Latest Iran Protests Likely Not Last for Tehran

In this photo taken by an individual not employed by The Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, protesters chant slogans during a protest over the death of a woman who was detained by the morality police, in downtown Tehran, Iran, Sept. 21, 2022. (AP)
In this photo taken by an individual not employed by The Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, protesters chant slogans during a protest over the death of a woman who was detained by the morality police, in downtown Tehran, Iran, Sept. 21, 2022. (AP)
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Latest Iran Protests Likely Not Last for Tehran

In this photo taken by an individual not employed by The Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, protesters chant slogans during a protest over the death of a woman who was detained by the morality police, in downtown Tehran, Iran, Sept. 21, 2022. (AP)
In this photo taken by an individual not employed by The Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, protesters chant slogans during a protest over the death of a woman who was detained by the morality police, in downtown Tehran, Iran, Sept. 21, 2022. (AP)

Only glimpses of videos that make it online show the protests convulsing Iran over the death of a 22-year-old woman who had been detained by the nation's morality police.

But those flashes show that public anger across the country, once only simmering, is now boiling.

The demonstrations surrounding the death of Mahsa Amini — and the government crackdown emerging to stifle them — represent just the latest cycle of unrest to grip Iran since its 1979 revolution.

It likely won't be the last as the country lurches between crises at home and abroad. The window through which the wider world can view them only will become more dim as authorities restrict internet access, detain journalists and tightly control all levers of the government's power.

Protests over Amini's death have spread across at least 46 Iranian cities, towns and villages. State TV has suggested that at least 41 protesters and police have been killed since the protests began Sept. 17. An Associated Press count of official statements by authorities puts the death toll at at least 13, with more than 1,200 demonstrators arrested.

But the tightening crackdown doesn't come as a surprise given Iran's modern history.

Iran's theocracy has viewed itself as under threat from the moment the late Khomeini returned to Tehran in 1979.

Bombings in 1981 blamed on dissidents killed dozens of top officials. One even paralyzed the right arm of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein launched a bloody eight-year war on Iran in which 1 million people were killed.

In Tehran, enmity toward the United States began with the American-backed 1953 coup that cemented the shah's reign. For Washington, the 1979 US Embassy hostage crisis stoked hostility toward Iran.

And the mutual distrust continues today. After the collapse of a deal in 2015 intended to curtail Tehran's nuclear ambitions, Iran amassed enough highly enriched uranium to produce an atomic bomb if it chose.

The Iranian government has dismissed the latest protests as a foreign plot, rather than an expression of public outrage over the death of a woman detained only because her mandatory headscarf, or hijab, wasn't to the morality police's liking.

Pro-government marches in Tehran and other cities echoed the official line.

The government's decision to restrict Instagram, LinkedIn and WhatsApp — three of the last Western social media apps working in the country — has limited the ability for protesters to organize and share their videos with the outside world.

Instead, only short clips find their way out, including those of security forces firing at protesters and women defiantly cutting off their hair and burning their hijabs. Security forces, including motorcycle-riding volunteers with Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, have attacked peaceful demonstrators.

There's also been footage of apparent demonstrators setting fires, flipping over police cars and fighting back against riot police.

These scenes are similar to those that occurred in 2019 after the government dropped fuel subsidies, prompting demonstrators to set gas stations ablaze and ransack banks. Rights groups say that the unrest across more than 100 cities and towns — and the government crackdown that followed — killed over 300 people and led to thousands of arrests.

Because of the internet restrictions, it remains unclear if the latest protests have eclipsed those of 2019. Exiled opposition groups and Iranian hard-liners have both used the short clips online to paint their own pictures of the unrest as the government largely remains silent.

Independent observers such as human rights activists face threats, intimidation and arrest in Iran. Text messages from the government to the public warn of criminal charges for joining demonstrations. At least 18 reporters are known to have been arrested so far in the crackdown, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Like other rounds of unrest since 2009, when millions took to the streets as part of the so-called Green Movement to protest a disputed presidential election, the latest demonstrations appear spontaneous and leaderless.

Even if a government crackdown eventually quells the protests, it likely won't eradicate the deep-seated rage.

Iran's economy has cratered, and Western sanctions have destroyed the savings of a generation. The value of the currency has plummeted, from 32,000 rials for a dollar in 2015 to 315,000 rials for a dollar in 2022. Iranian youth increasingly try to find new livelihoods abroad at whatever cost. Those left behind struggle to make ends meet.

Iranian politics have grown insular and uncompromising. In the 2021 presidential election, all serious contenders were disqualified to allow Ebrahim Raisi, a protege of Khamenei, to take the presidency in the lowest turnout vote in the republic's history.

The economic challenges and hardline political positions are only likely to solidify. Even if Iran agreed to a roadmap to restore the nuclear deal, it likely will face new US sanctions over selling so-called suicide drones to Russia to use in its ongoing war in Ukraine.

A battle over leadership could turn Iran's focus further inward. There is no designated successor for the 83-year-old Khamenei, though some analysts suggest his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, might be considered by clerics to become the next supreme leader.

Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Guard, which answers only to the supreme leader, has grown increasingly powerful both militarily and economically during the recent tensions with the West. The US Treasury said the Guard has smuggled “hundreds of millions of dollars” worth of sanctioned oil into the international market.

Both the theocracy and the Guard have financial and political incentive to continue the status quo. And with no other outlets, mass protests by the Iranian public seem likely to continue.



Syrians Return to Homs, ‘Capital of the Revolution’ 

A girl holds an independence-era Syrian flag out of the window of a bus carrying displaced Syrians returning home after years of displacement in the northern Aleppo province, at the entrance of the central city of Homs on February 10, 2025. (AFP)
A girl holds an independence-era Syrian flag out of the window of a bus carrying displaced Syrians returning home after years of displacement in the northern Aleppo province, at the entrance of the central city of Homs on February 10, 2025. (AFP)
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Syrians Return to Homs, ‘Capital of the Revolution’ 

A girl holds an independence-era Syrian flag out of the window of a bus carrying displaced Syrians returning home after years of displacement in the northern Aleppo province, at the entrance of the central city of Homs on February 10, 2025. (AFP)
A girl holds an independence-era Syrian flag out of the window of a bus carrying displaced Syrians returning home after years of displacement in the northern Aleppo province, at the entrance of the central city of Homs on February 10, 2025. (AFP)

Once dubbed the capital of the revolution against Bashar al-Assad, Homs saw some of the fiercest fighting in Syria's civil war. Now, displaced people are returning to their neighborhoods, only to find them in ruins.

It was in Homs that the opposition first took up arms to fight Assad's crackdown on peaceful protests in 2011.

The military responded by besieging and bombarding rebel areas such as Baba Amr, where US journalist Marie Colvin and French journalist Remi Ochlik were killed in a bombing in 2012.

Since Assad's ouster, people have started returning to neighborhoods they fled following successive evacuation agreements that saw Assad take back control.

"The house is burned down, there are no windows, no electricity," said Duaa Turki at her dilapidated home in Khaldiyeh neighborhood.

"We removed the rubble, laid a carpet" and moved in, said the 30-year-old mother of four.

"Despite the destruction, we're happy to be back. This is our neighborhood and our land."

Her husband spends his days looking for a job, she said, while they hope humanitarian workers begin distributing aid to help the family survive.

The siege of Homs lasted two years and killed around 2,200 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

During the siege, thousands of civilians and opposition fighters were left with nothing to eat but dried foods and grass.

In May 2014, under an evacuation deal negotiated with the former government, most of those trapped in the siege were evacuated, and two years later, Assad seized the last opposition district of Waer.

"We were besieged... without food or water, under air raids, and barrel bombings," before being evacuated to the opposition-held north, Turki said.

A boy walks past the debris of buildings in the Khaldiyeh district in Homs on February 10, 2025. (AFP)

- 'Precious soil of Homs' -

AFP journalists saw dozens of families returning to Homs from northern Syria, many of them tearful as they stepped out of the buses organized by local activists.

Among them was Adnan Abu al-Ezz, 50, whose son was wounded by shelling during the siege and who later died because soldiers at a checkpoint barred him from taking him to hospital.

"They refused to let me pass, they were mocking me," he said with tears in his eyes.

"I knew my house was nearly destroyed, but I came back to the precious soil of Homs," he said.

While protests and fighting spread across Syria over the course of the 13-year war, Homs's story of rebellion holds profound symbolism for the demonstrators.

It was there that Abdel Basset al-Sarout, a football goalkeeper in the national youth team, joined the protests and eventually took up arms.

He became something of a folk hero to many before he joined an armed group and was eventually killed in fighting.

In 2013, his story became the focus of a documentary by Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki named "The Return to Homs", which won international accolades.

Homs returnee Abu al-Moatasim, who remembers Sarout, recounted being detained for joining a protest.

When he saw security personnel approaching in a car, he prayed for "God to drop rocket on us so I die" before reaching the detention center, one of a network dotted around the country that were known for torture.

His father bribed an officer in exchange for his release a few days later, he said.

A vegetable vendor waits for customers in front of a damaged building in Homs on February 10, 2025. (AFP)

- 'Build a state' -

In Baba Amr, for a time early in the war a bastion of the opposition Free Syrian Army, there was rubble everywhere.

The army recaptured the district in March 2012, following a siege and an intense bombardment campaign.

It was there that Colvin and Ochlik were killed in a bombing of an opposition press center.

In 2019, a US court found Assad's government culpable in Colvin's death, ordering a $302.5 million judgement for what it called an "unconscionable" attack that targeted journalists.

Touring the building that housed the press center, Abdel Qader al-Anjari, 40, said he was an activist helping foreign journalists at that time.

"Here we installed the first internet router to communicate with the outside world," he said.

"Marie Colvin was martyred here, targeted by the regime because they did not want (anyone) to document what was happening," he said.

He described her as a "friend" who defied the "regime blackout imposed on journalists" and others documenting the war.

After leaving Homs, Anjari himself became an opposition fighter, and years later took part in the offensive that ousted Assad on December 8, 2024.

"Words cannot describe what I felt when I reached the outskirts of Homs," he said.

Now, he has decided to lay down his arms.

"This phase does not call for fighters, it calls for people to build a state," he said.