Death of Mahsa Amini

Based on Wikipedia: Death of Mahsa Amini

A Name That Meant Life

Her Kurdish name was Jina, which means "life" or "a life-giving person." The cruel irony would become apparent to the entire world in September 2022.

Mahsa Amini was twenty-two years old when she traveled to Tehran with her family to visit relatives. She had just been admitted to university in Urmia, where she planned to study biology—a stepping stone toward her dream of becoming a doctor. Those who knew her described a shy, reserved young woman who avoided politics, didn't follow the news much, and preferred socializing with family over maintaining a wide circle of friends. She was, by all accounts, an ordinary person living an ordinary life in northwestern Iran.

She would never make it to her first university class.

The Arrest

On September 13, 2022, Amini was walking with her family near the entrance of the Shahid Haghani Expressway in Tehran when officers from the Guidance Patrol stopped her. The Guidance Patrol—known in Farsi as Gasht-e Ershad—functions as Iran's religious morality police, tasked with enforcing the country's mandatory dress code for women. The officers determined that Amini was not wearing her hijab in accordance with government standards.

Her brother was told she would be taken to a detention center for a "briefing class" and released within an hour.

That's not what happened.

According to eyewitnesses—including women detained alongside her—Amini was beaten by police shortly after her arrest, while still in the police van. After arriving at the station, she began losing her vision and fainted. Two hours after her arrest, she was transferred to Kasra Hospital. The ambulance took thirty minutes to arrive. The trip to the hospital took another ninety minutes.

Amini never regained consciousness. She lay in a coma for two days before dying in the intensive care unit on September 16.

Two Stories, One Death

The Iranian government and independent observers told completely different stories about what killed Mahsa Amini.

According to the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Amini suffered a sudden heart attack at the police station, collapsed, and fell into a coma before being transferred to the hospital. They later added that she had experienced a brain seizure. Government officials pointed to what they claimed was a pre-existing medical condition—a brain tumor that had been surgically removed when she was eight years old.

But the evidence told another story.

Hospital photographs showed Amini bleeding from her ear with bruises under her eyes. Dr. Hossein Karampour, the top medical official in Hormozgan province, wrote in a letter that these symptoms "do not match the reasons given by some authorities who declared the cause to be a heart attack." Instead, he noted, they were consistent with "a head injury and the resulting bleeding."

Then came the leaked medical scans.

Hacktivists obtained and released what they claimed were scans of Amini's skull, showing bone fractures, hemorrhaging, and brain edema—swelling caused by excess fluid in the brain. Women who had been detained with Amini reported that she had been severely beaten for resisting insults and curses from the arresting officers.

The government released CCTV footage they said showed Amini talking with an official before suddenly holding her head and collapsing. Amini's father dismissed it as an "edited version" of events. He told the BBC: "They are lying. She never had any medical conditions, she never had surgery."

Actually, that last part wasn't quite accurate. Amini's family later acknowledged she had undergone an operation for a minor neurological condition—possibly a benign brain tumor—at age eight. But they emphasized it had been under control through medication, and her doctors had recently given her the all-clear. Medical specialists the family consulted stated the childhood condition was unrelated to her death.

The Cover-Up

Amjad Amini, Mahsa's father, was repeatedly prevented from seeing his daughter's body after her death. "I wanted to see my daughter, but they wouldn't let me in," he told reporters. When he finally viewed her body after it had been wrapped for the funeral, he noticed bruises on her feet but couldn't see the rest due to the wrapping.

When he asked to see the autopsy report, the doctor reportedly told him: "I will write whatever I want and it has nothing to do with you."

He asked to view body-camera footage from the officers who arrested his daughter. He was told the cameras were out of battery.

According to Iran International, the Iranian government was actively forging fake medical records showing Amini had a history of heart disease. A neurosurgeon appeared on state television claiming she had previously had a brain tumor removed—information the government seemed to be constructing retroactively to support their narrative.

A coroner's report released on October 7 stated that Amini's death was "not caused by blows to the head and limbs," instead linking it to pre-existing medical conditions and ruling she died from multiple organ failure caused by cerebral hypoxia—a lack of oxygen to the brain. The report notably did not say whether she had suffered any injuries at all.

In response, over 800 members of Iran's Medical Council signed a letter accusing the head of their own organization of assisting in a government cover-up.

The truth would eventually emerge from outside Iran. On March 8, 2024—International Women's Day—the United Nations Human Rights Council released a report concluding that Amini's death was caused by physical violence she suffered while in morality police custody. The report found Iran responsible for her death and documented the government's attempts to hide the truth and intimidate Amini's family rather than conduct an impartial investigation.

Four Decades of Forced Covering

To understand why Mahsa Amini died, you need to understand the four decades of policy that led to her arrest.

Iran was a very different country before 1979. Women wore whatever they wanted. Then came the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the Western-backed Shah and installed an Islamic theocracy under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

On March 7, 1979—less than a month after the revolution—Khomeini decreed the hijab mandatory for all women in workplaces. Women would no longer be permitted to enter government offices without covering their hair. Without the hijab, he declared, women would be "naked."

The rules tightened quickly. By 1980, women couldn't enter government or public buildings or attend their workplaces without a hijab. In 1983, the mandatory hijab became part of the penal code itself: "Women who appear in public without religious hijab will be sentenced to whipping up to 74 lashes."

In practice, the punishment often meant prison. Women like Saba Kord Afshari and Yasaman Aryani received heavy prison terms for hijab violations. Violence and harassment against women deemed improperly covered—whether by law enforcement or pro-government vigilantes—became routine.

The Guidance Patrol was the enforcement arm of this system. Officers would stop women on the street, inspect their clothing, and either verbally admonish them or arrest them for "re-education." Under typical circumstances, detainees were brought to a center, lectured on dress regulations, made to sign a pledge to comply, and then released to their families.

But typical circumstances didn't apply to everyone.

A Society in Quiet Revolt

By the time Mahsa Amini was arrested in 2022, Iranian society had been quietly changing for years. Young women in particular had become increasingly liberal about hijab rules throughout the 2010s and 2020s. They wore their headscarves pushed back, showing more hair. They wore tighter clothing. They tested the boundaries.

The Guidance Patrol responded with intermittent crackdowns—campaigns to violently arrest and "re-educate" women they considered improperly covered. But the underlying trend continued.

Surveys revealed just how far public opinion had shifted. An independent survey in 2020 found that 58 percent of Iranians did not believe in mandatory hijab at all. Seventy-two percent opposed compulsory hijab rules. Only 15 percent supported the legal requirement to wear it in public.

The government knew the public was turning against them. In 2020, two representatives of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei separately stated that improperly veiled women should be made to feel "unsafe." They later claimed their comments were misunderstood.

Resistance wasn't just about opinion polls. Protests against compulsory hijab had occurred repeatedly since the original 1979 mandate. One of the largest took place between March 8 and 14 of that year—beginning on International Women's Day, just one day after Khomeini's decree. During the 2019-2020 protests, demonstrators attacked a Guidance Patrol van and freed two detained women.

The tension had been building for decades. Mahsa Amini's death provided the spark.

The Uprising

Protests began within hours of Amini's death.

They started at the hospital in Tehran where she died, then rapidly spread—first to her hometown of Saqqez and other cities in Kurdistan Province, then across the country. By the time the dust settled, observers would describe these as the largest Iranian protests since at least 2009, surpassing the demonstrations in 2017 and 2019.

What made these protests distinctive was their focus and their symbols.

Women stood at the center. They removed their hijabs in public. They cut their hair—some individually, some in groups, some on camera for the world to see. Hair became both weapon and statement: the thing the regime demanded they hide became the thing they defiantly displayed.

The movement crystallized around a slogan rooted in Amini's Kurdish heritage: "Woman, Life, Freedom"—in Kurdish, "Jin, Jiyan, Azadî." It captured everything the protesters were fighting for: recognition of women's humanity, the right to live freely, and liberation from an oppressive system.

The Iranian government's response was brutal.

By December 2022, according to Iran Human Rights, at least 476 people had been killed by security forces attacking protests across the country. Amnesty International reported that security forces fired into crowds with live ammunition and beat protesters to death with batons. The government implemented regional internet shutdowns to prevent protesters from organizing and to stop footage of the violence from reaching the outside world.

Among those arrested was Niloofar Hamedi, the journalist who first broke the story of Amini's coma by posting a photograph of her grieving father and grandmother in the hospital hallway.

What Mahsa Amini Was Not

After her death, Mahsa Amini became a global symbol. But it's worth remembering who she actually was—and wasn't.

Her father explicitly rejected claims by the Iranian government that she was involved in politics. She wasn't an activist. She wasn't a dissident. According to those who knew her, she didn't even follow the news. She was a shy young woman from a small city who kept mostly to herself and her family.

But she also wasn't someone who enthusiastically embraced the hijab. Her photos and videos on social media tell a clear story: she wore the hijab half-heartedly, only because the law required it. At weddings and other events, she wore traditional Kurdish clothing that didn't include a hijab. When traveling to tourist areas, she only partially covered her hair.

This was what made her story so powerful. She wasn't a revolutionary who died for a cause. She was an ordinary young woman who died for the crime of showing too much hair—a "crime" that most Iranians didn't even believe should be a crime. She could have been anyone's daughter, sister, or friend.

Her cousin, a left-wing political activist affiliated with the Komala party and a Peshmerga fighter living in self-exile in Iraqi Kurdistan, was the first family member to speak to the media after her death. The activist who reached out to the world about Mahsa Amini's death came from the exact political background that Mahsa herself had avoided her entire life.

The Meaning of Her Names

Mahsa Amini had two names because she lived in two cultures. Mahsa was her Persian name—the one that appeared on official documents, the one required by Iranian law. In Persian, it means "similar to the moon."

Jina was her Kurdish name—the one her family actually used, the one that expressed who she really was to the people who loved her. In Kurdish, it means "life" or "a life-giving person."

The Kurdish people have faced decades of discrimination and persecution in Iran, their language and culture suppressed by successive governments. That Amini was both a woman and a Kurd made her a symbol of intersecting oppressions—and made the uprising that followed her death particularly potent in Kurdistan Province, where it began and where it burned fiercest.

The slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" wasn't just a political statement. It was a direct translation of words that had been central to Kurdish resistance movements for years. When protesters chanted it in the streets of Tehran and Shiraz and Isfahan, they were connecting Amini's death to a longer history of struggle—and placing women's liberation at the center of that struggle.

What Remains

Mahsa Amini never became a doctor. She never started her biology studies. She never got to live the ordinary life she seemed to want.

Instead, she became something she never sought to be: a martyr, a symbol, a name that would be chanted in streets around the world. The protests that followed her death didn't topple the Iranian government, but they revealed something the regime had worked hard to hide—that the majority of their own people had turned against the system of forced covering that had been in place for more than four decades.

The United Nations eventually confirmed what witnesses, doctors, and leaked medical scans had already suggested: Mahsa Amini died from physical violence suffered in the custody of the morality police. The official investigation found evidence of widespread human rights violations during the government's response to the protests, with many amounting to crimes against humanity.

Her father still hasn't been allowed to see the autopsy report. The security camera footage from her arrest remains unreleased—allegedly because the batteries were dead. The doctors who treated her, the officers who detained her, the officials who lied about what happened—none have faced accountability.

But her name endures. Jina, the Kurdish word for life, became the rallying cry for a movement demanding that women be allowed to live freely. In death, she gave life to something larger than herself—a global reckoning with what it means for a government to control women's bodies, and what it costs when they try.