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This time, the voice can be louder and the anger can be deeper. Iran’s protests may be more popular and their demands greater than at any time since the country’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
But after four months, the cry of “women, life, freedom,” that echoed in the streets and cemeteries, campuses and workplaces did not bring the freedom they demanded. Not loosening the strict Islamic edicts, and certainly not a complete regime change as many want they sing: “This is the year of bloody rebellion, Great Leader [Ali] Khamenei will be removed.”
The unrest was sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, after she was arrested by Iran’s morality police in September for not wearing the hijab properly.
But the mullahs – led by Khamenei – have not won.
The religious doctrine is less appealing to the collection of Iranians already on the streets. Only brutal action against protesters against threats to their power – including what UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk called Iran’s execution “weapon” to stamp out dissent.
So far, four people are known to have been hanged for their roles in the demonstrations where the government says security forces were attacked and killed. More than 100 additional protesters have been sentenced to death, the Iranian human rights organization HRANA said.
Among the latest to be executed, on January 7, is Sayed Mohammad Husseini, 39, a Tehran lawyer. tweeted he “confessed they were tortured” out of him.
Other protesters have been killed in the streets, with security forces using “rifles, assault rifles and pistols” against the “largely peaceful” crowd, Human Rights Watch said. reported.
HRANA said 525 civilians had been killed.
This had a “terrible effect” on the protests, said Hoda Katebi, a US-based Iranian activist and writer.
Censorship of the media and the internet make it hard to tell, but demonstrations now seem smaller and less frequent. Get together now often happens at the funeral of the protestors or during the visitation of the mourners which usually takes place 40 days later. The big protests downtown, for the most part last fall, were barely noticeable.
‘Grim and Scary’
The most common act of protest is women walking the streets with their heads uncovered, nervous that the security forces will attack them.
“I just feel that they can attack me at any moment,” the young woman told a Norwegian reporter in Tehran. “I did it because I wanted to be free.”
The situation is “very bleak and terrible,” Katebi said, but “it does not mean that people’s hopes are broken or that the revolution is over.” He predicted “another wave [of protests] to win.”
All this has brought Iran to a stalemate.
“This is a war of wills,” said Ali Vaez, the Iranian-born director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group. “Neither side can exclude the other.”
With inflation at around 40 percent, widespread shortages of natural gas and electricity and ongoing sanctions from the West, the regime has few ways to appease protesters economically — and little desire to do so politically, Vaez said.
The government “simply cannot deal with the problems that exist with the same character that created this disaster in the first place,” he said.
The protesters, on the other hand, are “more united than at any time in the past 43 years,” in their quest to “overthrow the Islamic republic.”
Experts say it will take a big game-changing event to achieve that. And there are two things to think about, starting with the change of leadership in Iran.
Khamenei is 84 years old, with much speculation about how long he will live. In September, he reported became “severely ill” with intestinal obstruction. Eight years earlier, Western intelligence officials did the same quoted said he had advanced cancer.
During his more than three decades as the supreme leader, he has repeatedly fought off political threats. Khamenei has sent in security forces to put down another major wave of protests since 2009, and purged opponents from Iran’s institutions, leaving him unchallenged.
There are no signs of a major crack in the leadership, nor is there any hope that a successor will change course. After all, most of the 88 clerics who will elect the next leader — the Iranian Council of Experts — are hardliners, said Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iranian leadership at the University of Tennessee.
But Golkar predicts a year or two of instability before the new ayatollah consolidates power, a period that “has the potential to change things rapidly and unpredictably.”
“People will be ready for protests and revolts,” while the Revolutionary Guards and other security forces that remain loyal to Khamenei may not be immediately loyal to his successor, he said.
Another unpredictable event could be a military attack from outside, although Golkar and Vaez consider it less likely.
As Iran has developed its own nuclear weapons program, it has triggered a round of sanctions from Western powers and threats of military force as the last resort of US President Joe Biden. Israel has been accused from behind repeated mysterious attacks about Iran’s nuclear facilities and ordered the killing of the country’s top nuclear scientist in 2020.
Tehran’s military aid to Moscow during the current war in Ukraine – incl provide Russia with drones made in Iran – has also angered the West.
If something leads to an external attack on Iran, Vaez said the regime could try to use the app to “gather the people around the flag and change the subject internally.” The military may try to “remove the clerics and take over,” he said.
Alternatively, the regime could not find support at home, Golkar said. “People are so desperate, so angry and so hopeless, that they can accept an attack on Iran.”
Tehran has been watching foreign reactions to the protests, and has condemned a growing list of sanctions by the EU, Britain, the US and Canada against top institutions and officials.
And, says Golkar, there has been a reaction.
He said that Iran’s execution of British-Iranian Alireza Akbari, which was announced last weekend, seemed to send a message to the West: “If you are going to impose sanctions, we also have influence and we will force you.”
Akbari is a former deputy defense minister in Iran, accused by the government of being a spy for British intelligence, MI-6. London denied the allegations.
Other foreign nationals have also been pressured by Iran, including a Belgian NGO worker sentenced to 40 years in prison on espionage charges by a Tehran court last week, a German arrested for taking pictures of a “sensitive” oil installation and American-Iranian Siamak Namazi. recently started a hunger strike after spending seven years in an Iranian jail, also accused of spying.
“Iran is using the wrongful arrest as a very political leverage,” Whitehouse spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, after Namazi was allowed to send a letter to Biden this week, indicting the case.
However, few are surprised that Tehran is using any tool at its disposal to attack one of the most serious political challenges facing the regime.
To the outside world, he tries to play “crazy,” Golkar says, to appear unpredictable, when in fact he is “scared.”
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