For years, one of the most confident assumptions in Western political and media circles has been that the Islamic Republic of Iran survives only through fear, and that the moment its leadership fell, the country would erupt in celebration. It was repeated so often by officials and commentators that many treated it as settled fact rather than a guess.
When Ali Khamenei was killed on February 28 in the opening strikes of the US-Israeli war on Iran, that guess was put to the test.
Some in Washington expected an uprising within weeks. Iranians would supposedly see the campaign as liberation, the theory went, and the death of a man who had ruled for thirty-seven years would knock the props out from under the regime entirely. Instead, the war ground on for months, and when Khamenei was finally laid to rest in Mashhad on July 9, Iran's government said the funeral processions across Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Karbala, and Mashhad had drawn well over ten million mourners, with state media claiming figures as high as forty million across the full six days.
That is not what regime collapse looks like.
A War That Started With a Bombed Schoolhouse
Any honest account of why Iranians did not rise up in gratitude has to start with what the first hours of the war actually looked like on the ground.
On the morning of February 28, a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, during class hours. At least 168 people were killed, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve, according to a letter Senator Raphael Warnock sent demanding a Senate Armed Services Committee investigation. Human Rights Watch and United Nations experts both opened inquiries into whether the strike amounted to a war crime, and reporting since has pointed to US targeting data built on outdated intelligence about the site.
President Trump initially suggested Iran itself was responsible for the strike, telling reporters that Iranian munitions were simply inaccurate. That claim was never supported by evidence and was contradicted by subsequent Pentagon and independent reporting.
Whatever the full investigation eventually concludes, the political fact is simple. In the opening hours of a campaign that was supposed to make Iranians grateful, the deadliest single incident was the killing of more than 150 schoolgirls. That is the backdrop against which everything that followed, including the funeral, has to be read.
Confusing Opposition with Treason
To understand why so many Western observers still got it wrong, it helps to start with a basic truth about nationalism: people can despise their own government while fiercely rejecting a foreign power's attempt to remove it by force. These positions are not in tension. Iranians have spent years protesting economic collapse, corruption, and political repression, including a wave of unrest in late 2025 that Iranian human rights monitors say the Revolutionary Guard met with lethal force, killing thousands. Wanting change at home is not the same as welcoming missiles from abroad, and history shows that external attack tends to narrow internal divisions rather than widen them. Americans rallied after Pearl Harbor. Britons did the same through the Blitz. Ukrainians did it after Russia's 2022 invasion. There was little reason to expect Iran to break that pattern, and it didn't.
What the Funeral Actually Showed, and Didn't
None of this means the funeral should be read as a referendum on the regime, and plenty of credible reporting has pushed back hard on the official story. Iran's government has a long record of pressuring attendance at state events, and independent journalists have noted that free bread, halved hotel rates, extended shopping hours, and closed workplaces all helped swell the crowds this time as well. Some Western outlets and analysts have argued the true turnout was a small fraction of the millions claimed by state media.
There was also a genuinely strange layer to the coverage. Fact-checkers at AFP and France 24 confirmed that several viral videos and images claiming to show record crowds at the Grand Mosalla mosque and Azadi Tower were AI-generated fakes, complete with garbled Persian text and architecturally impossible domes, and that both regime supporters and opposition accounts pushed fabricated visuals for their own reasons. So the skepticism aimed at the raw numbers was not baseless paranoia. It reflected a real information war playing out alongside the actual one.
But even accounting for state coercion and outright fakery, independent wire services including Reuters and the AP documented, with their own reporters on the ground, real crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands to millions across multiple cities and multiple days, chanting for revenge against the United States and Israel and carrying signs targeting President Trump by name. That is a very different picture from the mass defections and celebratory uprising that had been forecast.
The Fatal Miscalculation
Much of the pre-war discourse in Washington rested on the idea that military pressure would accelerate a democratic uprising. Instead, the war produced what wars almost always produce: civilian casualties, a devastated school in Minab, an internet blackout, and widespread fear. When families are burying children, abstract arguments about who should govern them tomorrow tend to lose their pull. People stop asking who should replace their leaders and start asking who is bombing them today.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald captured the frustration many felt watching officials' predictions collapse in real time, writing that Americans had been told Iranians would welcome US and Israeli forces as liberators, and that it rarely works out that way once people are actually the ones being bombed. Whether or not one agrees with his framing, the underlying point tracks with what happened: Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan all produced similar gaps between the liberation narrative sold at home and the far messier reality on the ground.
Seeing a Country as It Actually Is
None of this means Iran's government enjoys broad or genuine popularity. It does not mean the political tensions, economic anger, or memories of the 2025 crackdown have disappeared, and it does not mean everyone who showed up in Tehran or Mashhad did so freely or out of devotion to Khamenei personally. Some of the reported turnout was coerced, some of it was incentivized, and some of the most viral images of it were never real to begin with.
What it does mean is that the core prediction, that killing the supreme leader would trigger the regime's collapse and turn Iranians into grateful spectators of a foreign war, has not held up. Patriotism and political dissatisfaction can exist in the same person at the same time. Iranians can want serious reform at home while still refusing to cheer for the country dropping bombs on their schools.
The deeper lesson here may not be about Iran at all. It is about the risk of building policy on a story about another country written thousands of miles away, one shaped more by wishful thinking than by what that country's people actually say and do when the moment arrives.