Cracks in Iran’s brutal regime are now visible

Millions are risking their lives to prove the Islamic Republic does not speak for the Iranian people

People gather during a protest on 8 January in Tehran. Photo by Getty Images.

For those who remember the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Iranian people’s courageous uprising against their repressive theocratic regime carries that same longing anticipation and world-shaping potential. Before these protests began in late December, the Islamic Republic was already a regime in crisis. The decapitation of its proxies, the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria – its only real regional ally – and the destruction of much of its nuclear programme by Israel and the US during the 12-Day War severely weakened its power.

At the time, the regime – and some Western pundits – believed the Iranian people would rally around the flag. Instead, the daily indignities of life under a cruel, incompetent and thieving theocracy – a life marked by chronic power outages and water scarcity – quickly rose to the fore. In October, President Masoud Pezeshkian publicly declared that relocating Iran’s capital from Tehran to the Makran region in the country’s south had become “unavoidable”, citing water shortages, over-crowding and infrastructural collapse – a rare admission of systemic failure.

Two months later, in late December, protests broke out, initially triggered by a currency collapse. The demonstrations rapidly snowballed into a revolt against the brutal Islamist regime that has ruled my homeland since 1979. What began with a small group of merchants in the Tehran bazaar quickly spread to millions of citizens across every Iranian province, posing the greatest existential threat the Islamic Republic has faced since its inception.

This is not the first time the Iranian people have demonstrated. But while past protests have centred their demands for reform or women’s rights, these protests unequivocally call for an end to theocratic rule. Many Iranians alive today have never known a secular Iran. They did not grow up in a country where women could choose their attire freely, where tourists filled its streets, where the nation was integrated into the world rather than isolated from it – and where an Iranian passport conferred dignity rather than stigma. That Iran has been systematically erased, replaced by an Islamic Republic of death and destruction.

For nearly half a century, the regime has claimed to speak for Iran. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians are risking their lives to prove that it does not – even after enduring the most brutal year of repression in decades. Iranian nationalism has become the ethos of these protests; the antidote to the regime’s Islamist fundamentalism. On the streets, protesters are heard singing Iran’s patriotic pre-revolutionary anthem “Ey Iran”, vowing that “my life be sacrificed for the pure soil of my motherland”.

In the city of Khorramabad, in western Iran, a lone protester hoisted the country’s pre-1979 Lion and Sun flag on top of a statue – rejecting the imposed identity of an occupying Islamic Republic regime. This flag, now a counter-revolution symbol, has proliferated from city to city.

Iran’s youth inherited the Islamic Republic from the protests of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, who ousted the Western-allied monarchy. Today, they are bravely at the forefront of history – leading chants, scaling street poles to disable surveillance cameras, and forming human shields to protect fellow protesters. Many are chanting the name of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince and son of the man their parents and grandparents deposed five decades before. But there is no generational divide here: this rebellion transcends age. In footage circulating on social media, a bloodied, unveiled elderly woman can be seen marching on, declaring: “I am not afraid; I’ve been dead for 47 years.”

Amid dire food and water shortages, Iranians are not pleading for aid, but refusing to submit. In the western city of Abdanan, protesters tore open sacks of rice – reportedly sourced from a shop affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards – and hurled the grain into the air, even as hyperinflation has rendered basic food unaffordable. As the late Iranian poet and dissident Fereydoun Farrokhzad once said, “If you try to feed a sparrow, it will flee – for it knows that freedom is worth far more than bread.”

Cracks are visible in places that once seemed unbreakable. A video of a frail Shia cleric denouncing both the founder of the Islamic Republic and the current supreme leader as murderers has gone viral, as has footage in which the police appear to be cheering on protesters in Abdanan.

As the protests gained momentum, the regime resorted to its usual tactics: throttling the internet to sever communication and coordination and obscure state violence. Phone lines have also been cut. Starlink satellite access has allowed very limited connectivity, although that too was increasingly jammed from around 10 January. And while the Iranian people are muted, regime officials speak freely to the world – dangling deals to drown out demands for overthrow.

But when the regime plunged Tehran into darkness in a bid to stifle the growing protests, the people responded with a synchronised wave of light. Thousands of phone torches flickered on in unison, revealing just how many stood defiant. Fragments of the uprising are reaching us in snippets of video and pieces of audio. A man in his thirties left a voice message before taking to the streets: “Anything might happen tonight. I’ve waited 32 years for this day. If I’m gone, find joy – but remember me.” Reports are surfacing that thousands of protesters have been murdered behind the cloak of a communication blackout, and thousands more have been detained. As I write, video and audio proof of atrocities is emerging, including rows of body bags at a morgue in Tehran and the voices of doctors desperately seeking help in treating critically injured protesters.

For all their bravery, the Iranian people shouldn’t be left to fight the murderous regime on their own. Before we lost contact, a prominent dissident in Iran asked me to convey this message: “We need restoration and protection of internet access. An end to Western negotiations with any faction of this regime. We need every powerful tool available to stop the repression and killing of civilians.”

Iran is meeting its moment – and now, it is the world’s turn.

[Further reading: Iran is on the verge of revolution]