Security forces deploy as shops in western Iran strike on Mahsa Amini anniversary

A girl who was just entering adolescence when the Woman, Life, Freedom protests began is now approaching adulthood. The past four years have been part of the period in which her understanding of society, government and freedom has taken shape.

Women burning their headscarves, nighttime chants from apartment windows, protests in schools and universities, young people knocking turbans off clerics’ heads and protesters standing up to security forces all became part of the memories that accompanied that generation into adulthood.

One of the most enduring changes is visible on the streets.

Many women now appear without mandatory hijab in streets, universities, cafes, shopping centers and on public transport. Some ride bicycles and motorcycles without covering their hair.

The Islamic Republic has responded to this defiance with arrests and summonses, warning text messages, vehicle seizures, restrictions on bank accounts and SIM cards, surveillance cameras and the closure of businesses.

Human rights organizations say tens of thousands of women have faced security or judicial action over their clothing during the past four years.

Abandoning mandatory hijab has become one of the clearest forms of collective disobedience to emerge from 2022, continuing in parts of society despite the security and legal costs.

As the fourth anniversary of Amini’s death approached, a coalition of Iranian Kurdish political groups called for a general strike on September 16, urging people to close shops and markets and stay away from work.

From Mahsa Amini’s death to prison and executions

Mahsa “Jina” Amini, a 22-year-old woman from Saqqez in Iran’s Kordestan province was detained by the morality police in Tehran on September 13, 2022. She was taken to hospital and died three days later.

Her gravestone bears the words: “Dear Jina, you will not die. Your name will become a symbol.”

Her father, Amjad Amini, wrote on September 14, ahead of the fourth anniversary of her death, that her name had “gone beyond our small home.”

The family, he said, was still waiting for the truth to emerge.

“The sealed secret that you and all the loved ones resting in this earth carry with you will not remain hidden forever,” he wrote.

Amini’s name quickly became a rallying cry for protests that began in Saqqez and Kordestan, spread to Tehran and then swept across Iran. The Kurdish slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” and its Persian equivalent, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” became the uprising’s defining chant.

“Death to the dictator,” “This is the final message, the target is the entire system,” “Poverty, corruption, high prices — we will go on until overthrow,” and “Don’t call it a protest, it’s called a revolution” were also heard on the streets, reflecting the political direction the protests had taken.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Republic itself became the direct targets of many of the slogans.

The uprising also quickly became a global cause. Artists, athletes, academics, human rights activists and political figures around the world voiced support, carrying Amini’s name and the slogan Woman, Life, Freedom far beyond Iran’s borders.

The authorities answered the protests with lethal force, widespread injuries and mass arrests.

Human rights organizations have put the number of people killed in the uprising at more than 550. Many more were wounded, while shotgun pellets blinded dozens of protesters in one or both eyes.

Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei said in May 2025 that more than 90,000 cases had been opened in connection with the 2022 protests, including cases involving schoolchildren, university students and teachers.

The crackdown continued in the courts after large street gatherings subsided.

Execution, imprisonment, flogging, internal exile, fines, travel bans and restrictions on social rights were among the punishments handed down to protesters and activists linked to the uprising.

Mohsen Shekari, Majidreza Rahnavard, Mohammad Mehdi Karami, Mohammad Hosseini, Saleh Mirhashemi, Saeed Yaghoubi, Majid Kazemi, Milad Zohrevand, Mohammad Ghobadlou, Reza Rasaei, Mojahed Korkor, Mehran Bahramian, Mehrab Abdollazadeh, Abdoljalil Shahbakhsh and Aref Khoshkar were among those executed in cases connected to the 2022 protests.

Others remain at risk of execution.

Among them is Ali Zarei Dozdarehsi, who suffered an eye injury from shotgun pellets during the uprising. After spending time in Germany, he returned to Iran, was arrested and was later sentenced to death by a Revolutionary Court.

Dozens of other protesters have also received death sentences or still have cases under review.

Golrokh Iraee, Nasim Simiyari, Hamid Ghareh-Hassanlou, Farzaneh Ghareh-Hassanlou and Hossein Mohammadi are among hundreds of political prisoners connected to the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising who have faced restrictions in prison, including being denied phone calls, family visits or furlough.

For some, much of the past four years has been spent behind bars, even as Iranian society outside prison has moved through new protests and new changes.

A generation that says ‘We are not going back’

The children and teenagers of 2022 have grown older. Some are now at university, some have entered the workforce and others have left Iran.

What many share is the experience of growing up in a society that lived through one of the most widespread uprisings in the history of the Islamic Republic.

Schools themselves became protest sites in 2022. Students chanted slogans, pulled down images of Islamic Republic officials from classroom walls and girls removed their headscarves.

Universities saw weeks of demonstrations, sit-ins and confrontations with security forces.

For a generation that witnessed those scenes during formative years, politics became tied to the street, the school, the university and everyday life.

German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt linked freedom to the human capacity to begin something new. In her thought, political action emerges among others in the public sphere, and revolutions are among the moments when the possibility of a “new beginning” becomes visible.

For the teenagers of 2022, an experience of that kind unfolded on a mass scale before their eyes: people who often did not know one another chanted the same slogans, supported each other and joined collective action in schools, universities, neighborhoods and streets.

Four years later, this generation lives in a society where repression continues. But the experience of 2022 has not been erased from its political memory.

What Woman, Life, Freedom gave the protests that followed

The 2022 uprising did not topple the Islamic Republic, but it changed the language and horizons of protest.

Woman, Life, Freedom entered Iran’s political vocabulary alongside slogans calling for the overthrow and end of the Islamic Republic.

Women stood at the center of a nationwide uprising. School students emerged as a visible force in protest, and acts of disobedience moved from demonstrations into everyday life.

Some of the behaviors that took shape during those months continued in the years that followed.

Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist revolutionary and theorist, viewed the defeats of revolutionary movements as links in a historical chain that could help prepare the ground for future victories.

After the failed January 1919 uprising in Berlin, she treated the experience and political understanding gained through defeat as part of a revolutionary movement’s accumulated strength.

The protests that followed 2022 began from a point that Woman, Life, Freedom had already reached. Opposition to the Islamic Republic as a whole, and demands for its overthrow, remained present in later protest slogans.

January 2026 offered one of the clearest examples.

Protests that began over economic grievances rapidly spread across the country, with political slogans against the Islamic Republic becoming a major feature.

Estimates of those killed ranged from the government’s official figure of 3,117 to more than 36,500 in Iran International’s reporting. Tens of thousands were wounded, while around 100,000 people were arrested, summoned or interrogated.

For the generation that had experienced 2022, January 2026 became a second encounter with a nationwide uprising and a bloody crackdown within only a few years.

A generation carrying the memory of several generations

Iran’s teenagers and young adults now stand at the end of a much longer history of protest and repression: women’s protests against compulsory hijab in March 1979, the executions of the 1980s, the July 1999 university dormitory crackdown, the 2009 Green Movement, the protests of January 2018 and the bloody November 2019 crackdown.

Many learned about those events through their families, photographs, books and news reports.

Woman, Life, Freedom and the January 2026 protests, however, belong to their own lived experience.

That distinction has helped shape this generation’s political memory.

Images of protesting women, schoolgirls, young people in the streets, families demanding justice and political prisoners now sit alongside images of those killed, wounded and executed.

A girl who was just entering adolescence in September 2022 is now approaching adulthood carrying memories of Amini, protest, repression and disobedience — memories now layered alongside the stories earlier generations carried from March 1979, the 1980s, July 1999, the Green Movement and November 2019.

Four years after Amini’s death, Woman, Life, Freedom remains part of this generation’s memory: in the school and the street, in experiences of repression and defiance, and in the picture of freedom and Iran’s future that it carries into adulthood.

Above all, this generation has seen that the path to political change in Iran runs through the street, collective action and effective organization.

The sisters were 19 when they were arrested after joining January’s nationwide uprising in Isfahan. They turned 20 behind bars and remain imprisoned in Isfahan’s Dowlatabad Prison.

Taraneh has been sentenced to death, while Romina received prison sentences totaling 36 years. They were among 16 defendants tried by Branch 1 of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court in the Shohada Square case, 10 of whom received death sentences.

Masoud Nourmohammadi, the twins’ cousin who lives in the United States, told Iran International that prison authorities have recently begun denying Taraneh food, forcing her to rely on leftovers shared by other prisoners.

He said Taraneh was told the treatment was connected to his efforts to raise awareness about the sisters’ case outside Iran.

“They said your cousin has been talking outside of Iran,” Nourmohammadi said, recounting what Taraneh was told.

“This is the cost you have to pay.”

Nourmohammadi said he has also received daily death threats since speaking publicly about his cousins.

He said messages sent to him include his address and information about his family and warn him to remain silent.

“This is your address. This is your house. This is information about your family. We know where you live,” he said, recounting the threats. “Stop talking or something’s going to happen to your kids.”

Four months without knowing where they were

The sisters’ ordeal began after they joined protests around Isfahan’s Shohada Square during the nationwide uprising in January.

Taraneh and Romina were working at a shoe shop in the area when they closed the store and joined protesters outside, according to Nourmohammadi.

“They came out. They chanted,” he said. “The bravest Iranian people came out that night.”

About a week later, masked security forces broke into the home of a friend where Taraneh was staying, according to the family.

“They broke down the doors,” Nourmohammadi said. “They had masks on. They did not show any warrants.”

He said security forces bound Taraneh’s hands and feet, placed a bag over her head and took her away.

Romina was arrested separately at the family home. Nourmohammadi said security forces raided the house in the middle of the night and took her away in similar circumstances.

For roughly four months, their family did not know where either sister was being held.

Their mother, who raised Taraneh and Romina on her own, searched hospitals, courts and prisons for her only children.

“They were searching all of the hospitals, the courts, the prisons,” Nourmohammadi said.

Family members spent hours outside prisons demanding information, he said.

“No one answered them.”

For Nourmohammadi, thousands of miles away in the United States, the uncertainty was compounded by Iran’s internet blackout, which made communicating with relatives inside the country extremely difficult.

Eventually, his aunt received a phone call telling her the twins were being held at Dowlatabad Prison and that she could visit them.

She was given an appointment roughly two weeks later.

When she finally saw her daughters after months of not knowing where they were, Nourmohammadi said she could barely recognize them.

“Their faces were swollen, bruises all over their faces, their body was malnourished, they were limping,” he said.

“They had basically no hair on their head.”

It was only when the sisters began speaking that their mother realized the young women in front of her were her daughters.

“God, it was hard,” he said. “She only could recognize them when they started speaking ... she recognized them through their voices.”

Nourmohammadi said the sisters spent their first four months in solitary confinement.

‘The only evidence is the confession’

The family says both sisters were subjected to severe physical and psychological abuse during interrogation and coerced into confessing.

Before her arrest, Taraneh worked as an equestrian trainer and dreamed of opening her own riding academy.

Years earlier, she had suffered a serious horseback-riding injury that required orthopedic plates and screws in her leg. Her family alleges interrogators deliberately targeted the existing injury and repeatedly struck her damaged leg.

Romina had undergone stomach surgery before her arrest and was experiencing stomach problems around the time of the protests, according to Nourmohammadi.

The family also alleges that interrogators exploited the twins’ close relationship to pressure Taraneh into confessing.

The sisters had rarely been apart. During detention, relatives say, Taraneh could hear Romina screaming.

Interrogators then threatened to rape Romina unless Taraneh signed a confession, according to the family.

Taraneh later told the court that her confession had been extracted under torture, according to reports on the case.

Human Rights Watch and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran have documented allegations that defendants in the Shohada Square case were tortured and coerced into confessing, as well as serious violations of their due-process rights.

Nourmohammadi said there was no substantive evidence against his cousins beyond confessions he says were obtained through torture.

“There is basically zero evidence on the case,” he said. “The only evidence that they have is the confession.”

The Shohada Square case

Taraneh and Romina were prosecuted alongside 14 other defendants over events surrounding the January protests in Isfahan.

Ten of the 16 defendants, including Taraneh, received death sentences.

The defendants faced charges including moharebeh, or “waging war against God,” destruction of public property, assembly and collusion against national security and propaganda against the state.

Human Rights Watch and the Boroumand Center said the prosecution relied heavily on confessions that defendants said were obtained under torture. They also documented restrictions on access to lawyers and other due-process violations.

The rights groups said defendants were accused of involvement in incidents in which two people died, but none of the 16 was charged with murder.

They also reported that defense lawyers sought to introduce mobile-phone videos they said could exonerate defendants, but the material was not admitted as evidence.

Crackdown continues beyond the streets

The mass demonstrations that swept Iran in January are no longer visible on the same scale, but the crackdown that followed has continued in prisons and courtrooms.

Protesters arrested during the uprising continue to face lengthy prison terms, death sentences and execution.

At least 29 people arrested in connection with the January protests had been executed by the end of August, according to Human Rights Watch and the Boroumand Center.

Amnesty International said in July that it had identified 60 people, including three children, at risk of execution in connection with the protests. Iran Human Rights has reported that more than 70 protesters were at risk of execution in Isfahan Prison alone.

The actual number could be substantially higher.

The crackdown has also extended to lawyers representing protesters. The Boroumand Center documented the arrests of at least 19 lawyers in the month following the January crackdown, while other lawyers taking protest-related cases have faced threats of arrest, renewed prosecution or disbarment.

For Nourmohammadi, what is happening to his cousins shows that the crackdown did not end when large protests disappeared from Iran’s streets.

“The crisis didn’t stop at January 8th and 9th,” he said. “The massacre didn’t stop there. It is still continuing and it’s happening right now in the prisons.”

“These kids are the best versions of Iranians,” he added. “They’re the bravest, brightest ... Iranian kids, and they don’t deserve that.”

Their accounts preserve the intimate details of loss: the last phone call, kiss and touch, and plans for weddings and futures that never came.

A marriage cut short after 16 months

Shahrouz Mehrabi, a 36-year-old electrical engineer from Borujerd, was shot dead in Saveh on January 8, his wife Parvaneh's birthday.

The couple had struggled for years to build a life together. Their marriage lasted one year and four months.

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“We loved each other and went through so much to finally be together,” Parvaneh wrote.

She remembered Shahrouz as kind, in love with life and full of plans. His death left those plans unfinished and turned her birthday into the anniversary of his killing.

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‘I wish I had held you longer’

Matin Ghorbani, a 23-year-old barista, was shot dead during protests in Karaj on January 9.

His wife, Mahsa Khanjani, later published a photograph of herself embracing Matin's body.

“Why does this have to be our last picture?” she wrote.

In a recent video, Mahsa described the months that followed: nights reaching morning without him and memories of a final phone call, embrace and kiss that seemed ordinary because she did not know they were farewells.

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“I wish I had known it was the last time,” she said. “I wish I had held you longer, looked at you longer. I wish I had recorded your voice more deeply in my mind.”

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Seven days of marriage

Meysam Ghaderi, 32, and his partner had been together for 11 years before finally marrying.

Seven days later, he was dead.

Meysam was shot in the neck during protests in Karaj on January 8, leaving a marriage that had taken more than a decade to reach barely a week old.

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A ninth anniversary without him

For Elham Sadeghi, another anniversary arrived this month without her husband, Mohsen Jabbarzadeh.

Mohsen, 41, who owned a currency exchange business, was killed during protests on Tehran’s Salsabil Street on January 9 after being shot with live ammunition.

His injuries were so severe that he died within minutes. At the hospital, his family was told the bullet had severed the main artery in his leg.

Marking what would have been their ninth wedding anniversary on September 12, Elham remembered how hard they had fought to build their life together.

“We went through so much to be together, we fought so hard,” she wrote. “My love, I love you forever.”

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A first anniversary at his grave

Sadegh Ghorbani, 28, was shot in Shahr-e Qods near Tehran and died on January 10.

His wife, Atefeh Saei, spent their first wedding anniversary not beside him, but at his grave.

“Our first wedding anniversary; me without you, alone, frightened and in shock,” she wrote on Instagram.

In another post, Atefeh recalled touching her husband's cold body and fighting through a crowd to reach his coffin.

“I hate my hands; with these hands I touched your frozen body,” she wrote. “With these same hands, I made my way through the crowd to your coffin, held your lifeless feet and said: Don't be afraid. Go without worry, go in peace.”

Saei later described placing earth over her husband's body herself, fearful even during his burial that authorities might take his remains from the family.

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A wedding that never came

For Aida Heidari, 25, the future she had planned with her fiancé Abolfazl Soleimani Alamouti was supposed to begin around now.

Abolfazl was killed during protests in Qazvin's Zibashahr district on January 9. Their wedding was planned for about eight months later, people close to the couple said.

On September 3, around the time she would have been preparing for that wedding, Heidari died by suicide.

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People close to Heidari said she had struggled with grief and psychological distress in the months after Soleimani Alamouti’s death. However, the circumstances that led to her suicide are not independently known.

“In some cases, prisoners have been forced to lift their shirts and the guards have also touched their breasts,” one source said.

Body searches have become routine in Evin's women's ward in recent months. Female guards search political prisoners before they leave for family visits, medical treatment or court appearances.

The searches take place in a cubicle recently designated for the purpose. Guards touch different parts of prisoners' bodies and sometimes order them to move or remove clothing, according to the account.

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Families and children searched

Relatives visiting prisoners are also facing more intrusive searches under tighter security measures that differ from previous procedures, another source told Iran International.

Guards force relatives to remove their shoes, inspect the inside of their mouths and touch different parts of their bodies. Children and teenagers visiting imprisoned family members are not exempt and are also touched during searches.

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  Female political prisoners demand accountability for sexual abuse

Twenty-two female political and ideological prisoners at Evin demanded an investigation into what they called “sexual harassment” during body searches in a letter in October 2024.

Transgender prisoner Ghazal Marzban also wrote from Evin on August 21 that she was raped following her arrest in May 2023 at an Intelligence Ministry detention facility and threatened into silence.

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Sexual violence against detainees has been documented in Iranian prisons since the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, with former prisoners and rights groups describing its use as a means of torture and humiliation.

Searches deter treatment and visits

The increasingly invasive searches have led many women to forgo medical transfers or meetings with relatives and lawyers rather than undergo the procedures, the sources said.

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Pressure over prisoners' clothing when leaving the ward has also increased. Women have in some cases been forced to wear slippers and handcuffs.

Iran's Prisons Organization regulations permit searches without clothing only when necessary and under specified conditions. They also require body searches to be conducted with electronic equipment wherever possible.

The sources questioned why scanning equipment was not being used, describing the current procedures as a means of harassment rather than necessary security measures.

More than 40 women imprisoned for financial offenses were recently transferred to Evin's women's ward, and restrictions increased following their arrival, another source told Iran International.

Prison authorities have justified some of the tighter rules by pointing to the presence of non-political prisoners. Women imprisoned for financial offenses now make up around half of those held in the ward.

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Iran International reported on July 12 that women protested the transfer over overcrowding and the failure to separate prisoners according to offense. Special prison guards entered the ward and beat several protesters with batons.

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Some political prisoners view the mixing of political and financial prisoners as a deliberate policy intended to weaken collective resistance to restrictions.

Evin's women's ward has become a center of political prisoner activism in recent years, with women staging protests and hunger strikes over executions and other political and social issues.

The Alaj platform – whose name means “remedy” or “cure” in Persian – accepts information through its website, a Telegram bot and Iran's Bale messaging service.

“Alaj operates with the aim of safeguarding national security against anti-Iranian currents,” the Guards-affiliated Fars News Agency said in announcing the project on Monday.

State television also promoted Alaj, giving wider exposure to a system Iranian media had previously discussed but not promoted on the same scale.

Alaj says it has identified and monitored 1,600 people, including 600 identified through reports from members of the public, according to Iranian state media.

Its website publishes information about Iranians abroad, including names and photographs and, in some cases, national identification numbers, dates of birth and fathers' names.

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The platform says it targets people outside Iran who act “against the country's interests and security,” including those advocating sanctions or military action and members of separatist groups.

Alaj also lists potential measures against people it identifies, including freezing assets and withdrawing access to consular and citizenship services.

The project's name carries a pointed connotation. Alaj translates as “remedy” or “cure,” framing the people targeted by the platform as a problem to be treated.

People ridicule campaign

Responses to the post promoting Alaj ranged from mockery of Iran's security establishment to explicit warnings that people who inform on opponents could themselves be identified and punished in the future.

One commenter predicted the platform would be hacked and the identities of those submitting reports made public, arguing that previous breaches of major Iranian institutions gave little reason to trust Alaj with sensitive information.

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Another suggested the government's turn could eventually come, writing that authorities appeared to have little hope left even of securing future amnesty.

Others portrayed the campaign as a tactic opponents of the Islamic Republic could use themselves. One user said supporters of the Revolutionary Guards and Hamas abroad had already been publicly identified by opponents and several had lost their jobs as a result.

Several responses contrasted the effort to identify ordinary Iranians overseas with Israel's apparent intelligence penetration inside Iran.

“Start with the infiltrators inside your own ranks,” one person wrote, arguing that Israeli intelligence appeared to have extensive knowledge of Iranian officials.

Another mocked the limits of Iran's controls over information, asking whether authorities intended to “nationalize the internet outside the country” to prevent overseas opposition activity.

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Other comments were considerably more explicit, threatening revenge against people who cooperate with Alaj after any future change of government.

Pezeshkian targets Iranians abroad

The campaign coincides with sharper official rhetoric toward politically active Iranians overseas.

“Some Iranians abroad, aligning themselves with the enemy, seek to incite the public within the country,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said during a social event on Monday, according to state media.

Pezeshkian accused Washington of seeking “to cause social collapse through the problems and restrictions they have imposed,” and said preserving domestic unity would prevent Iran from yielding to US pressure.

Guards used similar model at home

Alaj follows a similar crowdsourcing project launched by the Revolutionary Guards Intelligence Organization in June to identify citizen journalists and social-media users inside Iran.

Known as Jasous-Yab, or “Spy Finder,” the project used channels on the Iranian Eitaa and Bale messaging platforms to ask members of the public to identify people photographing or filming missile strikes and other sensitive locations.

“This time, you identify the spies,” the campaign told users.

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People were instructed to scrutinize buildings, roads, sounds, distances and other details visible in photographs and videos to determine where material had been recorded and submit information to Revolutionary Guards intelligence.

The project also sought to identify social-media users opposing the Islamic Republic, extending its scope beyond people recording events on the ground.

Alaj takes that crowdsourcing model beyond Iran's borders, asking citizens to help identify overseas opponents and feeding the resulting information into a system that advertises consequences for those it identifies.

Overseas operations

Iranian intelligence activity targeting dissidents and journalists overseas has previously prompted criminal investigations, sanctions and warnings from Western governments.

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  Western powers condemn Iran over targeting opponents abroad

Authorities in the United States and Europe have accused Iranian security bodies and people working on their behalf of conducting surveillance and plotting abductions or killings of opponents abroad.

Activities linked to Alaj could therefore face scrutiny under espionage, foreign-interference or transnational-repression laws in countries where targets live, depending on how information is gathered and subsequently used.