Mahsa Amini protests

Based on Wikipedia: Mahsa Amini protests

A young woman boards a subway in Tehran wearing her headscarf slightly loose, her hair visible at the temples. Within hours, she will be dead. And within days, her death will ignite the most significant challenge to the Islamic Republic of Iran since its founding four decades earlier.

Mahsa Amini was twenty-two years old.

The Spark

On September 13, 2022, Amini was visiting Tehran from her hometown of Saqqez, a city in the Kurdish region of northwestern Iran. The Guidance Patrol—Iran's morality police, tasked with enforcing the country's strict Islamic dress code—arrested her for wearing her hijab "improperly." According to eyewitnesses, officers beat her severely. Iranian authorities denied this.

She collapsed. She was hospitalized. A CT scan revealed head injuries.

Three days later, Mahsa Amini was pronounced dead.

Protests erupted immediately—first in Tehran, where she lay dying in the hospital, then at her funeral in Saqqez, where hundreds gathered despite official warnings. When mourners shouted anti-regime slogans, security forces opened fire on them. The unrest spread to the provincial capital, then across the country. Within days, social media showed demonstrations in at least sixteen of Iran's thirty-one provinces.

The government's response was swift and brutal: internet blackouts, mobile phone shutdowns, tear gas, and live ammunition. But unlike previous Iranian protests, this one refused to die.

What Made These Protests Different

Iran has seen uprisings before. In 2009, the Green Movement protested a disputed presidential election. In 2017-2018, economic grievances sparked nationwide demonstrations. In 2019, what Iranians call "Bloody Aban"—a reference to a month in the Persian calendar roughly corresponding to November—saw protests against fuel price increases that killed more than 1,500 people.

The Mahsa Amini protests were different in ways that terrified the regime.

First, they were geographically unprecedented. Previous protests had concentrated in major cities or specific regions. These spread everywhere—not just to liberal Tehran or economically depressed provinces, but to the holy cities of Mashhad and Qom, traditional power bases of the Islamic Republic itself. They crossed class lines, uniting urban middle-class professionals with rural working families.

Second, women and girls led them. Schoolchildren—some barely teenagers—marched in the streets. Women burned their hijabs in public squares. They cut their hair as acts of defiance, broadcasting these moments on social media before the government could shut down their connections. This was not unprecedented—women had protested compulsory hijab before—but never on this scale, never with this intensity.

Third, the demands went far beyond previous protests. Earlier movements had focused on election results or economic conditions—asking the system to work better, not to be overthrown. The Mahsa Amini protesters demanded the end of the Islamic Republic itself.

Woman, Life, Freedom

The signature chant of the uprising was three words: "Zan, Zendegī, Āzādī." Woman, Life, Freedom.

The slogan has its roots in the Kurdish freedom movement. It was popularized during women's marches in Turkey in 2006 and reflects the philosophy of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned Kurdish leader who argued that a country cannot be free unless its women are free. This connection resonated deeply with Mahsa Amini's story—her Kurdish first name was actually Jina, and the Kurdish version of the slogan, "Jin, Jiyan, Azadî," emphasizes this heritage.

Kurds have particular reasons to distrust the Iranian government. They comprise roughly fifteen percent of Iran's population but are predominantly Sunni Muslims in a country ruled by Shia clergy. The Kurdish regions are among Iran's poorest. The Kurdish language faces official restrictions. Nearly half of all political prisoners in Iran are Kurds. And when the protests began, the government cracked down hardest on Kurdish cities like Sanandaj and Oshnavieh, seemingly blaming the entire ethnic group for the unrest.

But the slogan transcended its Kurdish origins. Other chants recorded in the streets were more direct: "Death to the Dictator." "Khamenei is a Murderer." "We Don't Want the Islamic Republic." Some even praised Reza Shah, the twentieth-century monarch who had banned the hijab—a remarkable reversal in a country whose revolutionary identity was built on rejecting the Pahlavi dynasty.

The Revolutionary Paradox

Understanding why mandatory hijab became such a flashpoint requires understanding a strange paradox at the heart of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

When Reza Shah founded the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925, he modeled his modernization program partly on Turkey's Kemal Atatürk. In 1936, he banned the hijab entirely—women could be arrested for wearing it in public. He opened universities to women. His son, Mohammad Reza Shah, relaxed the hijab ban but continued expanding women's rights: suffrage, parliamentary representation, expanded marriage rights.

The Islamic Revolution reversed all of this. It made hijab compulsory, loosened restrictions on polygamy and child marriage, and removed women from positions of power. The message was clear: the revolution defined itself in opposition to everything the Pahlavis had stood for, and women's dress was a visible marker of that ideological break.

But here is the paradox. While the revolution took away legal rights, it inadvertently created conditions that changed women's lives in unexpected ways.

Traditional religious families—who had refused to send their daughters to the Shah's secular schools—now felt comfortable educating them in an Islamic system. Female university enrollment jumped from three percent in 1977 to sixty-seven percent by 2015. A generation of Iranian women became highly educated.

And then they found that the country had no place for them.

Only fifteen percent of Iranians in the job market are women. Iran ranked 143rd out of 146 countries in the 2022 World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report. These educated women, who had left home to study and developed new values and worldviews, could not find jobs matching their qualifications. They became, in many cases, more dissatisfied with the Islamic Republic than their parents had ever been.

The regime had created the conditions for its own crisis.

The Tactics of Uprising

Protesters developed sophisticated techniques for evading security forces. They staged quick "flash mob" gatherings—small, fast, numerous, appearing and dispersing before police could respond effectively. Drivers blocked streets with their cars to slow security vehicles. When that failed, they used dumpster bins or overturned police cars.

They adapted to surveillance. When security forces began using paintballs to mark demonstrators for later arrest, protesters packed extra clothes. They wore masks. They dismantled public security cameras. Some chanted from windows and rooftops, harder to identify than street-level marchers.

Symbolic acts proliferated. Fountains were dyed blood-red. Women burned hijabs in public ceremonies. And in one particularly pointed form of protest, Iranians began "turban throwing"—knocking the turbans off clergy in the street and running away. The turban is a symbol of religious authority and, by extension, regime legitimacy. Even some reformers criticized this tactic as unfair to Islamic scholars not involved with the government, but the symbolism was unmistakable.

University professors joined by boycotting classes or resigning. In December 2022, a general strike shut down businesses across the country. Protesters organized boycotts of companies tied to the regime, including Digikala—Iran's equivalent of Amazon.

The Crackdown

The government's response was ruthless.

By September 2023, at least 551 people had been killed, according to Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based monitoring organization. At least 68 of the dead were minors. Death certificates obtained by human rights groups confirmed that many died from live ammunition.

The true numbers remain uncertain. Internet blackouts made accurate reporting nearly impossible. The government actively spread disinformation, maintaining what BBC Persian Service described as a "cyber army" producing fake social media content and staged interviews. When Western media quoted this fabricated material, Iran accused them of spreading fake news—a tactic of deliberate information poisoning.

Several deaths became international symbols. Nika Shakarami, sixteen years old, disappeared after burning her headscarf at a protest; her body was found days later with severe injuries. Hadis Najafi, twenty-three, was shot multiple times in a protest in Karaj. Sarina Esmailzadeh, also sixteen, died under circumstances her family said contradicted official claims of suicide.

According to families of the deceased, Iranian authorities pressured them to accept false explanations—car accidents, suicides—and threatened them with death if they spoke publicly about what really happened.

At least 19,262 people were arrested across more than 134 cities and towns and 132 universities. The government claimed, in February 2023, to have pardoned "tens of thousands" on the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. The head of the judiciary framed this as mercy for young people who had been "indoctrinated" by foreign enemies and now "regretted their actions." Not all protesters were released, and many journalists remained imprisoned.

The government also emphasized casualties among its own forces, claiming 68 security personnel killed by January 2023. But BBC Persian Service reported that some of those claimed as loyalist Basij militiamen killed by "rioters" were actually protesters killed by security forces. Their families had been pressured—threatened with death—to support the false narrative.

Forty Days of Blood in Zahedan

Two weeks after Mahsa Amini's funeral, a separate horror unfolded in Zahedan, capital of the remote Sistan and Baluchestan province on Iran's southeastern border with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Protests there had been sparked not by Amini's death but by reports that a local police chief had raped a fifteen-year-old girl in the city of Chahbahar. Following Friday prayers, demonstrators gathered. Security forces killed forty civilians and wounded many more in what became known as "Bloody Friday."

This massacre illustrated how the Mahsa Amini protests intersected with longer-standing grievances. Sistan and Baluchestan is predominantly Sunni and Baloch—another ethnic and religious minority in Iran. Like the Kurds, they face discrimination, poverty, and suspicion from the Shia-dominated government. The rape accusation and subsequent massacre were not directly connected to Amini, but they fed into the same fury.

The International Response

On March 6, 2024, the United Nations accused Iran of coordinating crimes against humanity in its response to the protests. The Iranian government rejected the accusation.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dismissed the entire uprising as "riots" orchestrated as part of a "hybrid war" against Iran by foreign enemies and exiled dissidents. This framing—that any domestic opposition must be foreign-sponsored—has been a consistent element of the regime's worldview since 1979.

Coverage in Western media was constrained by the government's suppression of journalists. Nearly all Western outlets lacked on-the-ground presence in Iran; NBC News was a rare exception. Reporters relied on networks of contacts, human rights organizations, and social media content that had to be carefully verified against government disinformation.

The End That Wasn't

By spring 2023, the protests had largely subsided. The government remained in power. No political leadership changed. The mandatory hijab stayed mandatory.

In early December 2022, a vague statement from the attorney general had been interpreted by some Western outlets as suggesting the hijab law might be under review and the Guidance Patrol disbanded. This proved to be, in the words of critics, a "diversion tactic." The regime had weathered the storm through a combination of violence, arrests, information control, and sheer persistence.

A November 2022 poll by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran found that nearly three-quarters of Iranians opposed mandatory hijab. Of those, eighty-four percent said they preferred a secular Iranian state to theocracy—a finding the organization characterized as an endorsement of regime change.

But endorsing regime change in a survey is not the same as achieving it in the streets.

The Underlying Grievances

The mandatory hijab was the spark, but decades of frustration were the fuel.

According to an Iranian government report from August 2021, a third of Iranians live in poverty. A conservative analyst, Abdolreza Davari, cited a statistic that ninety-five percent of Iranians worry about their livelihoods and their children's futures. The economy has been battered by international sanctions, government mismanagement, and corruption.

As the New York Times observed, Iranians face "soaring prices, high unemployment, corruption, and political repression." Many had already taken to the streets over these issues. The 2019 "Bloody Aban" protests began over fuel price increases before escalating to calls for the overthrow of the Supreme Leader.

The Mahsa Amini protests fused these economic grievances with the specific rage of women and girls who had been surveilled, harassed, beaten, and killed for the crime of showing their hair. For many protesters, the hijab requirement was not just about dress—it was the most visible symbol of a regime that controlled every aspect of their lives while delivering less and less in return.

What Remains

The Islamic Republic survived. Ayatollah Khamenei, who has held power since 1989, remains Supreme Leader. President Ebrahim Raisi, the hardliner whose government intensified hijab enforcement, continued in office until his death in a helicopter crash in 2024. The Guidance Patrol still operates.

But something shifted. The protests demonstrated that the regime's legitimacy has eroded dramatically, especially among young people and women. The government controls power through force, not consent. It rules a population where, by its own citizens' testimony, a large majority reject its core ideological premises.

Mahsa Amini became a name known around the world. Her death revealed the violence that enforces what might otherwise seem like a merely inconvenient dress code. The images of women cutting their hair and burning their hijabs—broadcast globally before the internet blackouts could stop them—became iconic representations of resistance to authoritarianism.

"Woman, Life, Freedom" entered the international vocabulary of protest.

The regime survived 2022. Whether it can survive the generation that rose up remains an open question. Those young women and schoolgirls who marched, who were beaten and shot and imprisoned, who watched their friends die—they are still there. They still remember.

They still want to live freely.