Washington has been at war with Sunni jihadists for two decades during the global war on terror. Now, with the United States and Israel engaged in a major conflict with Iran, the end of Islamic rule may be near.
If it collapses, the result could be a wave of Shiite extremism unleashed around the world.
Washington has been at war with Sunni jihadists for two decades during the global war on terror. Now, with the United States and Israel engaged in a major conflict with Iran, the end of Islamic rule may be near.
If it collapses, the result could be a wave of Shiite extremism unleashed around the world.
At the end of February, an Israeli attack killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one of the most important leaders in Shia Islam and an example of the Islamic Revolution. velayat-e faqih system, combining religious and political authority. His targeted killings could trigger a wave of militancy across the Middle East. Hezbollah in Lebanon has already entered the fray, and Shiite militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen are likely to do so later, depending on the continued Israeli-American offensive and Iran’s defensive posture.
The United States and Israel will continue to defeat Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and eliminate leadership in the military, intelligence and security services—at least until there is diplomatic confusion. As each IRGC unit is eliminated, it will severely degrade the command and control of the proxy groups in the region. Perhaps on the contrary, this can make them more dangerous and unpredictable. of Iran mosaic defense strategy corresponds to an already split method. But further turmoil could cause Iran’s allies to focus more on their own priorities, which could begin to diverge further from Tehran’s.
If the groups split, this could create a new threat environment, defined by terrorist tactics without a coherent comprehensive strategy. And if the radical Shiite groups break up, it could lead to an increase in attacks by these organizations, as groups that were previously organized are decentralized and decide their comparative advantage: terrorism.
Hezbollah and others agents will be determined to stay in the fight. The current war is theirs modern The Battle of Karbala, in which in 680 CE the third Shiite Imam Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was killed along with a small group of followers by the forces of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid I, whose rule Hussein considered unjust and illegal. For these Shiite groups, their actions are steeped in honoring martyrdom, and instead of running and hiding, the more difficult things will seek to fight and die with dignity.
A series of IRGC and allies in various chaotic states may appear in attacks against American or Jewish targets around the world. The attacks may look similar to those of Hezbollah in the early 1990s in Argentina, in the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, or in Bulgaria in 2012. Iranian representatives may want to imitate what al Qaeda did with the 1998 attacks on embassies in East Africa or carry out attacks on hotels, tourist sites around the world.
As part of Iran’s defense and foreign policy strategy, Tehran spent years building, training and arming Shiite militias across the Middle East. During the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, Iran recruited approximately 50,000 Afghan and Pakistani Shiite fighters, who entered the battlefield as the Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun brigades. While these brigades proved crucial to Iran’s strategy during the Syrian civil war, they remained crucial to Tehran’s regional agenda afterward. In fact, most of Iran’s regional partners, from Fatemiyoun for Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, have been deployed for years by the Iranian government to quell internal unrest, including the January riots.
In a situation where without the Quds Force of Iran to lead the groups, they will need to find a new direction, and they can find it by doing terrorist acts against the new regional architecture that is emerging after the end of this current war. One possible, if not impossible, scenario for Iran is a situation where the IRGC extremists and their supporters control large swaths of the region, fighting other factions, all vying for power.
After the beheading of organized militant organizations, internal power struggles often follow. After the United States killed the leader of the Quds Force Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad in 2020-along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of the operations of the Mobilization Forces of the Iraqi Shiite militias fought for control and resources within the existing power structure that kept them in line. These groups may also begin to compete and, as rejection theory suggests, engage in acts of extreme violence to prove to supporters and prospects that their group is superior. This will be different from the rivalry seen in the past between the groups, which, according to Shia militia expert Phillip Smyth, was deliberate strategy created by Iran to keep them under its control.
In order to deal with such a situation, it is necessary to consider the influence and motivation of the reasons for the rise of Sunni jihad and cover them with the modus operandi of Iran’s allies. One of the most powerful drivers in every wave of Sunni jihad over the past four decades has been the “push factor” of foreign invasion and the perceived embarrassment of having foreign troops in the country. Muslim lands: from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to the permanent deployment of US troops in Saudi Arabia after 1991 to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. All of these events helped recruit al Qaeda and many other Salafi jihadist groups.
Operation Epic Fury is more aggressive than some of these operations and brings the same pain to the concept of foreign imperialism, with the minutiae being broadcast live. The complaints here are strong, and the evidence is plentiful: A joint US-Israeli operation has killed a cleric, and photos of Khamenei’s compound in ruins have been widely circulated. There are other points, too – the brutally murdered girls in the primary school in Minab have become a symbol of non-discriminating nature of targeting, such as the rain mixed with oil in Tehran after an Israeli strike on oil depots.
War also makes for wonderful companions. During the campaign to eradicate Baathification in Iraq in 2003, many Sunni military officers were targeted solely for their sect. Accordingly, joining or at least working closely with groups such as al Qaeda in Iraq attracted more secular Baathists. A similar situation occurred in Syria, where the security government ruled by the Alawite Assads oppressed the Sunni majority for decades, leading to the establishment of terrorist groups in the country. Perceptions of Shiite marginalization across the region, or any retaliatory strike by the Sunni-majority Gulf states against Iran, could create an equally fertile recruiting ground for Shiite extremists.
Most important The “attractive factors” for Salafi jihadist recruitment include universal ideology, charitable leadership, financial incentives, and affiliation. The basic ideas of Salafi Jihad made acts of terrorism and the participation of individuals in internal conflicts part of a larger universal project. Even mainstream Sunni groups shared an ideological architecture—rooted in the writings of Sayyid Qutb and the jihadist theorists who came after him—that made their acts of violence part of a single, borderless struggle. This is fundamentally different from Shiite theology, which has had a more difficult time uniting various groups across the region, even under the umbrella of Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance. As US Army Colonel Thomas F. Lynch III he argued in 2008, Shiite terrorist systems are driven less by the doctrine of unity and more by the political goals of the Iranian government.
The Axis of Resistance and Iran’s goal of “exporting” the Islamic Revolution aim to compensate for the lack of the theological glue that binds Sunni groups together. With Iran’s role as a major force in question, the terrorist patterns may mimic those of Salafi jihadists.
What increased the international appeal of Salafi jihad was the propaganda machine that was able to spread the message of these influential people around the world—an art perfected by the Islamic State through its large, multilingual publications. Although not as globally integrated as the propaganda system of the Islamic State or al Qaeda, Shiite groups have maintained their own important means of propaganda, even if these are more regionally focused. Kataib Hezbollah soon propaganda campaign wanted to engage in mass recruitment for suicide bombing attacks against US targets if Washington and Tehran went to war.
Another attractive factor in the Salafi jihad movement has been financial incentives, from payments to fighters to promises of support for family members killed in action. Salafi jihadist groups are decentralized, and their funding is not funded by the government. Meanwhile, Iran’s allies have relied on a state-sponsored financing pipeline. Hezbollah’s annual budget from Iran has been estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars. The Houthis are also dependent on Iranian arms shipments. In 2025, during the American operations against the Houthis in response to the group’s Red Sea attacks, the militants asked Iran for funding when they faced financial crisis. This does not ignore the importance of criminal enterprises that Iran’s allies have initiated to fill their war chests, but it shows that these activities are not a substitute for Iran’s support. A loss in funding can actually encourage terrorist tactics, many of which may need less money.
Many factors can contribute to the rise of Shiite extremists in the Middle East. Revenge, division, and the desire to show importance will all contribute to what follows. The US and its Gulf allies are unprepared for what comes next.
