Protests are not new in Iran. But this time is different — an unprecedented revolution led by women, with support from men, encompassing a wide variety of grievances. It's a spontaneous civil rights movement made up of people at their wit’s end.
Sustained protests have taken place in Iran since the Sept. 16, 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, left, in police custody. | Illustration by Franziska Barczyk for POLITICOSuzanne Kianpour is a foreign affairs correspondent and presenter specializing in national security and the Middle East.
Our minds are not on mullahs or morality police — until we spot flashing lights in the rearview mirror.I remember what I’d witnessed earlier that week: a woman in a long black “chador,” a type of cloak that covers the whole body except for the face, flinging open the door of a green and white van and snatching a young woman off the street. The morality police were active again, and we would not pass the Islamic purity test.
.” I’d moved from Washington to Dubai — 70km from Iran, the distance between Washington and Philadelphia — to work on the hour-long program. The region felt like a tinderbox. An Iranian woman walks on the streets of Tehran without a mandatory headscarf last year in Tehran, Iran. | Getty Images One woman who lives in the southern part of Iran sent me a voice note on Instagram. A couple of months ago she received a summons to go down to the police station. She was ordered to pay a hefty fine and her car would be impounded. Her crime? A traffic camera had caught her, sitting behind the steering wheel of her car alone at a stop light, with her hijab having fallen off her head. If it happened again, she’d be imprisoned.
The protests have now been going on for over three months, and the crackdown has been brutal: hundreds killed, including children; over 10,000 arrested; reports of horrific sexual abuse of men, women and minors in detention. “The most unprecedented thing we’re seeing is people are fighting back against security forces. Women are not just taking off their headscarves in protest, they’re burning them. And young kids, young girls are protesting,” Boniadi told me.
The regime’s gaslighting is not holding, however, and Boniadi tells me the opposition — whether inside the country or among the diaspora — all agree no one is interested in interventionism. Change isn’t coming, it’s already here; Iranian women who don’t want to cover their hair just aren’t. “To me, it’s a losing game for them. Whichever course they take, the Islamic Republic as we know it is no longer going to exist,” Boniadi said.
Even some people within the regime are privately beginning to budge, however conflicted they may feel. In October a regime source called me and spoke for 45 minutes. This source is close to the Supreme Leader and spent time in the West — a true revolutionary, but clear eyed to some extent about what survival for such a regime in a rapidly evolving world requires.
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