As the protests in Iran enter pass the three-month mark, their number and intensity are beginning to decrease due to brutal government suppression. The policy of the ruling theocracy has been clear from the outset: they aim to crush the protests, which they will most likely succeed in doing, to ensure public dissention doesn’t gain sufficient traction nationally to threaten the regime’s existence.
An accurate picture of developments in Iran is clouded by the misinformation and disinformation being disseminated by various groups. What is known is that the protests were triggered by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an ethnic Kurd, detained by the religious morality police for wearing her headscarf, or hijab, ‘inappropriately’.
Amini’s death triggered nationwide protests, initiated and led by young women, many university students and graduates, using the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’. However, the protests quickly spread beyond these issues, attracting wider public and mixed-gender support for pursuing broad social and other issues including economic hardship, high-level corruption and the theocratic nature of the regime itself.
How many protesters have taken to the streets, and the gender mix, are not known. As of early December, the non-profit organisation Iran Human Rights estimated that more than a thousand separate demonstrations had occurred nationwide, involving some 155 cities and nearly half the nation’s universities.
Read the article by Ian Dudgeon on The Strategist.