by SABINA SALI
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening hours of the campaign. Nearly five weeks later, the war continues with over 1,900 Iranians dead (as of March 27), thirds of Iran’s missile production capacity destroyed[1], and the Strait of Hormuz crisis. For the network known as the Axis of Resistance, Iran’s coalition of allied non-state actors and state partners across the region, this is the moment it was theoretically built for. The main question is whether the network still has capacities to reach its goal.
The Axis was designed as Iran’s “forward defence” architecture, as a ring of armed movements and aligned states whose role was to deter and absorb military pressure before it reached Iranian territory. At its peak, this architecture extended from Tehran to the Mediterranean, through Syria, which served as the critical land corridor linking Iran to Hezbollah and Palestinian militant groups in the Levant. That corridor ran through Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, whose relationship with Tehran dated to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and whose territory Iran used to transfer weapons, fighters, and resources westward for decades. Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024, a collapse made possible in large part by the prior weakening of Iran and Hezbollah through Israeli military operations. With Syria gone, the Axis lost what the International Crisis Group called its strategic depth: “There is no axis without access”.
What remains are Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthi movement in Yemen, and the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq, but these actors have been progressively weakened since October 2023, so they are not operating at full capacitity. Now, with Iran itself under direct and massive attack, the question is not only whether these actors can respond meaningfully, but whether the Axis as a coherent strategic architecture still exists at all.
Iran: The Patron Under Fire
The Islamic Republic that emerged from the 1979 revolution was built on the ideology and strategy at once. The ideology was based on Khomeini’s principle of velayat-e faqih which served as the guardianship of the Islamic jurist and which gave Iran not just a theological foundation, but a doctrinal license to lead a resistance far beyond its own borders, fusing religious legitimacy with geopolitical ambition. The strategy followed from it where: Iran cultivated alliances with groups sharing its counter-hegemonic outlook, deep animosity toward Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia, regardless of sectarian proximity, which is why the Axis stretched beyond the Shia world to include Sunni Hamas and the Zaydi Houthis. The IRGC was created by Khomeini first to secure the revolution at home, then export it abroad. Not all members of the Axis were equally bound to Tehran because Hezbollah followed Iranian leadership closely, while Hamas and the Houthis retained their own agendas, which is precisely why the network proved less reliable when Iran needed it most.
Hezbollah: Re-entering the Fight It Had Barely Survived
Hezbollah entered the current war as an organization still grappling with the scale of its own near-destruction. Its degradation began on September 17, 2024, when thousands of pagers distributed to Hezbollah operatives simultaneously exploded across Lebanon in which Israeli intelligence had embedded explosive charges in devices ordered by the group. The attacks killed 42 people, wounded over 3,500, and destroyed Hezbollah’s secure communications infrastructure, injecting lasting mistrust between fighters, recruits, and leadership. In the weeks that followed, Israel systematically eliminated most of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, including Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, and destroyed an estimated 80% of its pre-war military infrastructure. A November 2024 ceasefire gave the group breathing room, but not for too long.
The re-escalation since March 2, 2026 exposes how fragile that recovery was. New Secretary-General Naim Qassem is leading an organisation that retains, according to Israeli security estimates, roughly one-third of its pre-war firepower, an estimated 20,000 – 25,000 rockets, while simultaneously fighting a war and facing serious structural difficulties at the command level with a prolonged leadership crisis, weakened mid-level ranks, and accelerating erosion of institutional expertise. The fall of Assad’s Syria compounded this further because the collapse of the Iran-Syria-Lebanon corridor eliminated the primary route for weapons transfers, forcing the group to develop domestic arms production, itself now a target of ongoing Israeli strikes. Hezbollah has nonetheless fired over 3,500 missiles and drones at Israel since March 2, a scale of response that surprised many, including Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, who had warned on the eve of the war that Hezbollah was rearming faster than expected. Despite catastrophic leadership losses, the group retained powerful military strength and a highly motivated fighting force , a resilience rooted in its flat, cellular structure that allowed it to absorb losses without institutional collapse.
Even Hezbollah’s traditional domestic base has grown ambivalent, the Lebanese Shia community, watching its country destroyed for the second time in two years, is increasingly asking whether alignment with Tehran serves Lebanese interests. The disarmament process formally initiated by Lebanon’s cabinet in September 2025 is now suspended amid the fighting, a political project eclipsed by a war it was never designed to survive.
Hamas: On the Sidelines of a “Bigger” War
Hamas is the most conspicuously absent actor in the current conflict. Devastated by 18 months of Israeli military operations that killed its top three key leaders, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, and destroyed an estimated 90% of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, the movement is nominally bound by the October 2025 ceasefire framework and has not joined the wider military coalition responding to the Iran strikes.
This restraint reflects strategic calculation more than incapacity. Hamas retains significant military capacity, between 15,000 and 20,000 armed operatives, and is exploiting the diplomatic vacuum created by the Iran war to delay the disarmament demanded under the ceasefire’s second phase, which it has explicitly rejected. The transitional “Board of Peace” governance structure exists on paper but in practice, Hamas continues to administer the territory it controls. The Iran war has paradoxically both weakened and strengthened its position: weakened, because its principal patron is under existential pressure; strengthened, because international attention has shifted entirely away from Gaza, reducing pressure to comply with disarmament timelines. For Hamas, anything that enables it to survive is considered an achievement. The movement that launched October 7 as an act of regional solidarity now watches the resulting war from the margins.
Iraq’s Militias: The Most Active, the Most Exposed
Of all Axis members, Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) have responded most actively to the Iran war. The PMF is a heterogeneous institution of roughly 60–70 brigades and 230,000 personnel formally integrated into Iraq’s armed forces since 2016, but its core leadership and operational capacity remain concentrated among pro-Iran factions, including Kata’ib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which maintain independent command structures and direct lines to the IRGC. Since February 28, these factions have launched over 300 drone and missile strikes on US military positions across the region, blurring the line between state-sanctioned self-defense and proxy warfare in ways that have drawn Iraq into a confrontation not of its own making.
Iraq’s government is under severe strain. Prime Minister al-Sudani has condemned both Iranian retaliatory strikes and US operations on Iraqi soil, while simultaneously granting PMF factions legal authority to respond, an extraordinary concession that reflects the government’s structural inability to control forces it formally funds.
The PMF remains structurally the most intact component of the Axis, with an annual state budget of $3.5 billion, but its position is increasingly untenable. Direct American airstrikes on PMF infrastructure represent a significant escalation of the pressure Washington is willing to apply, and the US has made PMF reform a condition of continued engagement with Baghdad.
The Houthis: Strategic Patience or Strategic Retreat?
For the first four weeks of the Iran war, the Houthis were conspicuously absent. Despite having demonstrated the capability to strike US and Israeli assets, and despite holding one of the most strategically significant cards in the entire conflict, they did not actively participate until the end of March. Iran appeared to be managing escalation gradually, keeping the Houthis in reserve as an important card to be played later, especially given their ability to disrupt Red Sea shipping and create wider economic and security pressure. That calculation shifted on March 28/29, when the Houthis launched their first direct strikes on Israel since the October 2025 ceasefire, announcing they would “continue carrying out military operations in the coming days.”
Their strategic importance within the Axis lies above all in geography. The Bab al-Mandeb, the strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, is de facto controlled by the Houthis, and approximately 10 – 12 percent of global maritime trade passes through it. With the Strait of Hormuz already partially blockaded, a simultaneous disruption of Bab al-Mandeb would, in the words of Cambridge Middle East specialist Elisabeth Kendall, “disrupt, if not cripple, trade toward Europe.” The sharp drop in Houthi attacks on commercial vessels in 2025 reflected strategic recalibration rather than diminished capacity, the capability was preserved, not lost.
That autonomy is the defining feature of the Iran-Houthi relationship. Unlike Hezbollah, which was built with direct Iranian oversight, the Houthis retain considerable autonomy and Iran has only limited control over the group’s actions. They are increasingly shaping their own network of allies directly, without Iranian intermediation, including coordination with Iraqi armed groups. Their entry into the current war therefore reflects their own calculation, not a directive from Tehran. Whether the Bab al-Mandeb option is exercised will be the single most consequential decision any Axis member makes in the weeks ahead.
Dismantled One by One
The Axis of Resistance was designed precisely for a scenario like this one, a direct military confrontation between Iran and the United States and Israel, in which distributed non-state actors across the region would impose unacceptable costs on any attacker. That deterrence has largely failed. But this failure did not begin on February 28, 2026. Rather, it accumulated over two years, through the successive elimination of one ally at the time.
This is the structural paradox at the heart of Iran’s defeat. Tehran watched as Israel systematically dismantled the network it had spent decades building, and largely allowed it to happen. When Nasrallah was killed, Iran did not respond meaningfully. When Hamas was being decimated in Gaza, Iran did not intervene. When Assad fell, Tehran’s proxies lacked the coordination to mount any coherent defense. At each juncture, Iran faced the same dilemma, escalate and risk a war it was not prepared for, or show restraint and watch its deterrence erode, and repeatedly chose restraint, mistaking it for strategy. An alternative reading holds that Iran was deliberately preserving its remaining capacities for a direct confrontation, calculating that intervention on behalf of Hezbollah or Hamas would have triggered an even earlier and more devastating war, a debate among analysts that the outcome of the current conflict may ultimately settle. Israel read that correctly, and exploited the absence of credible Iranian red lines to move sequentially through the Axis, eliminating each component before Tehran could recalibrate.
What remained when the February 28 strikes came was a network already hollowed out with Hamas isolated, the Syrian corridor severed, Iraq’s militias fractured. Hezbollah was the partial exception, devastated, yet capable of re-entering the fight and firing over 3,500 missiles, a performance that surprised many analysts and spoke more to the organisation’s institutional depth than to the health of the Axis as a whole. The Houthis entered the war on March 28, but as a last card, not a decisive one. What the war exposed, above all, is the gap between the architecture Iran designed and the political will required to defend it. The systematic elimination of Axis members without meaningful Iranian retaliation established a pattern of de facto impunity that ultimately made a direct strike on Iran itself a rational, low-risk calculation for both Washington and Tel Aviv.
[1] what US and Israeli officials claim is roughly two-thirds of Iran’s missile production capacity destroyed, assessments that remain difficult to independently verify during active hostilities
Sabina Sali is an MA student in Contemporary Balkan Studies at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Science, and RSKH intern at the Centre for International Security.
