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Members of the Basij paramilitary force hold Iranian flag, Lebanese flag, and various militia flags, during a rally commemorating International Quds Day in downtown Tehran, April 14, 2023.
Q + A: Is this the end of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance?”
As the world reacted to Israel and the US bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities last week, one group was largely silent – Iran’s network of allied militias in the Middle East.
Since the 1980s, Tehran has cultivated what it calls an “Axis of Resistance” – a network of groups closely aligned with its agenda, encompassing Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen.
In a sharp contrast to the weeks after October 7th, when Hezbollah and the Houthis launched missiles at Israel in solidarity with Hamas and the Palestinian people, this time around, the militias have not joined the fray.
Hezbollah reportedly has no plans to strike Israel right now. Hamas and the Houthis have done nothing despite vowing to respond against “Zionist-American aggression.”
The relative silence this time around reflects in part how much weaker some of these groups are. Hezbollah and Hamas in particular have been decimated by Israel over the past year and a half. But it also reflects Iran’s overall diminished position in the region. Last December, Iran suffered another blow with the demise of the closely-allied Assad regime in Syria.
So where does Iran’s 'Axis of Resistance' stand today? Is this relative silence temporary or permanent? And how might all of this affect a region where Iran has until recently been a major strategic player?
To find out, we asked two experts, with somewhat clashing views. Lina Khatib, a visiting scholar at Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, and Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow and project director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House. Their responses have been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
GZERO: Are we witnessing the end of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”?
Khatib: “The whole model of Iran's presence in the region has permanently changed…the Axis of Resistance, as Iran calls it, has crumbled in terms of it being a network. What we are left with are the individual groups, each struggling for survival in the country in which it operates…Iran is now fighting Israel and the United States on its own, its proxies are unable and unwilling to help it.”
Mansour: “For the time being, Iran is overstretched and looking to survive right now internally…but the connectivity will continue to be there to some extent…what remains of the axis has transitioned into more of a horizontal, non-hierarchical network – where Iran is still important – but the different groups have also begun to take on leadership roles.”
GZERO: With Iran’s decades-long dominance now diminished, how will the balance of power shift in the Middle East?
Khatib: “What we will see is an increased importance for the Gulf countries in the Arab world, in terms of being the heart of power in the Middle East, influencing where the rest of the region will head.”
Mansour: “It's hard to see whether there will be a hegemonic force…what we're looking at moving forward is a fragmented Middle East where you have multi-alignment, where you have different sides working with each other…based on different issues, where you don't really have clear spheres of influence.”
GZERO: What does this mean for regional stability moving forward?
Khatib: “Without Iran and its proxies, there will be less sectarian tension in the region and a greater possibility for cross-country cooperation in the Middle East, and therefore increased stability…[though this still] depends on whether Israel agrees to restart the peace process regarding Israel Palestine.”
Mansour: “There's so much unexpected, so much more violence that will happen before this comes to an end…[when] the US had overwhelming force and they went to war against Iraq or Afghanistan, would they have thought that this would actually facilitate the rise of their big enemy, Iran?”
A local Iraqi Kurdish footballer walks with his friends near a sportswear shop in the district of Soran, northeast of Erbil, Iraq, on April 6, 2019.
From football fields to classrooms: How FC Barcelona is reentering the political fray
If there’s a mention of FC Barcelona’s youth soccer system, fans of the Blaugrana will think straight to La Masia, the academy that produced legends of the game like Lionel Messi, Carles Puyol, and – more recently – Lamine Yamal.
What they might not think about is the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Syria. Yet that is exactly the place the famed Catalonian club has decided to set up another six youth soccer schools.
Called the “Hope League,” the aim of this initiative, per the club, is to “promote social cohesion and prevent future violent conflicts and radicalization processes among new generations — with special attention to the sons and daughters of victims of the Islamic State.” Kurdish fighters and the Islamic State fought violently from 2014 to 2019 for control of parts of Iraq, with the former coming out on top.
Despite the victory over IS, Kurdish independence efforts have languished. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey formally disbanded last month after a four-decade struggle to achieve independence. Their Syrian contemporaries, who would have thought the fall of Bashar al-Assad would bring them respite,nowface attacks from Turkey.
The Catalonian independence push has also hit a bad run of form, albeit a less violent one. In 2024, seven years after a Spanish court blocked an independence referendum, an anti-independence socialist won the local government election – it was the first time a unionist candidate won in 14 years.
“The so-called ‘Catalan process’ has gone very much down,” says Toni Roldán, a former Spanish congressman from Barcelona who opposes Catalan independence.
What has the Catalan cause got to with Kurdish independence? Certain Barcelona fans see them as one and the same: A group of Barcelona fans once unfurled a banner at a game that read, “Kurdistan is not Iraq, Catalonia is not Spain.”
“[Catalan separatists] always presented themselves as sort of an oppressed region without a state,” says Roldán. “And these they always look at places like Kurdistan as similar to them, because they have their own language, their own history, their own culture, but they don't have their own states.”
So these schools are an effort to get these independence efforts back on their feet? Not exactly. After all, Barcelona’s archrival Real Madrid – a team not exactly renowned for supporting independence movements – is opening their own schools in these Kurdish areas.
Nonetheless, there’s “clearly a political driver” for the Catalonian club’s decision to open these soccer schools, per Roldán. The leader of the schools initiative is former Barcelona right-back Oleguer Presas, who despite his position, is renowned for his left-wing, nationalist sympathies.
The can of worms: There will be some outside of Catalonia who might be upset, namely those in Iraq.
Football is by far the most popular sport in this war-torn nation – it is home to the largest contingent of registered Barcelona fan clubs outside of Spain.
“When there is any kind of championship or game between Barca or Real Madrid with other teams, all the coffee shops are full of youth waiting for the game,” says Raid Michael, the country director for Un Ponte Per in Iraq, one of the organizations behind the Hope League.
Michael claims that Iraqis love for football transcends political and sectarian differences, noting that, “with football, youth especially forget about all these tensions — they support football in the end.”
But the initiative certainly won’t land well in Baghdad. Iraq’s central government has long been sensitive to independence movements in its northern region, where residents have previously voted in favour of secession from the federal government. There, the Iraqi Kurds operate a semi-autonomous government, maintain their own armed forces, and oversee the region’s natural resource exports. Tensions rose again last month, as Iraq’s Oil Ministry criticized energy deals directly brokered between the Kurdistan Regional Government and US energy companies.
Now, one of the largest football clubs in the world is setting up schools in Kurdish areas. What’s Arabic for conceding a goal?
President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on April 7, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt
US-Iran talks to be held this weekend
On Monday, President Donald Trump said that the US has been engaged in “direct” talks with Iran over its nuclear program and said that a meeting with “very high-level” officials is set for this Saturday. That would be a sharp break from previous US-Iran talks, which have occurred mostly through intermediaries.
But Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denied the “direct” aspect of these talks,confirming that the US and Iranian negotiators will meet in Oman on Saturday, but that they would remain in separate rooms as Omani diplomats carry messages back and forth.
Whatever the format, Trump made it clear that he expects progress. “If the talks aren’t successful with Iran, I think Iran is going to be in great danger,” he warned. “And I hate to say it, great danger, because they can’t have a nuclear weapon. You know, it’s not a complicated formula. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That’s all there is.”
While a breakthrough this weekend is unlikely, the talks suggest that both sides see an advantage in finding out whether a deal with the other side is possible.
There are other hopeful signs of a deal. In response to warnings from US officials of looming air attacks by American forces, the leaders of four of the largest Iran-backed militia groups operating in Iraq told Reuters on Monday that they were prepared to surrender their weapons to Iraqi government authorities. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has reportedly met with militia commanders and urged them to disarm, according to Iraqi state officials who requested anonymity.
The militia commanders also said that the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, their prime supplier of weapons and money, had agreed to let local group leaders inside Iraq decide how best to respond to Trump’s threats.
Though these militia moves are more likely a tactical retreat than a true surrender, any move to disarm would give the Trump administration a notable foreign-policy victory without an attack. The so-called Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a group of about 10 heavily-armed Shia militias with a total of 50,000 fighters and access to heavy weapons, including long-range missiles, has attacked both Israeli and US military targets in the past.
A child, suffering from malnutrition, is treated at Port Sudan Paediatric Centre, during a visit by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to the country, in Sudan, on Sept. 7, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Cholera spreads in Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo turns to an unlikely source to boost tourism, Mass executions held in Iraq, Gunman hijacks bus in LA
430: Over 430 people have died from cholera in Sudan in the past month, according to the country’s health ministry, and the devastating civil war there is making it hard to provide treatment. Doctors Without Borders recently described the health system in Sudan as “decimated” and warned that the humanitarian response amid the cholera outbreak is “regularly obstructed by both warring parties.”
3: AC Milan, one of Italy’s top soccer teams, is reportedly in talks with the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo for a three-year sponsorship deal that would see the club promote the African country as a tourism destination. But there’s an ongoing war in the DRC. Vacationing in a war zone – what could go wrong? The Italian ambassador to the country was killed there just three years ago when the convoy he was traveling with was ambushed, making it no surprise that Italy currently advises people against visiting the country.
21: Iraq executed 21 people, including a woman, on Wednesday, with most reportedly charged with terrorism. Rights groups like Amnesty International have fiercely criticized Iraq for convicting people on “overly broad and vague terrorism charges,” and they have urged the Iraqi government to halt executions.
7: A bus was hijacked by a gunman in Los Angeles on Wednesday and traveled nearly seven miles before coming to a stop after police used spike strips and punctured one of the tires. One passenger reportedly died from gunshot wounds. The suspect has surrendered, but the motive remains unclear.
Russia’s last independent pollster tells me how Putin does it
How does Vladimir Putin manage to keep this up? For all the destruction he’s visited on Ukraine, his invasion has also inflicted so much damage on Russia.
There are the financial and economic costs. There’s the diplomatic isolation. There’s the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians who’d rather bet on a future abroad than support Putin’s war for the past at home.
But above all, there are the dead. The Kremlin doesn’t announce casualty figures, but a running tally by the BBC and the independent Russian outlet Mediazona estimates that at least 45,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine.
To put that in perspective, it’s triple the number of Soviets killed in the USSR’s decade-long invasion of Afghanistan, often described as the “Kremlin’s Vietnam.”
In fact, it surpasses the number of Soviet and Russian troops killed in the entire period between 1945 and 2022, a period that also includes the Kremlin’s hamfisted and initially disastrous bid to suppress Chechen separatists and jihadists in the 1990s. To put it in American terms, those 45,000 dead would amount to 100,000 flag-draped caskets in the United States.
And yet, there’s hardly been a peep from Russian society.
To find out why, I sent a note to Lev Gudkov in Moscow. Gudkov is the academic director of the Levada Center, Russia’s last remaining independent pollster. I last saw him in person in 2018, at his messy office on Nikolskaya Street – a ritzy pedestrian boulevard – that’s just a five-minute walk from the Kremlin, which has long considered Levada a “foreign agent.”
At 77, Lev has the weary, knowing demeanor of a man who has spent his life asking questions in a society that is increasingly wary of answering them.
The Kremlin has pressured Levada over the years but always seemed to allow it to continue its work. Even autocrats, after all, need to know what their people are comfortable saying to strangers.
“The people don’t know how many are dead and wounded,” he told me. More than 60% of Russians get their news primarily from state-controlled TV, which will shout at you about neo-Nazis in Kyiv, perverts who run Europe, or cats thrown from Russian trains – but will not tell you about the bodybags coming home from Ukraine.
People who do speak out about casualties are arrested, harassed or, on occasion, driven to suicide, which is what happened this week to a hawkish military blogger who suggested Russia had lost 16,000 troops in its recent campaign for a single Ukrainian town.
Another problem, to adapt a Vietnam-era protest line, is that the Russians dying in Ukraine “ain’t no Gazprom executive’s son.”
“The funerals are held by individual families,” says Gudkov, “and its overwhelmingly conscripts from marginalized social groups who don’t have the power to mobilize.”
A look at the casualty map bears this out. Young men in remote and relatively poor Russian provinces like Tuva or Buryatia, for example, are up to 45 times as likely to die as their counterparts in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
All of this makes perfect sense. Russians don’t know about the casualties, face huge consequences for trying to find out, and are victim to the propaganda mill that keeps support for Putin above 80% and approval of his war not far behind.
But blaming this sort of collective delusion simply on a Very Bad Autocrat™ is too easy. The reality is that it can happen in democracies too, and it does.
On the eve of the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, I looked at a poll that showed 72% of the population approving of their government’s decision to launch a disastrous, unprovoked war.
But it wasn’t from Russia. It was from the US, and it was taken in 2003 to gauge popular support for the invasion of Iraq.
Say what you will about the failure of mainstream media to question the WMD narrative – and there is lots to say – but the US was, and is, a pluralistic paradise compared to today’s Russia.
But even so, it took four whole years of debacle in Iraq for a majority of Americans to finally decide that the invasion was a “bad decision.”
The emergence of social media in the years since has hardly helped. Nearly 20% of Americans today say pop star Taylor Swift was engaged in a Deep State psyop to sway the next election, while a third of Americans still think the last one was “stolen.” And as many as half of Hillary Clinton’s voters once believed Trump’s victory was the result of Russian tampering with vote tallies. None of the above is true.
The point is that you don’t actually have to live under the sway of a late-stage autocrat who controls the airwaves to believe bad, stupid, or crazy things.
A badly contaminated news environment can in some ways be as bad as a tightly controlled one.
President Joe Biden attends the return of the remains of the three slain US soldiers — Sgt. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, and Sgt. Kennedy Ladon Sanders — at Dover Air Force Base on Friday.
US strikes back after deadly drone attack
Nearly a week after a drone attack killed three American service members at a small US base in Jordan, the US responded late Friday by launching strikes against more than 85 targets in Syria and Iraq. The Pentagon blames the Iran-backed Islamic Resistance in Iraq for the deadly drone attack.
The strikes hit command and intel centers and storage facilities affiliated with the Quds Force, a unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and local Iran-supported militias.
Tehran condemned the US strikes, calling them a “strategic error.” Baghdad said the attacks killed at least 16 people, including civilians. Syria, meanwhile, criticized the US and said the attacks would “fuel conflict in the Middle East in a very dangerous way.” The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based watchdog, said the strikes in Syria had killed 23 pro-Iran fighters, but no civilians.
The strikes came hours after President Joe Biden, first lady Dr. Jill Biden, and US Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin attended the return of the remains of the three slain US soldiers — Sgt. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, and Sgt. Kennedy Ladon Sanders — at Dover Air Force Base on Friday.
Biden had threatened to deliver a “tiered response” over time, so these strikes are expected to be just the first salvo of a broader campaign. We’ll be watching for Washington's next moves — and for any signs of escalation in the form of responses from Iran, Iraq, or Syria.
Tensions between the US and Iran have reached historic heights amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Will the US and Iran go to war?
The White House on Wednesday blamed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a coalition of militias backed by Iran, for the Sunday drone strike that killed three US service members in Jordan. It's only a matter of time before the US retaliates, and the White House signaled this would occur in stages.
In anticipation of this, Iran on Wednesday warned Washington there would be a “strong response” to “any attack on the country, its interests, and nationals under any pretexts.”
Will Iran make good on its threat? If the US strikes Iranian assets in the coming days, Tehran will likely feel compelled to respond.
But any retaliatory measures that Tehran ultimately takes will probably be calibrated to avoid a full-blown conflict – such as attacks by proxy groups, its preferred method of making problems for its adversaries. Depending on the scale of the US approach, it’s also possible that Iran could target US assets in the region or potentially even US forces – as it did in the wake of a 2020 US drone strike that killed a top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani.
War, huh, yeah. What is it good for? Neither Washington nor Tehran wants a full-blown war. For one, the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas already has the region on edge. Iran also can't match up with the US in a conventional war. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is running for reelection this year and can’t afford to get the US entangled in a war that would undoubtedly drive up oil prices.
Along these lines, there is still hope for de-escalation, but the situation remains tense.
Iran thrives on Arab "misery," says expert Karim Sadjadpour
Whether it's Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen, how much control does Iran have over its proxy forces? According to Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Karim Sadjadpour, Iran tends not to micromanage these groups. Iran may not typically give direct, day-to-day instructions but instead defer to these leaders to make their own decisions. However, Sadjadpour adds, on a broader level, Iran wields significant influence as they are often the primary source of funding and military support for these groups.
More importantly, when it comes to the people under the control of these proxy forces, whether they be Palestinian, Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni or Lebanese, Iran doesn't care about their wellbeing. Sadjadpour emphasizes that we must distinguish between Iran being anti-Israel and genuinely pro-Palestinian, for instance. He recalls a conversation with an Iranian official who suggested that Iran benefits from the instability and conflict in the region, as it furthers their interests.
"Iran really benefits from the misery of these populations and these failing states, and they don't want to see these populations become prosperous" Sadjadpour tells Ian Bremmer in the latest episode of GZERO World. " And so in some ways, the more these populations experience conflict, whether it's, you know, conflict amongst themselves or direct conflict with Israel, Iran has tended to benefit from the despair of these Arab populations."
Watch the full interview: What’s Iran’s next move?
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
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