The Iranian Protest Movement

Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, died in a Tehran hospital three days after being arrested by Iran's Guidance Patrol (morality police) for allegedly violating hijab rules. Witnesses reported she was beaten in the police van. The government claimed she had a pre-existing condition and fell into a coma. Amini's death sparked immediate protests in her home province of Kurdistan and quickly spread nationwide. Her Kurdish name, Jina, became a protest chant.

Protests erupted across Iran, with women removing and burning their hijabs in public and cutting their hair in defiance. The movement adopted the Kurdish slogan "Jin, Jiyan, Azadi" (Woman, Life, Freedom) as its rallying cry. University students, schoolgirls, and workers joined. The protests represented the most significant challenge to the Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979. Unlike previous protest waves, these demonstrations were led by women and youth and cut across ethnic and class lines.

Iran's government severely restricted internet access to prevent protesters from organizing and sharing footage of the crackdown. Instagram and WhatsApp were blocked. Iran also implemented a national intranet system, disconnecting the country from the global internet. The blackout drew condemnation from digital rights groups and complicated efforts by international media to verify events. Despite the restrictions, protest videos continued to leak out through VPNs and satellite connections.

The Iranian government responded with force, deploying security forces, the Basij militia, and plainclothes officers. Live ammunition, tear gas, and pellet guns were used against protesters. By late 2022, human rights organizations reported hundreds of deaths and over 14,000 arrests. Children were among those killed. The government framed the protests as foreign-instigated riots. The UN Human Rights Council established an independent fact-finding mission to investigate Iran's response.

The Iranian diaspora organized protests, advocacy campaigns, and cultural events in solidarity with the movement. The song "Baraye" by Shervin Hajipour, compiled from protest tweets, became the movement's anthem and won a Grammy. Diaspora groups lobbied Western governments to impose sanctions on Iranian officials and designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization. The movement's global visibility kept pressure on the Iranian government but also raised debates about external intervention in Iranian affairs.

The UN Human Rights Council voted to establish an independent fact-finding mission to investigate Iran's human rights violations during the protest crackdown. The mission, led by Sara Hossain, documented excessive use of force, arbitrary arrests, torture, and sexual violence. Iran rejected the resolution and refused to cooperate. The mission's reports provided crucial documentation of state abuses and kept international attention on the situation.

Iran carried out its first execution linked to the protests, hanging Mohsen Shekari after a brief trial where he was convicted of "enmity against God" for allegedly blocking a road and wounding a militiaman. Human rights organizations condemned the trial as lacking due process. Further executions followed, with at least four protesters executed by early 2023. The executions drew international condemnation and were intended to intimidate the protest movement.

Despite the crackdown, a sustained civil disobedience movement emerged, with women publicly refusing to wear the hijab in streets, shops, and restaurants. The "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement shifted from mass street protests to everyday resistance. Businesses that refused to enforce hijab rules faced closure. The government installed surveillance cameras to identify unveiled women and imposed fines and penalties, but compliance with hijab mandates appeared to decline significantly in major cities.

The Iranian government continued its repression through arrests, executions, and surveillance, while the protest movement evolved into underground networks and civil disobedience. The death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May 2024 briefly raised hopes for change, but the regime's structure remained intact. The 2024 parliamentary elections saw record low turnout, reflecting widespread public disillusionment. The movement's core demand — an end to the Islamic Republic — remained unmet, but the social contract between the regime and its people was fundamentally altered.

A new wave of nationwide protests erupted across Iran on December 28, 2025, triggered by the collapse of the Iranian rial (plunging to approximately 1.45 million per US dollar), record inflation, and shortages of food, water and energy linked to international sanctions and government mismanagement. Beginning with bazaari shopkeepers closing Tehran's Grand Bazaar, the unrest spread within days to more than 200 cities across all 31 provinces, becoming the largest uprising since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Protesters including students, workers and retirees chanted anti-government slogans calling for an end to the Islamic Republic; exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi called from abroad for a peaceful transition and a referendum on Iran's political system. Security forces responded with tear gas, beatings and mass arrests.

The government crackdown escalated sharply from January 8, 2026, as security forces opened fire on protesters with live ammunition nationwide, killing thousands. On January 8-9, an estimated 1.5 million protesters took to the streets of Tehran and up to 5 million nationwide after Reza Pahlavi called for unified protests. Human Rights Watch documented mass killings with gunshot wounds to protesters' heads and torsos, describing the violence as massacres. By early February, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) had confirmed 7,015 deaths (6,508 of them protesters), with 11,744 additional cases under review; local health officials estimated 30,000-36,500 were killed during January 8-9 alone. Authorities imposed a nationwide internet and mobile blackout from January 8 to late May to conceal the scale of killings and prevent organizing. Hospitals in Tehran and Shiraz were overwhelmed with gunshot victims, and The Guardian documented reports of mass burials.

After President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized to the nation for the massacres on February 11, a second major wave of student-led protests erupted on February 21, 2026 at the start of the new academic semester. Sit-ins and campus demonstrations spread across Iranian universities, coinciding with 40-day memorials for those killed in January. Chants targeted Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, with calls for Reza Pahlavi to replace him. University authorities declared the protests illegal, searched student dormitories, and arrested suspected participants, while Basij forces attacked protesters on several campuses. Protests continued into March, including nightly rooftop chants, even as Iran descended into open war with the United States. After Khamenei's assassination during the war and the naming of his son Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader on March 8, protesters chanted 'Death to Mojtaba' in residential neighborhoods as security forces fired toward people chanting from windows.

In an extraordinary escalation of post-protest repression, Iranian Revolutionary Courts sentenced dozens of January 2026 protesters to death in fast-tracked group prosecutions, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran (Aug 12, 2026). Defendants in Pakdasht, Isfahan and Esfarayen were tried collectively, denied access to independent legal counsel and case files, and subjected to torture and coercion to extract forced confessions broadcast on state television. At least four defendants had already been executed, including two publicly at Alikhani Square in Isfahan, where the entire judicial process consisted of only three one-hour hearings. Among those sentenced were multiple defendants receiving multiple death sentences, including Ahad Shokouhian (three death sentences) and a 16-year-old boy facing capital charges in Esfarayen. The European Union and more than 30 countries condemned the executions in joint statements on August 12-13. CHRI described the group prosecutions as a state strategy on a scale not seen in Iran in many decades.

Human Rights Watch and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center documented that Iranian authorities executed at least 29 people arrested in connection with the December 2025-January 2026 protests between March 18 and the end of August 2026, part of at least 59 politically motivated executions overall in the period. Several of those executed were teenagers aged 18 or 19, and five executions were carried out in public. The groups reported that trials lasted as little as five weeks from arrest to execution, relied on torture-tainted confessions, and in 16 of the 29 protest cases involved no allegations of killing, with convictions on vague charges such as 'waging war against God'. Rights organizations estimated scores more protesters remained at imminent risk of execution, while a Ministry of Intelligence directive designated hundreds of media outlets and human rights organizations as 'enemies', and Tehran's prosecutor opened criminal cases against people who publicly opposed the executions. Iranian authorities defended the executions as lawful responses to crimes committed during the unrest.

Location: Iran

Marking the fourth anniversary of the Woman Life Freedom uprising, Amnesty International released 'Architects of Atrocities', a report exceeding 1,000 pages documenting murder, torture, enforced disappearance, rape and persecution as crimes against humanity committed by Iranian authorities to crush the 2022 protests. The investigation mapped the chain of command behind a state policy of lethal force and identified 87 officials who should face criminal investigation, finding that Kurdish and Baluchi communities were disproportionately targeted. Amnesty called on the UN General Assembly to establish an international criminal justice mechanism, noting that those responsible still control the machinery of repression that carried out the January 2026 protest massacres. Iranian authorities rejected the report's findings.

On the fourth anniversary of Mahsa Amini's death in morality police custody, shops in western Iran's Kurdish cities closed in coordinated strikes while security forces deployed heavily to deter commemorative gatherings. Families of protesters killed in the January 2026 crackdown renewed demands for justice as rights groups reported that protest-related arrests had surpassed 6,000 and the state continued to seize assets of dissidents. The anniversary confirmed 'Woman, Life, Freedom' as an enduring touchstone of opposition despite mass executions and wartime conditions following the US and Israeli attacks of February 2026.