On the streets of Tehran or in exile, they are the ones who challenge the regime after the death of Mahsa Amini, the young woman arrested for wearing the wrong veil
“It’s happening, it’s really happening, and women are leading the way. The Iranian regime will be brought down by women,” Masih Alinejad said in a recent interview with ‘The New Yorker’. The dream that this 46-year-old Iranian activist has been living since 2009 exile, works, comes out with every handkerchief a woman burns in the streets of the Islamic republic.For ten days, thousands of Iranians protested the use of the mandatory veil and the spark of anger was death at the hands of the moral police of young Kurdish Mahsa Amini. Since then, images have been repeated of young people taking off their veils and setting fire to the streets in protest. At least 40 people have been killed and hundreds injured in the worst protests the Islamic system has witnessed since 2019 , when the streets erupted because of rising prices.
The social media accounts of Alinejad, who works as a journalist for the American channel Voice of America (VOA), are now bubbling because since 2014 she has been promoting a campaign called ‘My silent freedom’ that encourages women to record themselves on video doing forbidden things, like taking off her hijab in the middle of the street. She now has more than half a million followers on Twitter and is present in all major US media outlets to insist that “the Iranian regime will be brought down by women.” According to The New Yorker, the Islamic Republic has attempted to kill Alinejad at least twice, which is why he lives under the protection of federal police.
With each passing day, it becomes more difficult to get first-hand information about the protests. The videos, many of which are not independently verifiable, show large groups of protesters confronting security forces and burning public furniture in several cities across the country. The work in exile of activists like Alinejad serves to provide a global echo to that of reporters like Niloufar Hamedi, the first person to report what happened to Amini. The journalist from the reformist daily ‘Sharg’ is under arrest and in solitary confinement, according to her husband, Mohammad Hossein Ajorlou.
Hamedi was the first to go to Kasra Hospital where the police put Amini in a coma and took a picture of her broken parents embracing in the corridor of the medical center. That image went viral and served to warn what had happened to the 22-year-old girl during her brief detention. The reporter paid for this exclusively with the prison, and her husband wrote on Twitter that after four days of visiting and calling the Ministry of Information and Evin Prison, they had allowed him to make a short phone call. At this time, no case has been filed against him and police insist the investigation is “open”, the ‘Iranwire’ portal gathers.
Hamedi is part of the group of reporters that the regime has arrested in recent days for covering the protests and the Iranian press association is demanding the release of all of them. The regime does not want witnesses and, as usual, in every mobilization it opts for internet cuts, arrests of informers and limits the issuance of visas to foreign press. This is not the image of the Islamic Republic that they want to give the world, but while they hide it, it is an important part of that system that has expired after 43 years.
Source: La Verdad
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