Two words get used as if they mean the same thing. They do not. “Regime change” means new rulers in Tehran. “Dismemberment” means no Tehran to rule at all. Washington has flirted with the first idea for decades. Israel, in its most candid strategic writing, has quietly built the case for the second. The distinction is not academic. It decides whether Iran remains one exhausted, humbled state or becomes six-or-seven-armed fragments, each a magnet for the next war.
A mosaic, not a monolith, but not a house of cards either
Iran is not Persia with an accent problem. Persians make up roughly 61 percent of its 90-plus million people. Azeris are close to 16 percent, Kurds about 10 percent, Lurs 6 percent, with Baloch, Arabs, and Turkmen rounding out the rest. Sunni, Shia, and a scattering of smaller faiths sit inside that ethnic map.
Tehran governs a federation, in fact, even as it insists it is a nation-state in name.
That diversity is real. A century of Persian-centered nation-building and the binding force of Twelver Shi’ism across most of the population have absorbed shocks that would have split weaker states. The people who now argue otherwise are not neutral demographers. They are strategists building a case for fragmentation.
Mahabad: the template, and its lesson
The template already exists, and it failed. In January 1946, with Soviet troops still on Iranian soil, Kurdish leader Qazi Muhammad declared the Republic of Mahabad in Iran’s northwest. Mullah Mustafa Barzani commanded its forces. It opened girls’ schools, printed Kurdish books, and built a parliament. It lasted eleven months. Once Washington and London pressured Moscow to withdraw, Iranian troops walked back in. Qazi Muhammad was hanged the following spring. Barzani fled to the Soviet Union and later carried the idea south into Iraq, where it eventually led to the formation of the Kurdistan Regional Government.
The lesson from 1946 still holds today.
A Kurdish state carved from Iran’s northwest is not just an Iranian problem. It is a Turkish, Iraqi, and Syrian one too. Ankara has fought the PKK for forty years and will not tolerate a new Kurdish capital anywhere near its border. Baghdad already manages an autonomous Kurdish north it cannot fully control; it does not want a second one next door.
Damascus, with roughly a million Kurds of its own in the northeast, faces the same arithmetic. A Kurdish Iran does not stay inside Iran’s map for long, and none of Iran’s neighbors are prepared to let it try.
Balochistan: Pakistan’s nightmare, not just Iran’s
Move southeast, and the stakes get heavier, because Pakistan is a nuclear power. Baloch nationalism straddles the Iran-Pakistan border, split by nineteenth-century imperial lines that Baloch communities never agreed to. Pakistan’s own Balochistan province already hosts a low-level insurgency against Islamabad, run by groups like the Baloch Liberation Army. Iranian Sistan and Baluchestan has its own history of Jundallah-style militancy. Analysts have floated arming Baloch and Kurdish militants against Tehran as a shortcut to weakening the Islamic Republic. Islamabad would read that very differently: as a precedent for detaching its own restive province. A nuclear-armed state watching its neighbor’s ethnic map get redrawn by outside powers is not a stabilizing scenario for anyone, including Washington.
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Khuzestan: where the money is
Then there is the Arab southwest, Khuzestan, still called Arabistan by its separatists. Sheikh Khazal ruled it as a semi-autonomous emirate until Reza Shah’s forces crushed his revolt in 1924–25 and folded the province into Iran, one year after the British discovery of oil there had made it worth fighting over. Iran will defend Khuzestan more fiercely than any other region of the periphery, for one simple reason: it holds the bulk of the country’s oil wealth. Strip that province away, and Tehran loses its treasury, not just its map.
The Israeli case stated plainly
None of this is guesswork about Israeli intentions — the argument has been made openly. Brenda Shaffer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has pushed for years for Iran’s breakup along ethnic lines, comparable to Yugoslavia’s collapse, with particular focus on detaching Iranian Azerbaijan. After Israel’s opening strikes in the current war, the Jerusalem Post called for a “Middle East coalition for the partition of Iran” and security guarantees for the Sunni, Kurdish, and Baloch regions willing to break away.
The intellectual scaffolding for this goes back further to Oded Yinon’s 1982 strategy paper and the “Bernard Lewis Project,” both of which treated the ethnic seams of Middle Eastern states as levers Israel could pull. Regime change, in this reading, is only the opening move. A dismembered Iran — permanently incapable of reconstituting itself, let alone going nuclear again — is the real prize.
Why even Israel’s own strategists doubt it
Critics within the region and some outside it argue that this reading of Iran is a mirage. Iran is not a fragile mosaic on the edge of collapse; it is a 90-million-person state with a historical identity that outlasted empires. Ethnic insurgencies among Kurds and Baloch lack the manpower or geography to march on Tehran.
A fragmented Iran would not produce quiet statelets. It would detonate what one analysis called “a geopolitical dirty bomb” — a vacuum filled by militias, smugglers, and rival patrons, sitting on top of the world’s oil chokepoint. That is not a safer neighbourhood for Israel. It is a more dangerous one, indefinitely.
The difference that matters
Regime change asks Iranians to replace their rulers. Dismemberment asks them to stop being one country. The first is disruptive but survivable, and it is the policy Washington has actually pursued, however clumsily, since February. The second is not policy so much as a wager — that a fractured, radioactive Iran, fought over by Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Iran’s own remnant center, would somehow be more manageable than the state it replaced. That wager remains just that: a wager, not a forecast, and history’s one real trial run — Mahabad — ended in eleven months and a hanging.
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
