Iran’s protests are coming to a head

Iran’s protest movement appears to be coming to a head. It’s been going on for two months, since the country’s ‘morality police’ beat Mahsa Amini, a young woman visiting Tehran, into a coma from which she never recovered earlier this year. The reason these thugs gave for dragging her into their van was that she was wearing her mandatory hijab incorrectly. Ever since, Iranians of all ages, across the country, have been on the streets, protesting for ‘women, life, freedom’. 

Now the violence of that initial act is radiating outwards. From the ominous steps being taken by the Iranian state, and the extra-legal killers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it seems those in power are increasingly prepared to take drastic action to halt and punish those taking part in the demonstrations.

This week a revolutionary court handed out the protest movement’s first formal death sentence – to a demonstrator accused, with typical theocratic flourish, of moharebeh: ‘enmity against God’.