In the densely populated neighbourhoods of southern Tehran, the 11th Criminal Investigation Base once stood as a mundane symbol of local law enforcement. Its detectives investigated economic crimes, fraud and petty thefts.

The building housed no ballistic missiles, no uranium centrifuges and no military command centres. Today, it is a crater. In the opening wave of the United States-Israel war on Iran, warplanes wiped the local police station off the map.

It was not an isolated incident. An investigation by Al Jazeera’s Digital Investigations unit has verified that at least 75 internal security sites were destroyed or damaged in bombardments by Israel and the US from February 28 to March 10. The targeted facilities included local police stations, criminal investigation headquarters, public security offices and checkpoints operated by the Basij paramilitary force.

Al Jazeera mapped the strikes using open-source data, cross-referencing field reports with satellite imagery to confirm the destruction. However, conducting independent verification has grown increasingly difficult. On March 6, commercial satellite providers Planet Labs and Vantor restricted imagery over the Middle East, later expanding the blackout to impose a 14-day delay on all images of Iran.

While the companies said the blackout prevents hostile actors from endangering civilians, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein recently revealed a leaked US Space Force directive dictating how commercial satellite firms describe damage. The leak exposed a deliberate US effort to control the flow of information and obscure the reality of the battlefield.

Targeting population centres

The spatial distribution of the 75 verified strikes revealed a clear and deliberate strategy. Warplanes bypassed isolated military installations to hit the infrastructure Tehran uses to police its citizens.

The capital alone absorbed 31 strikes, more than 40 percent of the total targets. Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan province, suffered eight strikes. The remaining targets were clustered tightly in major western and central cities, including Isfahan, Kermanshah and Hamedan. Meanwhile, Iran’s sprawling eastern and southeastern provinces remained largely untouched by this campaign.

By overlaying the strike coordinates with demographic maps, the investigation shows a near-perfect alignment with urban density. More than 70 percent of Iran’s population lives in these targeted western urban areas.

The strikes systematically targeted the Law Enforcement Command, known as FARAJA, and the Basij network. FARAJA, elevated in 2021 by late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to operate alongside the military, is currently led by Ahmad-Reza Radan. It manages daily urban law enforcement and riot control. The Basij, an immense volunteer paramilitary force deeply embedded in Iranian neighbourhoods, acts as the state’s ultimate tool for social control.

Engineering state collapse

The pattern of the US-Israeli air strikes points to an objective far removed from dismantling nuclear facilities or degrading military infrastructure. It reveals a calculated attempt to engineer the collapse of the Iranian state.

On February 28, US President Donald Trump launched the war and in a video address urged Iranians to take over their government once the bombs stopped falling. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed this sentiment in Farsi, calling on millions of Iranians to take to the streets and describing the military strategy as breaking the Iranian government’s bones.

The military planning, however, preceded events on the ground that Trump and Netanyahu pointed to for justification for their war. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz revealed in early March that Israel had been planning to strike Iran in mid-2026, long before January’s deadly government crackdown across Iran against economic protests.

This approach aligns with a broader Israeli doctrine. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli government adviser, previously told Al Jazeera that Israel has no interest in a smooth political transition in Tehran. What Israel wants is the collapse of the government and the state, Levy said, adding that if the repercussions spread to Iraq, the Gulf and the entire region, that is better from Israel’s point of view.

A failing strategy

Still, a month into the war, the US-Israeli strategy to spark an internal revolution through the systematic destruction of Iran’s internal security apparatus appears to be failing.

Iranians are living under daily bombardments. As missiles destroy civilian infrastructure and oil refineries burn, daily survival has eclipsed any coordinated political uprising. The United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Iran has warned that civilians are facing a simultaneous military and human rights crisis.

Rather than collapsing, Iran’s internal security apparatus has adapted. During Ramadan, FARAJA deployed 24-hour patrols across Tehran, and riot police shut down public gatherings before the Persian New Year holiday. After the March 17 assassination of Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani, Israeli forces released footage of strikes on mobile Basij checkpoints, indicating that Iranian security forces are still controlling the streets.

The US attempt to dismantle state security from the air mirrors its disastrous 2003 de-Baathification policy in neighbouring Iraq, which barred members of the former ruling Baath Party from holding government jobs, dismantled local policing and birthed a devastating sectarian war. Unlike in Iraq, Washington today has no troops on the ground in Iran to fill a security void it is trying to create.

Beneath the rubble of the 11th Criminal Investigation Base and dozens of stations like it, the US and Israel are aiming to bury the Iranian state and spark a popular revolt. Instead, they have trapped millions of civilians in a burning country.