The Daily Populous Tuesday March 10th, 2026 morning edition
Authored by vox.com and submitted by Delicious_Adeptness9

is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map.

The destroyed offices of the Jamaa Islamiya, an Islamist group allied with Hamas and Hezbollah, after it was targeted by an Israeli airstrike the previous day in the southern Lebanese coastal city of Sidon on March 4, 2026. Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP via Getty Images

This is not how it was supposed to go for Iran.

For years, the Islamic Republic worked to build up a network of allies throughout the Middle East, widely known as the “axis of resistance,” which, in the event Iran itself were attacked, could rain down destruction on Israel, the US military, and American allies in the region.

Key takeaways Iran’s “axis of resistance” has failed. Built as a deterrent force meant to overwhelm Israel and constrain US intervention, the network of regional allies that included Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, and Hamas has responded weakly to the US-Israeli strikes on Iran. The key turning point for the axis was Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel. While Iran may not have directly orchestrated Hamas’s attack, the war it triggered allowed Israel to systematically degrade Tehran’s allies. As a result, Iran is now more isolated and vulnerable than at any point in decades, giving Israel and the US greater freedom of action, as seen in the current war.

The axis includes Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and militants in Iraq. At its peak, Iran relied on the network to promote its hardline brand of Shia Islam against rival powers associated with Sunni Islam, intimidate governments into submission, and scare off Western threats. Perhaps even more than its ballistic missiles stockpile, its nascent nuclear program, and its conventional military, these regional groups were Iran’s deterrent against exactly the sort of all-out attack we’re not seeing.

“The idea was never to be engaged in a war of attrition,” said Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow and expert on Middle Eastern armed groups and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “Everyone would fire at once, so that Israel would be overwhelmed before the US was able to completely deploy its defenses.”

And yet, since the joint US-Israeli airstrikes against Iran began over the weekend, killing its supreme leader and devastating the regime’s military and infrastructure, the response from the axis of resistance has been fairly feeble.

The impotent response is part of a larger story of the Iranian regime’s collapse from a fearsome military power to a weakened state fighting for its survival against an emboldened America and Israel. Rather than secure it from attack, its strategy of backing proxy forces in conflicts abroad played a critical part in dragging it into the existential crisis it faces now.

And while there are a number of factors that led to its unraveling, there’s one clear moment when it all started to go south: Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

In the spring of 2018, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had every reason to feel confident about Iran’s position in the Middle East. It was arguably the moment of greatest power and influence for the axis of resistance.

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s forces had taken the last major rebel stronghold near Damascus — seemingly ending the threat to the Iran-backed regime after a long and bloody civil war.

In Iraq, Iranian-backed militias were also tasting victory, having retaken all the territory held by the radical Sunni terror group ISIS and a good chunk of Kurdistan as well. That year, Hezbollah, the Lebanese hybrid militant group and political party, and its allies won an outright majority in Lebanon’s first elections in nearly a decade. In Yemen, the Iran-backed rebel group Ansar Allah, better known as the Houthis, were proving themselves an international threat by firing missiles into Saudi Arabia.

With its friends in secure positions of power in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, landlocked Iran had achieved its long-sought “land bridge” to the Mediterranean. In a confident letter to Assad, Khamenei wrote, ““If you and we, and other elements of resistance, stay determined, the enemy cannot accomplish a single thing.”

Eight years later, that strategy lay in ruins, buried under the rubble along with Khamenei himself.

The axis strategy had its roots in the 1980s, the early days of the Islamic Republic that took power after a revolution in 1979. During a long war with Iraq, Iran’s conventional military fared poorly, but gained an advantage by aiding Iraqi Shia militias opposed to then-dictator Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government. Around the same time, Iran began providing aid to Shiite militia groups fighting against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which eventually evolved into Hezbollah.

The alliance was coordinated by the Quds Force, a branch of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, an armed force that answers directly to the supreme leader and is separate from Iran’s conventional army.

Over the years, members of the axis have inflicted serious damage against Iran’s enemies. Hezbollah killed 241 US service members in the bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and fought the Israeli military to an inconclusive standstill — something accomplished by no other Arab military — in a month-long 2006 war. Later, Hezbollah fighters played a key role in the defense of Assad’s Syrian regime.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iranian-backed militia groups were a key component of the anti-US insurgency, often employing improvised explosive devices assembled in Iran itself. The Pentagon has claimed that one in six US casualties in the war in Iraq can be linked to Iran. (Ironically, years later the US military would form a tacit alliance with these same militias in the fight against ISIS.)

Though Iran may have been militarily outmatched by the US and Israel, and was struggling under crippling international sanctions — particularly after President Donald Trump pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated with President Barack Obama — it had every reason to believe that if the worst came to pass, its allies could inflict heavy damage. Even after Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guard commander viewed by many as the architect of the axis of resistance strategy, was killed in a US drone strike in 2019 along with the leader of one of the most powerful Iraqi militias, many experts believed the axis would remain a potent threat.

Hamas was always the odd member out in the “axis of resistance.”

It’s a Palestinian Sunni group that began in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist movement that favors government run according to strict religious laws. Nearly all the other members of the axis adhere to various branches of Shia Islam. On paper, therefore, they’re on opposite sides of the Middle East’s main sectarian divide. But the two share a common enemy in Israel. Iran’s hardline Islamic government broke off ties with Israel after its 1979 revolution, viewing it as a religious affront and Western imperialist power; Hamas is an offshoot of the Palestinian resistance movement that has existed since Israel’s founding.

In the early 1990s, Iran began providing Hamas, and fellow Sunni Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad, with tens of millions of dollars of funding per year, and Hamas later opened an office in Tehran.

Hamas became notorious around the world in this period for its use of suicide bombers against civilian targets in Israel, which helped derail negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, led by the secular Fatah movement, to establish a Palestinian state. But its militancy made it an increasing regional player: In 2007, its fighters purged Fatah from Gaza after Israel withdrew its soldiers from the territory, giving it a territorial base under its direct control.

Israel instituted a blockade, but Hamas — with Iran’s help — began amassing missiles that could strike deeper and deeper into Israeli territory, and material for command bunkers and tunnels to withstand counterattacks.

It fought a series of limited wars with Israel, and Iran and Hezbollah directly coordinated with Hamas during rounds of fighting. The relationship with Iran was strained at times by their ethnic and religious differences, which led to a rupture when they backed opposing sides in the Syrian civil war. But they repaired the damage and were once again closely aligned as of 2023.

Then, on October 7, Hamas and allied fighters launched a surprise series of attacks on Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people, most of whom were civilians, and taking 251 hostages back into Gaza. Israel responded by launching a brutal air campaign, and later ground invasion, in Gaza.

Iran’s axis members quickly involved themselves in the fight. Hezbollah, believed to have an arsenal of up to 200,000 rockets, began firing them into Israel the day after October 7 and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, praised the attacks, but seemed to hope to keep the fighting contained, particularly as the US had deployed naval ships specifically aimed at deterring the group. Nonetheless, the rocket, missile, and drone fire between Israel and Hezbollah continued to expand in the months that followed, displacing thousands on both sides of the border. At times, there was more active combat on Israel’s “northern front” than in Gaza.

As the war in Gaza dragged on, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria launched dozens of attacks against US military bases. In January 2024, three US soldiers were killed in a drone strike near the Jordan-Syrian borders — the first US troops killed by enemy aircraft since the Korean War. Using missiles and drones and taking advantage of fortuitous geography, Yemen’s Houthis managed to shut down the majority of commercial shipping through the Red Sea.

But despite Iran’s involvement in the expanding conflagration, it’s not clear they knew about, or intended, the spark that started it. Documents that were seized later by Israel suggest that Hamas leaders in Gaza had discussed an upcoming major attack with Hezbollah and Iranian officials in 2022 and 2023, but there’s no evidence to suggest the Iranians played a role in coordinating or carrying out the October 7 attacks. In fact, US intelligence agencies believe Iranian officials were taken by surprise when it happened.

This may not have been a war Iran itself chose, but the alliance appeared to be working as hoped.

While the Israeli war effort initially was concentrated in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet viewed the attack as fundamentally tied to the larger threat of Iran’s “axis of resistance.” The next phase of the war began to target them more directly.

But the domino effects in the region began to intensify, cutting further into Iran’s allies. In December 2024, the Assad regime in Syria fell after a brief and shocking rebel offensive. Assad’s rapid fall, seven years after he appeared to have “won” the civil war, was made possible in part because the allies who had come to his aid before were unable to this time: Russia was tied down by the war in Ukraine; Hezbollah was decimated by the war with Israel.

Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is the worst of both worlds from Iran’s perspective: a former Sunni jihadist who has become a close US ally. Assad’s fall denies a safe haven to Iranian militants. The land bridge was closed.

By 2025, when Israel and the United States launched a major strike against Iran’s nuclear program, it was clear that the axis was no longer the deterrent its architects had hoped for.

It’s an open question whether the axis was always just a paper tiger, or whether Israel’s intelligence and military capabilities — which had been unable to overcome Hezbollah as recently as 2006 — were simply more formidable and ruthless than observers realized. But the effect was undeniable: Iran was isolated and its military options were deeply constrained, making it a tempting target for an Israeli government and Trump administration that had long viewed it as an urgent threat.

“These guys were generally taken aback by October 7 and they struggled to adjust and didn’t understand the kind of war they were in,” said Hokayem. “They didn’t understand how Israel’s risk appetite had shifted.”

For the moment, Iran’s regional allies, drained after the post-October 7 war, seem reluctant to get dragged into another high-intensity conflict. It’s possible that as it continues, if the Iranian regime appears to be truly at risk of destruction, that could change.

Israeli authorities believe Hezbollah still has around 40,000 troops and 30,000 reservists — roughly the same as before the war — and about 20 percent of its prewar rocket arsenal. The Houthis have been relatively quiet since the Gaza ceasefire in January 2025, but that could change. The most powerful of Iraq’s Shia militias have also avoided direct attacks on the US military since 2024, but could rejoin the fight.

For now, however, the axis no longer appears to be a serious constraint on US or Israeli action, leaving Tehran to rely on its missile forces, which have so far been unable to overwhelm air defense systems.

Hamas’s decision to launch the brutal October 7 attacks were reportedly motivated by its desire to prevent the normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, a goal it apparently felt was worth the inevitably destructive Israeli retaliation against Gaza. It hoped, in other words, that the attack would reshape power dynamics in the Middle East. It did do that — but mainly by giving Israel far more freedom to act as it pleases.

Prize_Farm4951 on March 9th, 2026 at 21:14 UTC »

I find it remarkable that after a decade of winning the sectarian proxy war over the Saudis in the region and winning or securing favourable stalemates in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, along with Hezbollah looking stronger than ever over the last fight with Israel and they threw it all away after Oct 7 backing a Sunni group/people.

You'd almost think Hamas were a 5th Column.

Echo017 on March 9th, 2026 at 20:53 UTC »

It was launched on Putin's birthday when he desperately needed some breathing room, they had more than one patron

EconomistStreet5295 on March 9th, 2026 at 20:43 UTC »

October 7th was just about the worst campaign Iran and its proxies could have done/supported.

Totally underestimated what it would provoke within Israel and the current geopolitical climate.