Iranian authorities are holding back from enforcing mandatory hijab as extensively as they would like because of “war conditions,” a senior official said Wednesday, even as pressure grows for tougher enforcement.
“Look at how the enemy has managed to promote that decadent Western lifestyle in our society. Look at the hijab issue itself. Because of the war conditions, for now we cannot enter this front the way we should,” Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a member of Iran’s Expediency Council, and Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s father-in-law said at a gathering of student associations.
The effects would be visible in schools, making the authorities’ task “much harder than in 1981, when we started working,” Haddad-Adel added.
His comments came a day after an official representing supreme leader in Iranian universities announced that mandatory hijab instructions for universities had been drafted and would soon be issued by the ministries of science and health.
Universities prepare hijab rules
Existing hijab regulations were already sufficient but needed renewed attention, Saeed Karami, the cultural and political deputy of leader’s representative body in universities, told Mehr news agency Tuesday.
“We certainly will not see the bitter occurrences in universities that we sometimes see on the streets,” Karami said.
The new rules should be described as “instructions” rather than a “hijab charter,” Karami added.
Lawmaker Mohammad-Taghi Naghdali also criticized the government Tuesday for what he called a “retreat” on hijab and for failing to promulgate legislation known as the Chastity and Hijab Law.
Parliament would continue pursuing the issue, Naghdali added.
The comments are part of a renewed push by officials for greater enforcement after years of disobedience by women against compulsory veiling.
Officials press for tougher enforcement
The secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution said Wednesday that mandatory dress rules were not being observed in some government offices and pharmacies.
“In some government offices, hijab is not observed, and in some pharmacies things have gone beyond not wearing hijab,” Abdolhossein Khosropanah said at a meeting of university faculty members in Hamedan.
Government agencies and public-service institutions, including offices and facilities such as pharmacies overseen by ministries, were required to monitor compliance with regulations, Khosropanah added.
The Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution had adopted “comprehensive and sufficient” measures on hijab over the past two decades, meaning new measures were unnecessary, he said.
Other officials have made similar calls in recent weeks.
Hossein Akbari, the Revolutionary Guards commander in North Khorasan province, announced Saturday that groups tasked with verbally warning people about their dress would be revived and reorganized to promote mandatory hijab.
Lawmaker Mostafa Moeini Arani has called for action against women deemed improperly veiled and urged parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf to promulgate the hijab law.
Kayhan, a newspaper overseen by a representative of Khamenei, has also urged the government to address what it described as a failure to enforce hijab requirements.
Government supporters have staged demonstrations in several cities. They formed a human chain in Qom on August 29 demanding enforcement, while Friday prayer attendees demonstrated outside the South Khorasan governor’s office in Birjand a day earlier.
A video sent to Iran International showed a group of women supporting the government demonstrating in Isfahan on August 24 and chanting for the hijab law to be implemented.
Women continue to defy mandatory hijab
Women have continued to appear without mandatory hijab in public despite pressure from authorities, extending a form of civil disobedience that expanded after the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
Citizens have sent Iran International videos and messages criticizing renewed enforcement efforts at a time of rising prices and economic hardship.
They have described mandatory-hijab advertisements in Mashhad, confrontations with women in the streets, warnings issued to shops and cafes and the closure of dozens of businesses in cities across the country.
CNN reported in August that authorities had increased pressure on women over mandatory hijab but were avoiding widespread direct street enforcement because of concern that it could trigger another wave of protests.
Authorities were instead relying on legal measures, business closures and economic pressure while women continued their civil disobedience, CNN reported.
Haddad-Adel’s reference to “war conditions” comes as the Islamic Republic faces continuing military conflict alongside a worsening economic crisis and growing pressure on household finances.
The doubling of Iran’s highest petrol price tier has also increased official concern about public discontent and possible protests.
Eight months later, images of the killings and crackdown remain vivid for survivors and the wider public. Iranians describing life after January have spoken of recurring nightmares, crying at night and difficulty returning to ordinary life. Some survivors have attempted suicide.
For many, life is now divided into before and after January.
Body bags have also acquired a place in Iran’s collective memory that they did not have before. Previously associated largely with films, natural disasters and major emergencies, they appeared repeatedly in footage documenting the aftermath of the January killings.
Images from earlier waves of unrest – the 2009 protests, November 2019 and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement – often showed the bodies of those killed: lying in streets, on hospital beds or wrapped in burial shrouds.
In January 2026, the dead were frequently hidden behind black bags and zippers. Faces disappeared from view and rows of bags remained.
The distinction matters. An object intended to preserve bodies for transportation and identification became one of the most recognizable images of the crackdown.
Amnesty International counted at least 205 separate body bags in verified images from the Kahrizak morgue, south of Tehran. Human Rights Watch identified at least 400 bodies or body bags in three verified videos.
Eurovision News Spotlight, a verification project run by the European Broadcasting Union, also identified the green markings of Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery on some of the body bags.
The trauma behind the bags
Part of the disturbing power of such images comes from what the bags conceal.
An exposed body, however difficult to see, retains a face and visible identity. Hundreds of nearly identical bags can instead reduce individuals to units: one package beside another, one number beside another, with the total continuing to rise.
For relatives searching for somebody missing, however, those bags have to be opened. Each zipper brings the possibility of encountering the body of a parent, child, sibling or friend.
This can be understood as a particular trauma associated with body bags: the combination of mass death, the temporary erasure of individual identity, the anxiety of identifying the dead and the repeated return of the same visual image.
There is also the question of dignity. Each bag contains a person whose family may be searching for them, yet footage showed bodies left in rows on the ground as relatives tried to identify them.
Such scenes are not unique to Iran.
After Egyptian security forces opened fire on protesters around Cairo’s Rabaa Square in the summer of 2013, the El-Iman mosque became a temporary morgue. Bodies were placed in tightly packed rows under white sheets. Volunteers wrote victims’ names on the coverings; some carried names and addresses, while others remained unidentified.
Families also searched morgues in Damascus after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, opening bags, photographing faces and comparing them with images of missing relatives and acquaintances.
Those bags represented an archive of years of enforced disappearances, torture and deaths in custody.
Iran’s January 2026 images were different in one important respect. The bags appeared during the days and nights of the crackdown itself, within the existing system of hospitals, forensic facilities and cemeteries.
In much of the footage, rows of black bags are visible without names or identifying information that can be seen on their surfaces.
The victims’ faces are concealed, but the sheer number of bags makes the scale of death visible.
The bags also did not arrive at morgues by themselves. Behind the images was a system responsible for collecting, transporting, recording and storing bodies.
What happened after the shooting
Mass killing does not end when shooting stops. Bodies have to be moved. That requires ambulances or other vehicles, body bags and labels, morgues or refrigerated containers and lists recording the dead. Decisions also have to be made about where bodies are stored, when they can be identified and under what conditions they are returned to families.
Reports following the killings on January 8 and 9 described shortages of body bags and bodies accumulating in hospitals and morgues.
That raises another question: where did the additional bags come from, and how prepared were authorities for handling large numbers of bodies?
Two procurement notices for body bags appeared around the time of the killings in Alborz province, one of the main centers of the protests and subsequent crackdown.
The Imam Hossein medical center in Alborz sought quotations on January 4, after the protests had begun, for 200 adult body bags and eight bags for children.
Shariati Hospital in Karaj had separately registered a request for 200 adult body bags on December 18, with the procurement notice published two days later.
The timing, particularly of the Imam Hossein request, warrants scrutiny. But the records alone do not demonstrate that authorities anticipated mass killings, nor do they establish that these particular bags were subsequently used to carry protesters’ bodies.
Several links in the procurement chain are also missing, including final contracts, delivery receipts, shipment numbers and warehouse release documents.
Body bags are routine supplies for hospitals, cemeteries and emergency services. Purchasing them is therefore not in itself evidence of preparation for a crackdown.
Reports of shortages in cities including Arak, Khorramabad and Gorgan, however, suggest that ordinary stocks were rapidly exhausted. If so, additional supplies would have had to be distributed, potentially following further purchases.
That leaves a narrower but important question: what level of fatalities was the system for handling bodies equipped to manage, and did January’s death toll overwhelm that capacity?
Turning numbers back into names
In hospitals, forensic facilities and disaster operations, body bags serve practical purposes: separating and transporting the dead and protecting workers from contact with blood and bodily fluids.
Joint guidance from the World Health Organization and International Committee of the Red Cross says each body should be placed separately in a bag, with the location and time it was found recorded. Personal belongings should remain with the body and each person should receive a unique identification number.
That number is not intended to erase a name. Its purpose is to help establish an identity and ultimately return the body to relatives.
For some Iranian families in January, the process appeared to work in reverse: they searched through bags and thousands of photographs in an effort to turn a number back into the name of somebody they knew.
The father of Iman Asadi spent five days searching police stations, prisons and hospitals before finding his son’s photograph among thousands of images of unidentified people.
In that collection, Iman was No. 11838.
A number intended to assist identification had become, at least temporarily, the marker of a person without a name.
Another father, Esmail Shokri, was filmed walking among body bags at the Kahrizak forensic facility in a 12-minute video, calling out for his son.
“Sepehr ... Sepehr, my son ... where are you?” Shokri called.
Every bag could have contained Sepehr. To his family, he had a face, a history and a name. From the outside, each closed black bag looked much like the next.
That is what distinguishes some of the most enduring images of January 2026 from those of earlier Iranian crackdowns. Previously, the victim’s body often occupied the center of the frame. This time, for many Iranians, the body bag stood between the dead and the public looking at them.
In the early hours of July 9, cruise missiles hit the Aq Tekeh Khan railway bridge near Aqqala in Golestan province, in Iran's far north-east. The Revolutionary Guards' regional corps and state media attributed the strike to US forces. Damage was limited, as it has been at other bridges hit in the war, and trains were running again within days. Washington has not commented, which is common for many strikes in this conflict.
The bridge sits on the Gorgan–Incheh Borun line, one of two railways connecting Iran's network to Central Asia through Turkmenistan. Iranian outlets described the strike as an attack on the corridor linking Iran to China through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, a reading that spread widely.
What the line actually carries
Iran's official statistics are opaque and frequently incomplete, and under nearly five decades of sanctions the state has had every incentive to blur figures that touch on trade, let alone anything with a military dimension. But even taken at face value, the numbers do not support the corridor claim.
Iran has two main rail gateways to Central Asia: Sarakhs, in the north-east, and Incheh Borun. Shortly before the war, in early 2026, the head of the Khorasan railway said 75 percent of all rail transit into and out of the country passed through Sarakhs, which handled 1.27 million tons in the ten months to late January. The Incheh Borun line's entire nominal capacity is around 500,000 tons a year, and how much of that is actually used is unknown.
Rail was never central to Iranian trade in any case. Before the war, the bulk moved by sea and road, with high-value, low-weight goods going by air.
Nor does the line point at China. Opened during Hassan Rouhani's first term as the Iranian section of a 930-kilometre Kazakhstan–Turkmenistan–Iran railway, completed in 2014 at a cost of about $1.4 billion, it was designed to link Russia and the Caspian region to warm-water ports through Iran, connecting northward toward Astrakhan and the Russian network.
The natural, cheaper route for Chinese rail freight is Sarakhs. Chinese traffic on the Incheh Borun line is not zero, with some reports counting several dozen freight trains from China over the past year, but it is marginal, and the line matters far more to Russia and Turkmenistan, notably for minerals, than to Iranian trade with the east.
Which leaves the question. If the bridge was not hit for what it carries for Iran, one possibility is what it carries for someone else.
Where Russia and Iran meet
Turkmenistan's neutrality is written into its constitution and recognized by the United Nations, and it has taken no side in Iran's wars. It has also become, since the US naval blockade closed Iran's ports, one of the country's principal overland routes to the east. That gives a small, closed and rarely reported state an unusual position: the place where Iranian and Russian logistics physically meet.
The Islamic Republic has a long, documented history of military exchanges with Russia and China. Alongside the rail and road routes, which carry their own risks, combined routes for moving equipment are routine.
Ashgabat's airport is the nearest major airfield to Iran's north-eastern border. Iran International reviewed data on roughly 6,500 flights that landed there between the start of November 2025 and early July 2026, a window running from before the war through the ceasefires and the resumption of strikes.
The review has limits, and they should be stated first. Flight-tracking data depends on aircraft transmitting their position and on receivers within range picking it up, so gaps occur. The pre-war portion of the window is short, less than four months. And a change in what tracking systems record after a war begins may reflect changed behavior across a whole region rather than anything specific to one airport.
One category in the data carries more meaning than it might appear to. Scheduled passenger and cargo flights file public flight plans, so their origin and destination almost always appear in tracking records.
Flights that show no origin at all are therefore disproportionately state, military and private operations, which do not file in the same way. The category cannot tell a military transport from a government delegation or a private charter, and some freight operators also fall into it, but it does separate the traffic that files paperwork from the traffic that does not.
The Antonov from China
The most concrete item is a single flight. On April 13, an Antonov An-124, the largest transport aircraft in regular service, landed at Ashgabat from Urumqi in western China, paused, and left early the same day for Cairo. Nothing like it appears elsewhere in the nine months of data.
The aircraft belongs to Volga-Dnepr Airlines, which is designated by the United States, the European Union, Britain, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Ukraine and France. Britain listed it in June 2024 for "the provision of heavy airlift capacity to the Russian Armed Forces."
The EU, listing the group's owners and directors the same month, said Volga-Dnepr has been "playing a crucial role in servicing Russia's military-industrial complex and providing air transportation services for Russian military purposes," importing electronics and communications equipment for the war on Ukraine and receiving Russian government subsidies for doing so. The US designation carries a secondary sanctions risk, which applies in principle to any third party that does business with the airline, including by servicing its aircraft.
The specific aircraft carries the registration RA-82074. A Ukrainian investigation named it among Volga-Dnepr An-124s that sharply increased flights to countries friendly to Russia, including China, after the 2022 invasion, in transport the investigators linked to sanctioned goods and military products.
The website openDemocracy reported in 2023 on the company's role in carrying equipment critical to the Russian military from China. Only three of the company's An-124s are currently active.
There is an ordinary explanation available. Egypt is a major destination for commercial heavy cargo, and an An-124 routing from China through Central Asia to Cairo is consistent with legitimate project freight. Egypt is also a longstanding Russian arms customer. Volga-Dnepr has said it stopped carrying military cargo in 2018; Western governments that have examined its record disagree, and the Islamic Republic has spent more than four decades perfecting the art of moving sensitive goods under commercial cover.
The pattern around it
Around that flight, several categories of traffic rose after the war began.
Local callsigns in the 795 series, searchable under identifiers such as 795M12 and 795A01, were rare before the war and rose sharply from April: 11 in April, 7 in May and 15 in June. Most were logged with no recorded origin or as Mil Mi-8 military transport helicopters, sometimes several times in a day.
On July 6, three days before the bridge was struck, three such flights were logged. One caveat matters here: the same callsign sometimes appears several times within minutes, which may mean genuine repeat flights or may mean several ground receivers logging one signal, so these counts may be inflated.
Flights with no recorded origin rose from a single instance in January to 8, 6, 4, 9 and 7 in the months from February to June, with two more in the first nine days of July. Given what that category captures, this is the closest the data comes to a measure of non-commercial traffic, and it went from one a month before the war to an average of nearly seven a month after it began.
Callsigns in the RSD series, used by Russian state and military flights, together with Tupolev Tu-204 and Ilyushin Il-96 aircraft, increased noticeably in May. Ilyushin Il-76 heavy transports arriving from within Turkmenistan were logged twice in February and twice in May, with none in the pre-war months. Three AgustaWestland AW139 helicopters, a type used in government and military roles, landed in May and June, though similar flights also appeared in November.
None of this is evidence of military transfers through Ashgabat. There is no official statement or document to that effect, and the relative rise in irregular traffic could have explanations that have nothing to do with the bridge 100 kilometers to the south.
What the data does show is a change in the rhythm of arrivals at Turkmenistan's main airport that coincides with the intensification of the war, and that was building in the weeks before a railway line to Russia was hit.
Iran International has asked US Central Command to confirm the strike and explain the choice of target. It had not responded at the time of publication; this report will be updated if it does.
But the fighting is also showing why a weakened axis can remain dangerous: it does not have to win territory to impose costs on Iran’s adversaries.
Yemen’s Houthis dramatically escalated their attacks on Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, striking four southern cities with missiles and drones. The group targeted a Saudi airbase in Khamis Mushait and Saudi Aramco assets in Abha, Najran and Jazan, setting oil installations ablaze. Saudi authorities said 73 people were wounded, including women and children.
The attacks also threatened to widen the war’s economic impact beyond the Strait of Hormuz, where the US-Iran conflict has already disrupted energy flows. Brent crude briefly touched $99.46 a barrel on Tuesday, its highest level since July 24.
“They’re not really fighting five separate wars, they’re just using five instruments of the same coercive strategy,” Fatima Abo Alasrar, a researcher and author on Yemen and Iran and founder of The Ideology Machine, told Iran International.
The timing, Alasrar said, matters.
Iran is exerting pressure around the Strait of Hormuz while the Houthis can create another pressure point around Bab al-Mandab, forcing Iran’s adversaries to contend with threats near two of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints.
“The lesson that the Houthis appear to have learned is that escalation produces leverage,” she said, even without territorial gains.
That leaves Saudi Arabia with a difficult choice: escalate in an effort to substantially weaken the Houthis and risk a wider war or seek a political exit that could reinforce the belief in both Sanaa and Tehran that military pressure can ultimately produce concessions.
Houthis called Saudi Arabia’s bluff
Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemeni-American geopolitical analyst and risk adviser who heads the Washington DC-based Basha Report, said the Houthis helped bring about the renewed war by assuming Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s internationally recognized government would avoid a return to full-scale fighting.
“The Houthis were hoping to call a bluff — a Saudi and a government bluff,” al-Basha told Iran International.
Asked whether they miscalculated, he replied: “Of course, of course.”
Yet al-Basha said the Iran war has also reinforced the Houthis’ belief in the value of escalation.
“They feel that the best way for you to get what you want is to use force,” he said.
The confrontation follows an earlier dispute over an Iranian aircraft carrying a Houthi delegation back from Tehran following the funeral of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Analysts told Iran International at the time that the flight may have been an opening move in an effort to establish an air bridge into Houthi-controlled Yemen and rebuild the group’s strategic capabilities.
“The alliance is no longer secretive or covert, it’s very public,” al-Basha said of the Iran-Houthi relationship.
Can battlefield gains change the equation?
Forces loyal to Yemen’s internationally recognized government have now launched counterattacks across several fronts, with officials openly declaring their intention to eventually recapture Sanaa.
But al-Basha cautioned against assuming the Houthis are close to defeat. He said losing strategically important territory, rather than simply patches of ground, could eventually push them toward negotiations.
One place to watch is Hodeidah, whose port al-Basha described as “the lung that the Houthis breathe from.” The group’s position around Hodeidah, Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea is central to its ability to threaten maritime traffic.
Alasrar, however, said territorial losses do not necessarily eliminate Houthi leverage.
“They can lose ground and still increase their regional leverage,” she said.
The Houthis have threatened further attacks against Saudi economic and military infrastructure, raising the prospect of greater disruption around Bab al-Mandab while the Iran conflict continues to put pressure on Hormuz
A ‘win-win’ for Tehran?
Danny Citrinowicz of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies sees that predicament as advantageous for Iran.
“For them it’s amazing. So it’s a win-win for them,” Citrinowicz told Iran International.
If Saudi Arabia backs down, he argues, Iran gains room to strengthen the Houthis. If Riyadh keeps fighting, instability around Bab al-Mandab creates another source of economic pressure while Iran contests Hormuz.
“It definitely worked in the Iranian favor,” he said. “The Iranians are learning from that, unfortunately.”
But it leaves Saudi Arabia with two costly options. Citrinowicz said the Houthis have “crossed the Rubicon” and are unlikely simply to retreat. As Saudi-backed forces approach areas the group considers critical, he expects Houthi attacks against the kingdom to intensify.
A moment of truth for the Mecca Defence Alliance
The escalation is also posing an early test for the Mecca Defence Alliance, the collective defense pact signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan on August 7.
The agreement stipulates that an armed attack against any one of the three countries is to be regarded as an attack against all three.
Yet neither Turkey nor Pakistan has so far entered the fighting militarily on Saudi Arabia’s behalf.
Citrinowicz calls it “a moment of truth” for the alliance, with neither country so far entering the fighting militarily.
Will Washington hold Iran responsible?
The United States is now explicitly pointing toward Tehran.
“The Houthis in many ways are agents and proxies of the Iranians. I think behind some of this is clearly the Iranian hand,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters when asked about the attacks on Saudi Arabia.
Rubio said Washington has a strong defensive military relationship with Riyadh and is closely watching developments.
His comments revive a warning President Donald Trump issued on July 23.
Trump said then that Washington would hold Iran responsible if the Houthis resumed attacks, describing the group as a “Surrogate and/or Proxy of Iran” and warning of “major military punishment” against Iran and the Houthis.
The Houthis have now resumed major attacks against Saudi Arabia. Rubio has publicly pointed to an Iranian hand, but Trump has yet to publicly repeat the threat he made in July.
That leaves a consequential question as the conflict widens: if Washington considers the Houthis an Iranian proxy, how far is it prepared to go in holding Tehran responsible for what they do?
The coming days and weeks are likely to bring advances and retreats on both sides, with territory changing hands and apparent victories proving temporary. The battlefield remains highly fluid, and both sides appear determined to keep fighting, making it too early to draw sweeping conclusions from any single development.
But even without a clear Houthi victory, Iran may stand to gain. As long as the fighting forces Saudi Arabia to expend resources, keeps pressure on Bab al-Mandab and stretches the attention of Tehran’s adversaries, the Houthis can continue to provide Iran with leverage even while under pressure themselves.
The conflict has a long way to go for now and consequences reverberate from Yemen across an already destabilized region.
Saeed Karami, deputy for cultural and political affairs at the Office of the Supreme Leader’s Representative in Universities, said the directive had been drafted and would soon be issued by the ministries of Science and Health, which oversee most universities and medical schools.
Karami told the semi-official Mehr news agency that existing regulations on hijab were “very good” and only needed renewed attention.
Asked whether universities would receive a “hijab charter,” Karami said “directive” was a more appropriate term. He did not give details of the measures it would contain or specify when they would take effect.
“We will certainly not witness the bitter incidents that we sometimes see on the streets at universities,” he said, without elaborating.
The planned directive comes amid a renewed push by hardline officials, clerics and government supporters to strengthen enforcement of compulsory hijab, four years after the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in morality police custody triggered the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.
Women appearing in public without headscarves have since become commonplace in Tehran and other major cities, making rejection of compulsory hijab one of the most visible social changes to survive the 2022 protests.
Pressure has increased in recent weeks as hardliners demand implementation of the stalled Hijab and Chastity Law and criticize President Masoud Pezeshkian’s government for what they describe as a retreat on the issue.
Hardline lawmaker Mohammad-Taghi Naghd-Ali said Tuesday the government had backed down over hijab and accused it of failing to implement the legislation, describing compulsory veiling as one of the “foundations of the revolution.”
The more sweeping Hijab and Chastity Law remains suspended after the Supreme National Security Council instructed parliament not to promulgate it, Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf disclosed last year. The decision was widely seen as reflecting fears that aggressive enforcement could trigger renewed unrest.
Other signs of renewed pressure have appeared across Iran. The commander of the Revolutionary Guards in North Khorasan said this week that groups tasked with verbally warning women over their clothing were being revived, while pro-government gatherings demanding stricter hijab enforcement have been held in Qom, Birjand and Isfahan.
Iran International found last month that authorities had sealed at least 42 cafés, restaurants, shops, sports clubs and other businesses in 17 cities within three weeks over alleged violations of hijab rules and other Islamic norms.
Authorities have increasingly used business closures, judicial warnings and economic pressure rather than relying solely on the large-scale morality police patrols associated with enforcement before the 2022 uprising. Reports from inside Iran have nevertheless also pointed to renewed street warnings and patrol activity in several cities.
Universities have long been a particular focus of hijab enforcement and political control. Campuses became major centers of protest during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, and female students were among those who openly removed their headscarves in defiance of the state.
In April 2023, the Science Ministry said universities would not be required to provide educational, welfare and other services to students who refused to comply with hijab regulations. Female students were subsequently barred from campuses, summoned to disciplinary committees and in some cases suspended or expelled from dormitories.
At the University of Tehran, authorities later deployed women with seminary backgrounds to monitor students’ clothing, while students at several other institutions reported being photographed, having their student IDs recorded or being denied entry over their clothing.
At Tehran’s Amir Kabir University of Technology, students boycotted classes in 2024 after reports that more than 200 students had been barred from campus amid stricter dress-code enforcement. Similar pressure was subsequently reported at Tehran North Islamic Azad University.
Signs of renewed tension have emerged again this year. The Student Basij at Iran University of Science and Technology recently protested the presence of unveiled female students at an event attended by senior officials from the Science Ministry.
Despite successive enforcement campaigns, many Iranian women continue to appear without mandatory hijab in streets, cafés, shopping centers and other public spaces, maintaining a form of civil disobedience that has persisted since the Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
