When Civilian Space Becomes a Security Weapon
The meaning of Iran’s war without boundaries.
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In Iran, ambulances are no longer always trusted, especially in times of crisis. During protests, people have watched emergency vehicles move through streets not to rescue the injured, but allegedly to transport security forces, arrest demonstrators, or move detainees. This image says something larger about the Islamic Republic. The regime does not only repress society from outside, but enters civilian life, uses its institutions, borrows its vehicles, hides behind its buildings—and then presents itself as the victim when those same spaces are caught in the consequences of conflict.
This has long been part of the Islamic Republic’s evolution, not an accident or a temporary wartime improvisation. Over the last three decades, the regime has gradually blurred the line between civilian and security (or military) institutions. Universities, hospitals, schools, banks, municipalities, and even private companies have been penetrated by the security apparatus, including the Basij and Herasat offices. For the regime, civilian institutions are more than pure autonomous spaces; they are resources that can be used for surveillance, ideological control, repression, military movement, and propaganda. Unlike other authoritarian states, the regime doesn’t just control society; it securitizes it.
Herasat offices operate inside universities, ministries, banks, municipalities, and public organizations. Their job is to protect buildings and sensitive information, but also to monitor employees, supervise behavior, enforce ideological discipline, and shape hiring and promotion decisions. The civil Basij organization also performs a similar role inside schools, universities, workplaces, and neighborhoods. It is a multifaceted organization. The Basij is an armed militia, as well as a social-security network that extends the state’s eyes and arms into everyday life.
But the blurring of civilian and security spheres has also become operational, meaning that during moments of crisis, the regime uses civilian tools for coercive and security purposes. For example, ambulances, buses, ordinary cars, commercial trucks, hospitals, schools, universities, and mosques can all become part of the security system. The regime benefits from the civilian appearance of these spaces and vehicles. They are familiar, less suspicious, and often protected by social trust. That trust becomes a weapon.
The use of ambulances is one of the clearest examples. Iran’s military and security agencies used ambulances as military vehicles to arrest and transport protesters and political rivals, and to move them to detention centers, for example during the Women, Life, Freedom movement.
This is important because an ambulance normally carries a special moral and legal status. Representing medical neutrality, it has access to restricted areas and people are expected to move aside for it. When the state uses it to carry security forces or detainees, it destroys public trust not only in the regime but also in emergency medicine. The victim is not only the arrested protester. The victim is also the next injured person who may not receive help because people now fear the ambulances.
Similarly, hospitals have also been treated as extensions of the securitization of civil institutions. According to Reuters, Iranian security forces removed protesters from hospitals and detained them—with the support of the Basij and Herast offices at the hospitals. The Revolutionary Guards took wounded patients while police and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) members searched hospital records to identify discharged protesters. The same pattern holds for other civilian vehicles, such as ordinary cars, vans, buses, and commercial trucks, which were used to transport security personnel or detainees. Claims about specific private companies, including Mihan ice cream trucks, have circulated widely; in one case, security forces used one such truck to transport a 17-year-old girl to a detention center, then raped and killed her.
According to Amnesty International, Iran’s highest military body instructed commanders across the country—including the Basij and plainclothes security agents—to “severely confront” protesters. This matters because repression in Iran is carried out through overlapping institutions, some formal and some informal, some uniformed and some hidden inside society.
Since the June 2025 Iran-Israel war, this blurring of security and civilian domains has become even more stark, showing that the regime’s use of civilian space is not limited to domestic repression but is in fact part of its wartime defense. During the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes, Iranian security and military forces moved personnel, weapons, and equipment into civilian sites, including schools, hospitals, stadiums, universities, mosques, parks, and government offices across the country. This is not simply about hiding. It is about transferring risk onto society. In some cases, the Islamic Republic even used civilian trucks for transportation and for the launch of missiles and drones during the war.
International humanitarian law is clear that civilian objects are protected from attack unless and for such time as they become military objectives. Even when a civilian site is misused by military or security forces, any attack must still obey the laws of war. The Iranian regime is creating ambiguity and turning schools, hospitals, ambulances, and commercial vehicles into contested spaces by using them for coercive or military purposes.
This is the regime’s double game: it militarizes civilian life and then, when those spaces are damaged or threatened, it plays the victim card by presenting them as purely civilian, and uses those images for propaganda. This victimhood narrative is powerful because it contains a partial truth: that civilians are suffering. When civilian buildings and equipment are damaged, ordinary people are the ones who pay the price. But the regime hides its own role in creating that danger, denying that it placed security forces inside civilian areas or used medical institutions as instruments of control or transformed schools, universities, hospitals, and commercial infrastructure into parts of the security system.
This strategy undermines Iranian society from within and erodes political and social trust. Iranians distrust ambulances, fear hospitals, and avoid treatment, especially during protests. They understand that universities, schools, and mosques are not safe, as they are used for military purposes. The regime’s survival strategy creates insecurity everywhere.
This is why the concept of a modern security state is a useful framework. The Islamic Republic is more than a theocratic regime—it is also a military dictatorship. It is a system in which ideology and security reinforce each other inside everyday institutions. The mosque, school, university, hospital, workplace, and neighborhood are all connected to the survival of the regime. The result is the transformation of the civilian sphere into a security field.
Many analysts still look for a clean division between civilian and military life in Iran. They ask whether an institution is educational or security-related (like Minab School, which was struck earlier this year), and whether a vehicle is medical or used by military commanders. But in the Islamic Republic, the answer is often both: the form may be civilian, while the function is security. For example, the university may produce engineers, but it may also serve the defense establishment and work on military equipment.
This does not mean that every civilian institution in Iran is a legitimate military target. That approach would be legally and morally wrong. But it does mean that we must understand how the regime itself has polluted the civilian sphere and made civilian life vulnerable by inserting security apparatus into it.
The Islamic Republic has endangered Iranians by placing security and military equipment and personnel inside the spaces where ordinary people live. Iranians are trapped inside this system, which exposes them to risk and then turns them into propaganda images. In fact, the regime, despite claiming to defend the people, constantly sacrifices the safety of the people for its own survival. By removing the boundary between civilian life and the military, the regime has turned Iranian society into part of its battlefield.
Jason Brodsky is the policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran.
Saeid Golkar is an associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, a senior advisor at United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), and a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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