective attacks probably cost a great deal less than Israel’s highly effective response.

As Katz pointed out, the Houthis of Yemen are the last combat-effective proxy in Iran’s once-vaunted “Axis of Resistance” (a name the Israeli defense minister mocked by calling it the “Axis of Tyranny.”) 

Tehran invested huge amounts of time and money to build Lebanon’s Hezbollah into a force that could constantly menace Israel with terrorist attacks and missile strikes, only to watch the Israelis maim Hezbollah leaders with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, then crush Hezbollah’s ground forces in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah has a ceasefire with Israel now, and “ceasefire” means “rearm and reload” to Iran’s terrorist proxies — but rearming will be far more difficult now that Bashar Assad has been ousted from Syria.

Iran put a lot of eggs in the Assad basket, only to watch them scrambled in a lightning-fast offensive by Islamist rebels in early December. The rebels took advantage of how Iran and Russia had been distracted and weakened by their wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine. They rolled the dice on Tehran and Moscow being too weak to save Assad this time, and their gamble paid off.

Writing at Foreign Affairs on Monday, Hamidreza Azizi of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs was fascinated by Iran’s silence as the rebels destroyed Syria’s military and swept to victory in Damascus. The Iranians indulged in some grumbling about Western conspiracies after the fact, but they scarcely even bothered to wave goodbye to their man Assad on his way out the door, even after spending up to $50 billion to keep him in power.

Azizi postulated that Iran is suffering from strategic confusion after enduring a year so awful that its political, military, and theocratic leadership has no idea how to cope with its losses. Assad’s downfall represented a catastrophic failure of the last thing Iran thought it was very good at — funding, training, and arming local Shiite militias to protect its interests in other countries:

Hezbollah was central to Iran’s strategy in Syria, with thousands of its fighters deployed to support Assad’s regime over the last decade. After the death of the Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, in 2020, Hezbollah became the primary coordinator of Iranian-backed militias in Syria. But Israeli strikes against Hezbollah personnel and infrastructure over the last year wiped out leadership and prevented the group from offering Assad any further military or logistical support.

…By the time the rebel offensive in Syria began, in late November, the Iraqi Shiite militias that had played a major role in the early stages of the Syrian civil war had become unwilling to reenter the fray, preoccupied with domestic priorities and wary of escalating costs of external intervention. This lack of reliable allied support left Iran constrained in its ability to respond effectively.

Azizi noted that Iran’s loss of Syria appears to have damaged its credibility with Shiite militias in Iraq, to the surprise of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who thought he would never be free of Iranian influence in his country. Iran stands on the verge of losing its reputation as an Islamic superpower — perhaps to be eclipsed by up-and-coming Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

“Since Assad’s fall, Ankara – now the main patron of Syrian rebels, particularly HTS – has replaced Tehran and Moscow as the dominant external power in Syria, expanding the breadth of Turkey’s influence while limiting Iran’s. There are growing concerns in Iran that Turkey, emboldened by Tehran’s weakened position, could now seek to increase its influence, at Iran’s expense, in Iraq, Lebanon, and the South Caucasus,” Azizi wrote.

Iran has a few cards left to play, such as cultivating a relationship with the Syrian Kurds, who are looking for protection as Turkey and its Syrian militia allies march against them. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been urging Syrians to rise up against the groups that deposed Assad, which seems like a desperate gamble until one considers that Iran might have enough resources left in Syria to support an aspiring counter-revolution.

Iran’s last calamity of 2024 is its collapsing economy, which has lately seen schools, factories, and entire industries shut down because the regime cannot provide reliable electric power. The return of Donald Trump scuttles any hope Tehran had for rescue from Barack Obama and his foreign policy minions, who were eager to restore the nuclear deal that enriched the Iranians until Trump withdrew from it in May 2018. 

At the close of 2024, the Iranian theocracy is at its lowest point since the 1979 Islamic revolution, and soon it will probably experience a leadership crisis to replace the aging Ayatollah Khamenei. 2025 could be a very interesting year in Iran.