Iran-US historian: Iranian execution wave unsurprising

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00:00Firstly, are you surprised by the reports that Iran has executed at least six people

00:05since Israel launched its attacks just two weeks ago?

00:10No, not at all.

00:11It's quite normal under these kinds of circumstances for Iran, for the supreme leader and for the

00:16Iranian government to want to be asserting their authority and consolidating their power

00:21after what has been, from their perspective, a very, very testing, trying time.

00:25Look, I think the bigger picture is that the Ayatollah, the supreme leader of Iran, feels

00:32that he has survived what is without question the biggest test of his leadership, if not

00:39the biggest test of the survival of the Islamic Republic since the revolution of 1979.

00:43And that has put him in a situation where I think he's, I would imagine, much more confident

00:49than he was even a week or two ago.

00:51So it's fairly obvious that the United States is not going to escalate militarily any further.

00:57Israel might be a different story, but I think Iran feels probably that militarily it can

01:02fight Israel to some kind of stalemate.

01:05And so, of course, now the Ayatollah has turned his attention to his domestic position.