Iran Is Collapsing, but Islamism Is Spreading

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, TheFreePress.com. March 2, 2026

Three events, three continents, one week. A parliamentary by-election in Greater Manchester, England; a thunderous war and the death of a tyrant in Iran; and a terrorist attack in Austin, Texas. They seem unrelated. They are not. Together, they tell you where political Islam has got to—and more urgently, where its most committed adherents are heading next.

On February 26, the UK’s Green Party won a parliamentary seat in Gorton and Denton that the Labour Party had held for decades. The Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, secured nearly 15,000 votes. Matt Goodwin, the candidate for the conservative populist Reform party, came in second with about 10,500, while the Labour candidate slipped to third. The obvious question is how a party associated with bike lanes, green energy, and rewilding managed to seize a Labour stronghold in Greater Manchester.

The answer has nothing to do with climate policy.

The Greens ran two entirely separate campaigns. To progressive voters, they offered the standard mix of green and anti-austerity policies. To Muslim voters, who make up 30 percent of the Gorton and Denton electorate, they offered something else. Leaflets in Urdu, Bengali, and Arabic told readers that Labour must be punished for its complicity in the Israeli war in Gaza. The translated material framed the vote as a community act—a way for Muslims to speak with one voice. Spencer appeared in a keffiyeh outside a mosque. Green Party leadership gave interviews to 5Pillars, an Islamist-leaning outlet that has been involved in the circulation of antisemitic and homophobic content. The Green Party pulled LGBT-friendly content from its Muslim-facing literature in the campaign.

Observers of the election found that about 12 percent of ballots were cast by people engaged in “family voting,” with multiple adults present in the same booth. Britain banned the practice in 2023, but its frequency in Groton and Denton may reflect a deep-set patriarchal tendency among local Muslims.

After the victory, Green deputy leader Mothin Ali attended a London rally backing Iran’s regime—the same regime whose rhetoric targets Britain and whose operatives have been linked to terrorist plots on UK soil.

This is what the red-green alliance looks like when it works. The radical left needs votes. Islamist-aligned networks can deliver them. In return, the left provides political cover, amplifies grievance narratives, and treats any internal criticism of the arrangement as racism. The Greens offered a different face to each audience and collected votes from both. They won. The implications go well beyond one seat.

Islamist networks now know they can move votes in Britain at scale. They can punish parties that displease them. They can reward those who serve their agenda. Labour is terrified, the Greens are emboldened, and independent candidates also claimed seats in the 2024 election on an Islamist platform. Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a choice between holding the Muslim vote and sticking to his stated commitment to fight antisemitism. He cannot do both, and the people applying the pressure know that perfectly well.

Now move east.

For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran was the world’s most consequential exporter of radical Islam. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had no interest in merely governing Iran. He wanted to remake the entire Middle East. He funded Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias across Iraq and Syria. He used oil revenues, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and intelligence services to construct an international infrastructure of radicalization. The caliphate he imagined would be built piece by piece, proxy by proxy, over a generation.

After U.S.-Israeli strikes killed Khamenei on Saturday, that project is now in free fall, undone by a fatal miscalculation.

October 7, 2023, was the hinge point. The Hamas assault on southern Israel—the murder of over 1,200 people, the abduction of 250 more—was an act of unimaginable terror. It was also a strategic gamble built on two assumptions, both catastrophically wrong.

The first was that the Abraham Accords could be shattered. Normalization between Israel and Arab states—Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia moving steadily toward the table—threatened to nullify Iran’s Palestinian proxy strategy. Once the Middle East built economic and security ties across old fault lines, it would have no use for Khamenei’s revolutionary project. The October 7 attack was designed to force every Arab government to choose publicly between solidarity with Palestinians and partnership with Israel. Khamenei calculated they would choose the former.

What Khamenei spent almost half his life building—the money, the networks, the radicalized men already living in Western cities—still exists.

The second assumption rested on American politics. Khamenei watched President Joe Biden in the White House and saw weakness. He watched the polls and concluded that Vice President Kamala Harris would succeed him. A Harris administration, he wagered, would maintain the Obama-era posture: cautious, multilateral, allergic to force, and eager to revive the weak restrictions on Iran’s nuclear arms program that the U.S. and Europe imposed in 2015. Under that cover, Iran could absorb whatever retaliation came its way, run out the clock, and emerge intact.

Both assumptions were wrong. The Abraham Accords survived October 7 and were even reinforced. Gulf leaders who had spent years worrying about Iranian expansionism and Islamists inside their borders watched what Shia Iran and Sunni Hamas had produced together and drew a conclusion Khamenei hadn’t anticipated. The Iran-Hamas partnership unified Arab and Israeli security interests more effectively than any diplomat could have managed. And then Donald Trump returned to the White House. Iran’s strategic vision, based on its expectation of a compliant U.S. administration, was nullified overnight. The restraint ended. The pressure arrived.

Now the Gulf states, Jordan, Egypt, and Arab governments that had never normalized relations with Israel are actively working to dismantle the institutions of radicalization that Iran built and supported over 40 years. They have cut off funding. They share intelligence. They have concluded that the Islamist revolutionary project threatens their own stability and are acting accordingly.

At the same time, inside Iran, something equally significant is happening. Many Iranians, particularly the young, no longer simply oppose the Islamic Republic. They have turned against political Islam altogether. Many choose religious skepticism. Others belong to a large underground Christian movement that now operates across the country. House churches function in secret. Conversions happen at a scale that would have seemed impossible two decades ago. Iranians who grew up under compulsory dress codes and mandatory religious instruction have had enough. They have seen what political Islam produces and want no part of it.

Khamenei weaponized religion and fused Islamic identity with state power. In doing so, he discredited both. His attempt to build a caliphate from above—through secret police, executions, and enforced observance—produced a generation of Iranians who now rank among the most secular people in the Muslim world.

Now Khamenei is dead, and that is cause for celebration. Yet what he spent almost half his life building—the money, the networks, the radicalized men already living in Western cities—still exists. And Austin shows that radicalism is alive, diffuse, and threatening.

In the early hours of Sunday, March 1, an armed man named Ndiaga Diagne—a 53-year-old who arrived in the U.S. from Senegal in 2000—drove up to a packed bar wearing a hoodie that read “Property of Allah” and a T-shirt that bore the Iranian flag. He had a Quran beside him. Diagne opened fire, killing two people and injuring 14. Investigators are examining whether the attack was connected to the U.S. strike on Iran. It is hard to believe the timing was coincidental.

The radicalization pipeline runs long. Sleeper cells tied directly and indirectly to Iranian networks exist across America and Western Europe. They have existed for years. We cannot yet be sure of Diagne’s route to jihad, but the Austin shooting is a reminder of what activation looks like.

The Trump administration, with none of its predecessor’s reluctance, has moved aggressively to identify, expose, and dismantle the networks behind Islamist terror on American soil. The southern border has been sealed. Federal authorities are working to identify and eliminate subversive networks operating domestically. For years, the Biden administration tied itself in knots to avoid naming the ideology behind these attacks. The evasion was political. It was also lethal. You cannot fight what you will not name.

Now put all three events together.

The Islamist project faces pressure from multiple directions at once. Iran loses ground. The Middle East turns. The United States acts. That is good news. But pressure is not defeat. Radicals relocate. They find the path of least resistance and exploit it. Right now, that path runs through Europe.

Europe’s leaders talk about borders more convincingly than they defend them. The continent’s legal protections for asylum seekers’ human rights—some legitimate, some absurd—make deporting or prosecuting apparent extremists nearly impossible. There are large, politically mobilized Muslim communities in France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, and Britain, and a political class that prefers the comfortable lie to the uncomfortable conversation.

More on Iran

The Gorton and Denton result is more than a British curiosity. It is a preview of what is coming across the continent. In France, leftist parties court Muslim communities while condemning Israel. In Germany, pro-Palestinian demonstrations regularly cross into open antisemitism while authorities debate whether to classify them as “hate crimes.” In Belgium, the Brussels district of Molenbeek, which housed and sheltered multiple perpetrators of the 2015 Paris attacks and the 2016 Brussels bombings, continues to breed radicalization.

The red-green alliance has no particularly British character. It operates across Europe wherever the necessary conditions exist: a left that needs votes, an Islamist-aligned network that can deliver them, and an institutional culture that treats any scrutiny of the arrangement as bigotry.

What Europe needs, and what most of its governments remain too timid to pursue, is a clear-eyed policy of tracking Islamist funding networks, detecting and dismantling political alliances that trade votes for ideological concessions, and refusing asylum or residency to individuals with documented ties to extremist organizations.

None of this would be discrimination against Muslims. Many Muslims in Europe want nothing to do with political Islam and are far too often among its first victims. The right targets are the extremist networks that exploit European openness, and those who provide them cover.

America should watch Europe carefully. The continent is a live case study in what happens when subversion goes unchallenged. The Trump administration is taking the right steps, and that work mustn’t stop because Iran’s collapse won’t make the West safer in the short term. It will displace the danger.

Fifteen years ago, as the so-called “Arab Spring” swept North Africa and the Middle East, I warned that the principal beneficiaries of the upheaval would be Islamists and that the main consequence would be a surge of emigration as people fled the violence. I remember the skeptical responses to my prediction.

Today, Iran may be at the beginning of another revolution—a revolution from above, triggered by U.S. and Israeli air strikes. The radicals Iran spent 40 years cultivating are now in motion, seeking new ground. Some will surface in Europe. Some are already in America. The difference is that America is actively looking for them.

Manchester. Tehran. Austin. One story told across three continents. Only the most consequential passages—the conclusions—remain unwritten.