For years, policymakers and analysts have tended to characterise Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance as a centralised system, with Tehran provisioning and directing a collection of proxy organisations, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen.

But there is compelling evidence that some members of this network are no longer passive recipients of Iranian support. Increasingly, they can manufacture sophisticated weapons, train other armed groups, build their own procurement networks, and adapt independently when traditional supply routes are disrupted.

This is the central argument presented in Beyond the Axis, a groundbreaking report published last week by Century International,1 to which I contributed my Sudan expertise.

The ‘Capability Ladder’

Drawing on a wealth of cross-disciplinary evidence,2 the report analyses the evolution of Iran’s relationship with other members of the Axis, and shows how in certain cases its partners have grown from a reliance on the provision of complete Iranian weapons systems to building their own weaponry, and later becoming hubs for the cultivation of new partners.

The report names this process the capability ladder. Hezbollah, and more recently the Houthis, have reached the top rung. There is evidence that the Houthis, for example, are now providing weapons training to groups such as the Sudanese Armed Forces, and al-Shabaab in Somalia. Other groups continue to climb the ladder.

Drones & modern warfare

Anyone following the conflicts in recent years in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, and the Middle East will be well aware of how modern warfare has been re-defined by the dramatic growth in the production of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles - or drones), and the proliferation of drone technology.

The report shows how Iranian drones - particularly one-way attack drones, also known as suicide drones - have been deployed by armed groups in several of these conflicts.

It also demonstrates how, at a certain point in the relationship, armed groups climbing the capability ladder are provided with complete Iranian weapons systems. Further up the ladder, they are given the technology and training to assemble, or manufacture, the systems without the involvement of Tehran.

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Global trade re-mapped

The development of this ecosystem has been made possible by changes in the configuration of global trade.

China has overtaken the US as the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods, and new international trading hubs have emerged. This means there is now a global network for the shipment of arms components that is beyond the reach of Western regulations or sanctions.

Policy implications

The report makes clear the policy challenges posed not just by the direct threat of Iran and the Axis, but by drone proliferation and armed groups within the ecosystem. There are no easy solutions, but the report highlights the tell-tale signs that might help policymakers take advantage of a narrowing window of opportunity to intervene.

If groups can build their own one-way attack drones from components sourced from indigenously run supply chains, the report considers them to have reached capability breakout, at which point it becomes infinitely more difficult to degrade and destroy them.

The capability ladder model - and the tracking of drone proliferation as a marker of progress up the rungs - can help policy actors identify which groups are pre- and post-breakout, and therefore which might be susceptible to intervention.

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Link to the report

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As it turned out, all went smoothly. In fact the immigration official was disarmingly friendly, beaming at me and going well beyond the terse grunts and nods characteristic of many of his peers across the world.

Such friendliness was a feature of the rest of my short stay in China. But equally obvious were the trappings of the surveillance state, of which I’d heard much spoken but still wasn’t sure exactly what to expect.

The Great Firewall

I was prepared for the fact that once I touched down I’d no longer have roaming data on my phone. Even with Wi-Fi, what’s known as the ‘Great Firewall’ - China’s internet surveillance and censorship technology - meant I had no access to Google, WhatsApp or Signal. (I didn’t try Facebook or Telegram, but I know they’re blocked too.)

The VPN on my Mac didn’t help – if I tried to use it, all internet access was blocked. Other travellers I met had bought a local SIM card with a VPN that bypassed the access restrictions, though VPNs are a legal grey area in China (and very risky for locals).

I decided to go without data, relying on taking screenshots from Microsoft Bing Maps on the evening of my arrival to help me get around the following day. (Microsoft has a deal with Beijing where they provide a tailored service that accommodates Chinese censorship.)

I had a long walk around on my first evening - long largely because of the number of times I got lost as my brain struggled to adjust to functioning without a digital map for the first time in years. But by the time I found my hotel again, I had my bearings.

The following day, when I’d decided to visit Tiananmen Square, things were more tricky.

Tiananmen Square

Tiananmen Square gained notoriety for the 1989 student protests that were fired upon by the Chinese army, killing more than 200 people. Images of tanks rolling towards the protestors – and most famously of one lone protestor standing in front of a column of tanks – were broadcast throughout the world. They had a profound impact on China too.

The 1989 protests – which spread across the country and well beyond their student origins – were fundamentally a plea for civil liberties, political reform and an end to state corruption. The regime took them as a sign that it needed to work harder to ensure those liberties were oppressed. It is forbidden in China even to talk about the protests.

The severity of China’s security state has varied in the intervening decades depending on its political leadership. But the accession in 2012 of current leader Xi Jinping has seen an intense tightening of control. Today, a location that might have become a symbol of free expression is instead a microcosm of the surveillance state.

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Restricted access

At my hotel reception, I was surprised to learn that if I wanted to visit Tiananmen Square I had to register my name and passport details the day before. This granted me permission to visit up to 12 noon.

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Arriving at Tian’anmendong station on the northeast corner of Tiananmen Square, I was met with another security barrier. Here I had to show my passport to an official, and have my face scanned and photographed. When I’d passed that, I was confused where to walk, confronted as I was by an impassable metal railing along the length of Chang’an Avenue, the road bordering the square’s north side.

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I’d been in the city for a few days, attending an anti-corruption conference. It felt a privilege to be in Vilnius: the historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; and earlier that day I’d enjoyed a trip to the spectacular Trakai Castle, set on an island, in a lake, in the countryside a short train ride from the capital.

The contrast with how I was to spend my afternoon could not have been more stark. From the outside, the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights looks benign enough. Built in 1899 to house the Vilnius district court, it could be any one of the many Neoclassical government buildings erected around Europe in the period.

But for much of the twentieth century, as Vilnius was shunted between occupying powers, the building was a prison run by some of the world’s most notorious state security services, including the Gestapo and the KGB. In the two decades from 1944, more than 1,000 of its prisoners were executed on the site.

The upper floors of the building have been converted into a conventional museum, telling of the devastation wrought on the land of Lithuania in recent decades by a succession of brutal occupiers (a subject I’ll return to in more detail next month). But as I enter the building, past a chilling photo montage of those who met with gruesome violence within its walls, I’m directed not to the museum upstairs, but down to the basement.

It’s a warm midsummer day, but here the air is cold and the light is from a string of bare lightbulbs. Stretching into the distance is a stark, roughly-painted corridor bordered on either side with heavy prison doors. Behind these are the cells where for decades political prisoners were held captive, abused, and tortured.

The prison was home to Soviet state security and intelligence agencies from 1940-41, German intelligence and secret police from 1941-44, and the Soviet security apparatus once more from 1944-91. The last political prisoners held there by the KGB were released in 1987.

On the walls by the cells I read the descriptions of the horrors perpetrated within. Each cell, each description, takes me further from my world and towards not an experience of the suffering endured but a visceral sense of it - the kind of feeling that if you want to leave behind you have to physically shake off. My fellow visitors walk around slowly; no voices are raised beyond an occasional brief whisper.

In the years following the Second World War, those detained in the prison were typically members of the anti-Soviet resistance. Cells of no more than 10 square metres (such as that pictured above) held 15 to 20 people. Windowpanes were glazed or painted white; wooden boxes fitted on the outside allowed no more than a sliver of daylight. The light was on all day and night, the walls were damp with condensation that trickled down to the cement floor.

From the 1960s, when the armed resistance to Soviet rule had ended, the prison held those who fought for human rights and freedom of conscience, authors of anti-Soviet leaflets, underground publishers and distributors, and those under investigation by the KGB for criminal offences.

‘Active interrogation’

It was during the early postwar years that the worst brutality took place. Physical torture, blackmail, threats and provocations were standard practice. Interrogations could last several days, and drugs were administered to break the will of inmates. Torture was officially referred to as ‘active interrogation’ or ‘physical influence’.

I stand inside a tiny cell with a boarded up window, a basic latrine and a small wooden bench. Inmates who violated prison rules, or refused to give evidence under interrogation, were held in isolation in this unheated concrete box for up to 10 days, wearing nothing but their underwear. They were given a daily ration of 300 grams of bread and half a litre of warm water, and allowed no more than five hours’ sleep.

Through steel bars I look into another solitary confinement cell. In cells like this one, the floors were flooded with ice-cold water and prisoners were forced to stand on a tiny platform in the middle of the room, falling into the water whenever they lost their balance. Another cell has padded walls, a padded door, and a straitjacket on display. The padding absorbed the cries of those suffering torture, or of those whose minds it had already broken.

Uncertainly, I follow a sign marked ‘Execution Chamber’. With morbid aptness, the room is like a concrete catacomb. In a display beneath my feet are shoes, glasses and other belongings of those executed here. On a screen in the corner, a scene from a Polish film, Katyń, is playing. The scene was filmed in this room, and shows a security official killing a prisoner with a shot to the head.

The information panel by the door to the chamber tells me that more than a thousand people were killed in this room between 1944 and the early 1960s. The remains of 767 people shot between 1944 and 1947 were later discovered in a mass grave just outside Vilnius. The burial places of those shot after 1950, when the Soviet Union restored the death penalty, remain unknown. It is believed that there are several undiscovered mass graves within 30 kilometres of the capital.

I visit the museum upstairs before escaping into the sunshine, where within a few hundred yards I happen on a vocal street demonstration. It’s a sign that freedoms have returned in Lithuania since the restoration of independence in 1990. But such freedoms cannot be taken for granted. Freedom of speech and political representation are deprived to the majority of the world’s population, and the imprisonment, and sometimes torture, of political opponents are hallmarks of repressive regimes throughout the world.

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Lithuania shares a border with Russia’s exclave Kaliningrad and its ally Belarus, making it fearful that Moscow’s efforts to impose itself on its former empire could easily spread. In July, Lithuania appealed to the EU and NATO to help bolster its border defences, and on 20 August it began building a military base that will house Germany’s first foreign troop deployment since the Second World War.

Fundamental freedoms are threatened not only by dictatorships and sham democracies. Among a myriad of cases of human rights abuses featured in my Conflict and Human Rights Update earlier this month were an Amnesty International report into 21 European nations showing how the right of peaceful assembly is coming under attack, and a warning from Global Witness that custodial sentences for climate change activists are threatening democracy in the UK.

Many of us can be grateful that we are free. But let’s not be complacent that our freedoms can’t be taken away.