What Are the Iran Protests About?
On September 12, 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Jina Amini left her home in the Saqqez province, a region of Iran known as Kurdistan. She was on her way to visit her brother in Tehran, the capital city of Iran. By the time she reunited with her brother on September 13, she had been arrested by what is known as the “morality police” due to a few strands of hair peeking through her headscarf. They took her to a station to be “educated” on the law that requires all women in Iran to keep their hair covered. By September 16, she had fallen into a coma and was eventually pronounced dead. Although the Islamic Republic alleges that she died of a heart attack, Amini’s family claim she had no pre-existing heart problems. However, post-mortem CT scans show signs of skull fractures, hemorrhage and brain injury, painting a very different picture of what happened to her.
By September 17, the first protest erupted during Mahsa Amini’s funeral. Protests have since swept every corner of the country, launching a revolution that has been largely led by protestors born after 2000 (Iran’s Generation Z). Women—some as young as pre-teens—have been burning their headscarves, cutting their hair and chanting “death to the dictator”, uniting them in their shared fury. Images have been circulating of young schoolgirls flipping the bird at the portrait of the Ayatollah Khamenei that hangs in every classroom in Iran. Men have also been at the forefront of these protests, because the demand for regime change did not just happen overnight. It’s the result of a dictatorship that regularly persecutes its own people and denies them the basic human right to self-expression. In Iran, singing and dancing can get you killed. So can being a member of the LGBTQ community. These protests are also taking place in a country with rapidly rising poverty levels and limited opportunities, as US-led economic sanctions against Iran have contributed to a pressure cooker of problems in Iranian society.
These protests have been met with violence at the hands of the Islamic Republic. As of January 27, 2023, 488 people have been killed by security forces in Iran, according to Iran Human Rights (IHR NGO). This also includes 64 children and 39 women. At least 107 protesters are currently at risk of execution, death penalty charges or sentences. Furthermore, at least 55 people have been executed in the first 26 days of 2023. These numbers are likely higher, as these are the only deaths that are confirmed. 15,000 protestors have also been arrested in severe crackdowns and are at risk for imminent execution by the Supreme Leader of Iran for “waging a war against God” (as if Khamenei is on the same level as God). Kurdish regions of Iran are under heavy military siege by the Islamic republic of Iran, as Kurdish civilians are being systematically targeted, kidnapped, arrested and murdered. When an Iranian person attends a protest, they know there’s a chance they won’t make it back home.
Take 16-year-old Nika Shakarami, for example. On September 20, she left home to attend a protest in Tehran and disappeared for 10 days before her parents finally found her body at a morgue. “When we went to identify her, they didn’t allow us to see her body, only her face for a few seconds,” Atash Shakarami—Nika’s aunt—told BBC Persian. Government officials threatened her family and told them not to host a funeral. They later stole Nika’s body, making sure that she was quickly buried in secret and laid to rest far away from home, presumably to prevent her from becoming a martyr. She was supposed to turn seventeen on October 2, the same day her family was finally able to transfer her body back to her father’s hometown of Khorramabad.
