The murder of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police last September sparked the largest revolt in Iran since the 1979 revolution. What began as a protest in Gina Mahsa Amini’s home town of Saqqez soon developed into a nationwide revolt against the Iranian state. Over the course of six months, hundreds of thousands of students, workers, the young and the old, took to the streets with the battle cry “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi!” (Women, life, freedom).
“It looked like an earthquake had struck the Jenin camp. The roads were completely obliterated, ambulances could not get through, wounded people had to walk. People inside their homes were crouching down and peeking out from the windows. You could just see the top of people’s heads because they were trying to avoid being shot through the windows.”
“In Safsaf, after the inhabitants had hoisted the white flag, the soldiers gathered the men and women into separate groups, bound the hands of 50 or 60 villagers, shot them, then buried them all in the same pit.”
“Basij guards, you are our Daesh!”, chanted parents outside an Education Ministry building in western Tehran on 4 March, likening Iran’s security forces to the Islamic State.
Iran’s prosecutor general, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, was recently quoted in local media remarking that the country’s morality police had been “shut down”. Montazeri’s comments came as nationwide protests entered their third month, sparked by the police murder of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September.
Protests continue across Iran following the police murder of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September.