Why was 2024 so bad for Iran?

The network presented “a series of strikes against Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his regime over the past year.” In April, Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Syria, prompting Iran to respond with more than 300 drones and missiles directed at Israel. But the latter worked with the United States, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia to shoot down almost every missile and drone. In May, the late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash while visiting a remote area, and Iran blamed the accident on heavy fog. Raisi was a protégé of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei and a potential successor to him.”
According to the network, “In July, while Iran was installing a new president this summer, Israel infiltrated to assassinate Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political bureau of the Hamas movement, during his visit to Tehran to attend the inauguration ceremony. While Haniyeh was staying in a private government guesthouse, Israel detonated a remote-controlled bomb. In October, Israeli forces were able to eliminate Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the city of Rafah in Gaza. Sinwar was the mastermind behind the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel and was one of the most wanted men in the war. In fact, Hamas has lost thousands of fighters and most of its leadership ranks due to Israeli attacks, and is no longer the force that could pose a threat on Israel’s borders that Iran had hoped it would be.
The network continued, “In November, the Iranian currency fell to its lowest levels ever after news of Trump’s election, and expectations that he might return to a policy of “maximum pressure.” The Iranian rial has fallen by 46% this year, officially making it the world’s least valuable currency. Iran has long vowed to retaliate for Trump’s approval of the killing of the commander of the Quds Force in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, General Qassem Soleimani, in 2019, and US intelligence also revealed Tehran’s plots to kill the president-elect. After the Trump administration withdrew from the Iranian nuclear agreement in 2018, it imposed harsh sanctions on the regime to stop its funding of agents abroad, and prevented American citizens from trading with Iran or dealing with Iranian funds. It also punished entities in other countries that did business with Iran, by cutting off their dealings with the dollar. President Joe Biden has often waived the application of such sanctions, out of his eagerness to bring Tehran back to the negotiating table to prevent it from possessing nuclear weapons and for fear of a rise in global oil prices. Iran received more than $10 billion through a State Department sanctions waiver that allowed Iraq to continue purchasing energy from Iran, which the Biden administration says is necessary to keep electricity in Baghdad.
According to the network, “In the fall, Israel redirected much of its efforts toward bombing Hezbollah after a series of cross-border attacks between the two parties. Israel targeted Hezbollah’s leadership and blew up hundreds of pagers that the party was using to communicate. At the end of November, Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire, with both sides claiming that the other had violated the fragile truce, but it ostensibly held for weeks. In December, Syrian rebels were able to oust Iran’s Quds Forces, an extension of the Revolutionary Guards, leading to the overthrow of Assad. Iranian forces in Syria have been supporting Assad since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, but their size has diminished since the outbreak of war elsewhere in the Middle East. The new Syrian government is scheduled to be run by Sunni Muslims hostile to the Shiite government in Iran. The latter also lost a major supply line through Syria that it used to arm Hezbollah in its war against Israel.