The protests of the 2022–23 Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement — sparked by the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini — brought women’s issues squarely to the center of the political stage, marking a new phase in the estrangement between the Islamic Republic and Iranian society. Unlike earlier mass protests rooted in economic grievances, the WLF movement was from the outset a direct ideological challenge to the regime. However, efforts to formalize opposition faltered amid disunity, while Tehran escalated its hybrid war against dissent. The Islamic Republic’s war against the Iranian people is part of its global war against liberal democracy. Liberal democracies must build a coordinated multinational alliance to confront this cold war on democracy. The Realpolitik-based worldview is ill-suited to the current global reality — and to the war being waged against liberal democracy.
For nearly half a century, Western liberal democracies have preferred to engage the theocracy that is the Islamic Republic of Iran almost solely through the paradigm of Realpolitik. The Islamist regime’s denial of freedom to Iran’s people and widespread, persistent, and systematic human-rights abuses are mentioned relatively little by Western powers. Instead, their focus rests squarely on containing Iran’s nuclear program and destabilizing influence in the broader Middle East, while the Islamic Republic’s totalitarian character is implicitly accommodated as an entrenched internal reality. The current talks between the United States and Iran over the nuclear program rest on the same premise. That the Realpolitik approach has never worked in dealings with Tehran seems not to be a consideration.
The dreary familiarity of this type of negotiation should not be allowed to obscure the prospect that the current diplomatic dynamic represents a setback to the cause of liberty — especially given the remarkable achievements of the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement in 2022 and 2023. The movement’s success in undermining the theocracy’s legitimacy on the world stage was unprecedented in the history of Iranians’ struggles against the totalitarian regime that dominates their country, not least because WLF influenced — if only for a time — the behavior of Western democratic leaders. Two and a half years later, it is time to revisit this momentous movement in its historical and international contexts and assess both its achievements and its shortcomings.
For years, Iran’s theocracy has waged a brutal war on its own citizens, putting violence at the center of its interactions with them. This long war has seen many battles, the latest being the one fought against the WLF movement — a massive and still ongoing campaign of savage repression that has, for now, managed to contain it. In March 2025, the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) on the Islamic Republic of Iran reported that security forces had killed 551 protesters through the abusive use of force, and arrested about twenty-thousand. The FFM further decried the widespread use of torture, sexual violence, and rape; summary executions and systemic violations of detainees’ and defendants’ due-process rights; and the harassment and intimidation of victims’ families. Based on its findings, the report charged Iranian authorities with “gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity.”1
The government’s resort to such crimes testifies to the acute threat that the WLF movement posed (and poses) to the regime. By the end of 2022, protests had erupted in about 164 cities and towns, including places with no history of unrest. Nearly 150 universities, high schools, businesses, and diverse groups — oil workers, Tehran bazaar merchants, teachers, lawyers, artists, athletes, and doctors — joined in various forms.2 Despite mass arrests and violent crackdowns, protests (though growing more sporadic) continued into early 2023.
Ironically, the regime’s decades of success at suppressing organized dissent had left its security forces poorly prepared to confront this leaderless, unstructured uprising. Any woman walking down any street in any city or town could ignite protest simply by removing her headscarf and shouting “Woman, Life, Freedom!” Such acts could instantly rally passersby, spark small demonstrations, and draw support from honking drivers or residents chanting from their windows or balconies. One woman’s spontaneous defiance could become a flashpoint, the nucleus of a protest. The protests’ unpredictability, along with the boldness of Generation Z — the movement’s youthful driving force — posed a serious challenge to authorities. As a figure close to the regime and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) lamented:
This generation is not afraid of beatings — they resist. Yesterday, we confronted them for an hour. In the past, when we attacked, they would run. Now . . . they don’t leave. On some streets, we’re pelted with stones, flowerpots, even irons from the thirty buildings lining the road.3
It is far from clear that the regime has overcome this social challenge — that violence has once again prevailed and kept the theocracy firmly in control. The WLF movement is the latest round in a long-running battle between the regime and the people it rules. Neither the first nor the only popular uprising by Iranians against the Islamic Republic, WLF is simply the most recent in a history of resistance that includes the 2009 Green Movement as a turning point.
That uprising against the fraudulent June 2009 presidential election was met with brutal repression, marking the end of a twelve-year chapter in the relationship between the theocracy and civil society. That chapter had begun with the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) and his “reformist” government. During those years, Iranian civil society, benefiting from limited freedoms that the state had decided to tolerate, organized numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and promoted liberal principles without directly challenging the regime’s existence.
The dialogue between the regime and civil society quickly reached an impasse, however. Civil society wanted free and fair elections, civil and political rights, the repeal of discriminatory laws against women and religious minorities, and open multiparty competition for political power. The regime would yield none of these things. The Green Movement marked the last collective attempt to reform the state from inside the parameters of the regime.
With the Green Movement’s suppression — dramatized in blood before a horrified world when a regime sniper fatally gunned down an unarmed woman named Neda Agha-Soltan in Tehran on 20 June 2009 — public attitudes changed radically, as if society had come to realize that the problem’s root was not something ancillary, but sprang directly from the Islamic Republic’s constitution and state ideology. Profound cultural changes began to manifest themselves, both in Iranians’ lifestyles and their relations with religion. The uprisings of 2017 and 2019 reflected this ongoing cultural and ideological transformation.
Many Western commentators viewed the 2017 and 2019 revolts merely as outbursts of frustration over the high cost of living or rising fuel prices, dismissing the unrest as apolitical. Yet as early as 2017, protesters’ slogans made their agenda unmistakable: “The Supreme Leader has become God, while the people sink into misery”; “Death to the dictator, death to the rule of the theologian”; “What a mistake it was to have made the revolution.” Protesters set fire to the offices of “Friday-prayer leaders,” Shia clerics named by the regime to act as key spreaders of its propaganda. Ominously for the powerholders in Tehran, many protesters were from the lower middle classes or were poor day laborers — the same disadvantaged groups that had long formed the Islamic Republic’s social base. Now they were out in the streets saying openly that religious despotism was the root of their suffering.
“Our enemy is right here; they lie when they say it’s America” was among the slogans chanted during the 2017 and 2019 protests. It reflected how society had come to realize that its own government had become an alien, hostile force. The theocracy’s transformation into a foe in the minds of Iranians had long been underway, but 2017 was the year this sense of the regime as internal enemy went public and erupted.
The 2017 and 2019 uprisings were not the only signs of deep social and cultural shifts in Iranian society. For years, Iranian women had been quietly — but forcefully — pushing back against the mandatory veil. With support from activists for women’s rights living in the diaspora, women in Iran transformed social media into a virtual public space where they asserted their right to define their own identities. As I noted while writing online for the Journal of Democracy in 2022, these campaigns grew potent enough to spill from the virtual into the physical public sphere, where women began organizing small, coordinated protests against the compulsory veil.4
On 27 December 2017, a young woman (nameless at the time) made history by standing atop a utility box on Tehran’s Revolution Street, removing her headscarf, and waving it in the air on the end of a stick. She became known as the “girl of Revolution Street.” This spectacular act of defiance — an outgrowth of years of discreet civil disobedience — was recorded on smartphone video and sparked imitators throughout the country. In response, the regime began punishing campaigners against compulsory veiling with cruelly long jail terms.
The WLF movement brought women’s issues — and the veil — squarely to the center of the political stage, marking a new phase in the estrangement between the Islamic Republic and Iranian society. What set WLF apart and made it compelling for a global audience was its ideological clarity. Unlike earlier mass protests rooted in economic grievances, this movement was from the outset a direct ideological challenge to the regime. Protest slogans emphasized gender equality, freedom of expression (including the right not to wear the veil), religious liberty, and the full range of civil and political rights.
The female body had become the original target of reigning Islamic totalitarianism in March 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s founder, declared that women working in government offices would have to wear the Islamic veil. It is no coincidence, then, that the female body now lies at the heart of the enduring ideological war between state and society. When women across the country took off and burned their scarves — while men demonstrating alongside them cheered — these women were setting alight not mere bits of cloth, but the ideological fabric of the Islamist regime itself.
The dramatic incident that sparked the WLF movement came on 13 September 2022, when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini — whose Kurdish name was Jina — was arrested in Tehran by the morality police for wearing her veil loosely. She and her brother Kiarash were visiting from the northwestern city of Saqqez, in Iran’s Kurdistan Province. Her two names already reflected a regime that denies families the freedom to name their children. Mahsa was no activist; she loved dancing and dreamed of becoming a doctor. But under then-President Ebrahim Raisi — a former Islamist revolutionary judge accused of crimes against humanity — morality patrols had intensified their harassment of women. Deemed improperly dressed, Mahsa was forced into a van. Her brother, pleading for her release, was shoved aside and told she would be freed after a one-hour “reeducation” session at a police station.
Kiarash later found her at Kasra Hospital, her face swollen and her legs bruised. Anonymous citizen-journalists posting on social media had already put out mention that the morality police had become violent with a young woman and sent her to the hospital. These posts were seen by IranWire, a U.K.-based nonprofit that links journalists in the Iranian diaspora with citizen-journalists still living inside the Islamic Republic. IranWire verified the information through a trusted source — a former security-forces member with extensive contacts inside the institution. The source was able to provide Kiarash’s name and phone number.
IranWire soon went online with an interview of Kiarash plus photos of Mahsa in a coma. Two Iran-based journalists, Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi — both known for covering women’s issues — began investigating with authorization from their respective reformist newspapers, Shargh and Ham-Mihan. Hamedi entered Kasra Hospital as Mahsa’s parents were being told she would not survive. On September 16, Hamedi tweeted a photo of them embracing in the corridor — a moment of helplessness and quiet devastation.
By that same day, news of Mahsa’s death had spread nationwide via social media and popular satellite TV programs that are beamed into Iran from the diaspora. Niloofar Hamedi’s photo of Mahsa’s parents had gone viral. Mahsa was now the face of women victimized by the Islamic Republic. Protesters — many but not all female — gathered outside Kasra Hospital. There were arrests. Thanks to the internet and the diaspora, the Islamic Republic’s killing of Mahsa could not be kept quiet.
Elaheh Mohammadi traveled to Kurdistan to cover Mahsa’s funeral. Mohammadi’s account ran in Ham-Mihan under the title “A Land of Sorrow.” The article omitted the chanting of antiregime slogans, but did mention the “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan. Videos circulated on social media and were picked up by Radio Farda, Voice of America, and Iran International, reaching millions inside and outside Iran. Mahsa’s funeral and the subsequent protests and repression became a template replicated nationwide.
The protests around the funeral had begun brewing on September 15, when news of the attack on Mahsa reached Saqqez, a city of about 165,000 people where Mahsa had many relatives and acquaintances. Determined to give the young woman a dignified funeral — something routinely denied to victims of lethal state violence — residents formed groups to watch the town’s entrances overnight and meet the ambulance that would be transporting her remains from the airport. Videos posted online showed people gathering at Aychi Cemetery before dawn. Word had been passed that the funeral would start at 10 a.m. The ambulance arrived before then and security forces wanted to rush things, but Mahsa’s father, Amjad Amini, refused. By then, thousands had gathered. The silence was so deep, people could hear each other breathe. Diako Alavi, a teacher from Saqqez who is now a refugee in France, was there. Later, he gave an account to IranWire. As he recalls:
Suddenly . . . a well-known labor activist cuts through the crowd with his cries, as if slapping thousands of people in the face: “Honorable people of Saqqez, what was this girl’s crime? She could have been my daughter, she could have been your daughter, she could have been dear to any one of us. . . . How much longer must we endure this injustice?”5
The crowd erupted in chants of “A martyr never dies.” Masked plainclothes agents climbed onto the roof of the cemetery’s mosque to film the gathering. Enraged, people raised their fists and chanted “Death to the dictator.” Some younger mourners chased and apprehended the agents. They were released after older attendees intervened, but their phones and cameras were seized and destroyed. What followed revealed the deep cultural shifts driving the WLF movement: As Jina was carried to her grave, no one recited the shahada, the customary Islamic declaration of faith that begins “There is no god but Allah.”
Alavi relates that instead, people said things such as “They killed her over her headscarf — how long must we endure this disgrace?” Later, at her graveside, there were cries of “Death to the dictator,” “Kurdistan is the grave of fascists,” and “Woman, Life, Freedom!” A Sunni cleric tried to lead the funeral prayer for Jina, but the mourners refused to pray and instead shouted “This very religion is what caused her death!” Women and girls took off their headscarves and twirled them in the air as the girl of Revolution Street had done five years earlier. The crowd applauded, then joined in a unified chant: “Woman, Life, Freedom!” — a slogan that spread like wildfire. From city to city, women and girls removed their scarves, many setting them ablaze, and echoed the cry: “Woman, Life, Freedom!”
One might ask why, among the regime’s countless crimes — summary executions, stonings, amputations, floggings — it was the unintentional killing of an apolitical young woman from a law-abiding family that sparked an unprecedented nationwide uprising. The answer lay in the words of the man who broke the silence in the cemetery: “What was this girl’s crime?” he asked, reminding the crowd that because she had done nothing, she could have been any of them. Her death was a stark reminder of how the state had broken any covenant with society.
As early as February 1979, the month he returned from exile in France to take over Iran after the ailing shah had left the country, Khomeini had told Iranians to expect not a normal state, but a theocracy that would insist on treating political authority as a branch of religious authority. In a speech on February 3, he declared: “Islam is a school that aims to make man in all aspects, not only to make him a material being but also a divine one. Islam considers all the facets of human life. . . . Islam is a religion of politics; it includes a government.”6
Mahsa’s death made it clear: Not only had the Islamic Republic deprived its citizens of normalcy, it had become their enemy, a threat to peaceful citizens. The mourners made it clear too when they refused to pray: The state’s criminal behavior was rooted in its fusion with religion. That they rebuked a Sunni mullah — someone who did not represent the Shia state religion — suggests the depth of cultural secularization and the urgent desire to separate religion from the state.
The symbiosis between dissidents inside Iran and the diaspora — first seen in the documenting and spreading of Mahsa’s story and enabled by the existence of a virtual public space — intensified as the dissident movement grew. With close to fifty-million users, social media became a place for free exchange of information and ideas despite censorship and distance. To measure the impact of this symbiosis, we must recall that the Islamic Republic’s protracted war against its own population has been waged across three distinct yet interrelated battlegrounds:
1) The narrative battleground, where the regime seeks to distort the aspirations of citizens by portraying them as loyal subjects. This front is key to shaping perceptions abroad — convincing liberal democracies that the regime’s grip is firm and that compromising with the regime is the only viable path.
2) The psychological battleground, which targets Iranian citizens directly and builds upon success on the narrative battleground. Failing to secure genuine popular support, the regime instead seeks to erode citizens’ confidence and hope by fostering the belief that any alternative to the Islamic Republic must inevitably lead to chaos even worse than the current status quo.
3) The brute-force battleground, which is the foundation of the regime’s narrative and psychological assaults. The regime has no qualms about coercing its citizens through violence and intimidation, with arrests, torture, executions, and live fire used to kill or maim.
In earlier battles, brute force erased the people’s narrative and secured the regime’s version, while instilling fear through psychological pressure. Narrative, psychological, and physical tactics were used together to silence dissent. The WLF movement disrupted this alignment — turning physical repression’s success into defeat for the regime narrative and delivering a major blow to the Islamic Republic’s campaign of psychological warfare.
As each victim’s name emerged, their Instagram posts were swiftly retrieved and preserved by fellow citizens — both inside Iran and abroad — thereby thwarting the regime’s attempts to erase these people whom it had oppressed. Iranians and the world saw their youthful faces laughing, singing, and sharing their dreams. For the first time, global media focused on their lives, their struggles, and their tragic deaths. Far from vanishing, they became posthumous heroes whose stories crossed borders and stirred consciences around the world. In absentia, they became recruits in the war of narratives — rendering the regime’s version inaudible at home and even more so abroad.
Within days of Jina’s death, a groundbreaking grassroots initiative emerged, using social media as a consultative assembly of sorts. Iranians were invited to post tweet-length reasons for protesting, all beginning with “Baraye” (“Because of” or “For the sake of”). By September 20, thousands had joined, each one of their messages forming a fraction of one collective voice. On September 28, singer Shervin Hajipour set 29 of these tweets to music, creating the song Baraye in tribute to the movement. Arrested the next day, he saw the song vanish from his Instagram account, only for it to spread via other IG accounts and online channels as widely as had the “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan. Within 48 hours, his song had received forty-million views.
The protests had found an anthem — crafted by the people themselves (with help from Hajipour) through a spontaneous virtual consultation, as if an informal general will had taken shape. Its worldview stood in stark contrast to Khomeini’s vision of homo Islamicus, which denied citizens their autonomy and their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Baraye was a poetic and musical declaration of independence from a totalitarian theocracy, the voice of a citizenry yearning for freedom. Beneath the song’s lyrical form lay a juridical and philosophical subtext: an indictment of a regime guilty of systemic crimes, and a reclaiming of inalienable rights. Though vastly different in form and historical context from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Baraye was its spiritual kin. The song resonated deeply with Iranians — and with global audiences — because of its universal, inclusive, feminist, liberal, humane, and patriotic message.
The anthem and the hashtag “Mahsa_Amini” (used in half a billion tweets) became key vehicles for international solidarity with the movement, but not the only ones. On September 20, Minu Majidi, a middle-class mother and grandmother, joined young protesters in Kermanshah, a city in the Kurdish region of western Iran. While chanting slogans, she was shot from behind at close range by regime agents and died within minutes. Ten days later, her daughter, Roya Piraei, posted a photograph of herself at her mother’s grave. In that picture, Roya gazes solemnly into the camera with her hair cut very short and the long locks that she had shorn off grasped in her left hand. Like Baraye, the image went viral.
By standing unveiled and holding the tresses she had cut off, Piraei transformed a traditional mourning ritual into a modern act of defiance, reclaiming ownership of her hair and rejecting the state’s control. As artists around the world sang Baraye, women globally began cutting their hair in solidarity. These powerful gestures extended beyond civil society — activists, musicians, artists, intellectuals, celebrities — to include leaders in liberal democracies. Female politicians posted videos of themselves cutting strands of hair in admiration and support of Iranian women.
Behind these high-profile expressions of support was the unprecedented mobilization of the Iranian diaspora. Hundreds of thousands around the world were electrified by the movement and felt compelled to act. They formed collectives and organized massive solidarity marches — from New Zealand to Los Angeles, Toronto to Strasbourg, Istanbul to Seoul, and notably in Washington, London, and Paris. In Berlin alone, eighty-thousand people marched.
The diaspora had spontaneously opened a new global front against the Islamic Republic — fought on the narrative and psychological battlegrounds and with far-reaching political consequences. These were not the traumatized newcomers who had left Iran late in the last century, but well-integrated, influential second-generation dual nationals with deep emotional ties to Iran. In a matter of months, as young protesters in Iran held their physical ground and the death toll rose daily, their allies abroad gained virtual ground in the narrative battle, determined to stop the bloodshed in Iran. What the Islamic regime’s propaganda had built over three decades in the West unraveled. In turn, the unprecedented wave of global solidarity boosted protesters’ morale inside Iran, as they saw their struggle reshaping democratic leaders’ perception of the regime.
Building on these gains, a network of diaspora human-rights organizations played a key role in advancing a long-held but elusive goal: blocking the Islamic Republic from receiving a seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women. They joined forces with prominent women from around the world as well as the NGO Vital Voices. Their October 30 open letter demanding Iran’s exclusion gathered a hundred-thousand signatures, including those of Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and other high-profile women worldwide.7
Around the same time, the prime minister of Canada marched with demonstrators in Ottawa while the vice-president of the United States met with female dissidents. Iranian human-rights activists addressed a UN Security Council session called by Albania and the United States. As television beamed them into Iranian homes, the activists condemned the regime’s crimes, echoed the protesters’ voices, stressed that the Islamic Republic did not represent the Iranian people, and called for stronger international support, including an independent fact-finding mission to investigate state crimes.
On November 11, French president Emmanuel Macron met with four female dissidents from different generations — each a victim of violence by the Islamic Republic.8 After the meeting, Macron publicly voiced France’s “admiration, respect, and support” for Iranian women’s struggle, calling it a fight for universal values. He noted that the younger generation’s attitudes and actions disprove the claim that such values do not apply in Iran.9 Macron’s statement stood as the clearest proof of the WLF movement’s victory on the narrative front. The French president openly acknowledged that what the world had been told for years about Iranian society, women, and cultural norms was simply not true.
Similar meetings across Europe saw dissidents urge stronger UN action and call on liberal democracies to back up their rhetoric by designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist group, and by diplomatically isolating the Islamic Republic.
As 2022 headed toward 2023, unprecedented diplomatic victories over the Islamic Republic were in the offing. On November 18, prominent Iranian dissidents spoke at the Halifax International Security Forum. A week later, the UN Human Rights Council set up the FFM to investigate state crimes related to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement — laying the groundwork for future prosecutions. On December 14, in a historic decision, the UN Economic and Social Council voted to expel Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women.
In early 2023, the World Economic Forum invited dissidents instead of regime figures to Davos, and the Munich Security Conference gave the WLF a prestigious platform from which to address world leaders. The movement also received major honors, including the European Union’s Sakharov Prize, Freedom House’s Freedom Award, and the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to imprisoned activist Narges Mohammadi. Shervin Hajipour had been jailed in September, but was out on bail in Iran when, in February 2023, the First Lady of the United States presented his song with a “special merit” Grammy Award recognizing its contribution to social change in Iran.
Within Iran, efforts to organize the leaderless movement included Tehran Youth, an underground group that mobilized thousands across towns by mid-October 2022. On December 11, the group issued a manifesto rooted in human rights, popular sovereignty, gender and ethnic equality, and secular governance.10 Using Twitter and Telegram, the group remained clandestine, so its impact was hard to assess.
In response to these victories, the Islamic Republic hardened still further. The first execution of a dissident for protesting Jina’s death came on 8 December 2022. Mohsen Shekari had been detained in Tehran in late September. Officially, his crime was moharebeh (“enmity against God”), a vaguely defined violation that the Islamic Republic uses as a catchall capital offense.11 More executions would follow: The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (iranrights.org) documented that executions jumped from 579 in 2022 to 811 in 2023, and then to 942 in 2024.12 Narrative and diplomatic wins against the Islamist regime were not reducing its will to commit violence. Prominent dissidents and anonymous groups urged the diaspora to form a coalition that could represent the WLF movement globally. These calls, along with the mounting humanitarian crisis, prompted influential expatriate dissidents to pursue unity. Some Western interlocutors, looking for a counterpart that they could officially engage, also wanted this.
From secret meetings there emerged a self-appointed group including Iran’s Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi; Kurdish leader Abdullah Mohtadi; journalist and campaigner against mandatory veiling Masih Alinejad; human-rights lawyer and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi; actress and human-rights advocate Nazanin Boniadi; former soccer star Ali Karimi; actress Golshifteh Farahani; and Hamed Esmaeilion, a dentist and writer whose wife and daughter had been killed when the IRGC deliberately shot down Ukrainian Airlines Flight PS752 near Tehran in January 2020. In the wake of his loss, Esmaeilion had cofounded the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, which became central to the pursuit of justice and helped the diaspora to organize WLF solidarity marches worldwide, including the major demonstration in Berlin.
The criteria behind the coalition’s formation were never disclosed. Its members were of two main types: newly politicized celebrities such as Karimi and Farahani with their millions of social-media followers, and seasoned rights activists such as Alinejad, Boniadi, and Ebadi with their international recognition and outreach. Reza Pahlavi, the last shah’s 65-year-old son, was the only figure whose name had been chanted during the 2017 and 2019 protests in Iran. He left Iran as a teenager and many see him as a reminder of a better time when, despite the absence of political freedom, the state upheld citizens’ dignity and welfare. Esmaeilion enjoyed the diaspora’s trust and respect while Mohtadi, from the left-wing Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, was seen as an indispensable representative of the Kurds, who form about a tenth of Iran’s total population of 92 million.
Meeting in public on 10 February 2023 at Georgetown University, the group dubbed itself the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran (ADFI). It presented itself as a unifying umbrella soon to be guided by the Mahsa Charter, its political and ideological framework. The public welcomed the initiative, hoping that it would generate international pressure to halt the regime’s assault on protesters. On March 9, the Mahsa Charter appeared over the names of six initial signatories (the two celebrities, Farahani and Karimi, had left the group).13 The six affirmed their shared belief in the need to “overcome” the Islamic regime and build a “free and democratic” Iran.
As the Charter noted, ADFI’s main mission was to lobby democratic governments so that they would press the Islamic Republic to curb its violence, revoke death sentences against protesters, and recognize the Alliance and the Mahsa Charter. The “common values” meant to guide the transition from the Islamic Republic to a democratic Iran formed the Charter’s second part. Here, the document overreached. The drafters had gone beyond calling for universal human rights, popular sovereignty, the separation of religion from the state, and free and fair elections to address constitutional, legislative, and policy matters that were outside the purview of a self-appointed emergency group. Unlike the Second Continental Congress when it crafted the Declaration of Independence with an eye to (as John Adams would later put it) “making thirteen clocks strike as one,” or Charles de Gaulle when he postponed divisive “postwar” topics in order to keep his Free French movement focused on helping the Allies to beat the Nazis and liberate France from German occupation, the ADFI leaders needlessly and prematurely plunged into debates that they should have avoided.
This political blunder proved costly, pitting royalists and nationalists against federalists and allowing the mullahs’ regime to sow division and distraction. Inside and outside Iran, other dissidents began drafting and publishing their own charters. The irony was that all seemed to agree on the liberal-democratic fundamentals.
Assessing their position, strengths, and weaknesses; anticipating the regime’s next moves following its partial defeats on the narrative and diplomatic fronts; and building on the movement’s gains to mitigate state violence should have been ADFI’s urgent priorities. Its failure to meet the historical moment is evidenced by the speed of its collapse: It took three months to publish a charter but fell apart in half that time. The regime, by contrast, did exactly what ADFI had failed to do: It evaluated its setbacks and adapted its strategy in the hybrid hot and cold war that it was waging against the dissident movement. Taking stock of defeats at the UN and other international forums as well as the growing Western reluctance to engage Tehran, the Islamic Republic’s diplomats singled out the diaspora’s catalytic role and called for a robust counteroffensive.14
After retaking Iran’s streets through brute force, the regime intensified its hybrid war against the diaspora. In 2023, Western authorities foiled several assassination plots targeting prominent diaspora journalists. Since its founding, the Islamic Republic has killed more than five-hundred dissidents abroad. This asymmetric warfare is reinforced by aggressive cyber and disinformation campaigns. Ironically, the regime has turned its narrative defeat into a weapon, exploiting it to sow discord. Soon after the diaspora’s united solidarity marches, imposters posing as monarchists or ethnic secessionists began violently disrupting rallies, effectively deterring public participation. At the same time, “extreme royalists” flooded social media to discredit human-rights defenders and prodemocracy voices, many of whom also faced hacking attacks.15 In a reprise of one of the ploys that the KGB had used against Soviet dissidents, Islamic Republic mouthpieces posing as dissidents accused genuine Iranian dissidents of being regime collaborators. As always, the intent was to sow distrust and discord in opposition ranks.
In a striking shift, the Islamic Republic now uses a secular autocratic front (for example, online accounts purporting to be the work of “extreme royalists”) to undermine liberal democracy rather than defending its own Islamist ideology. This is making it increasingly hard for the opposition to distinguish between regime agents and an authentic autocratic opposition inspired by the global rise of authoritarianism.
Because of their effective work at the United Nations and other international forums, Iranian human-rights organizations have been targeted by incessant defamation campaigns. Through its “royalist opposition” proxies, the regime seeks to undermine public confidence in these groups. The funding that has sustained their work over the past two decades is the primary target of these calumnies. By repeating ad nauseam the claim that rights groups are “venal” confidence tricksters merely looking to lure funding and donations (often from Western governments), the defamation campaign aims to convince the public that those who defend human rights secretly want to keep the regime in place so that they can make a profit off its violations.
Infiltrating the opposition has long been among the regime’s staple practices, but never at this scale. That is the mullahs’ backhanded tribute to the extraordinary challenge posed by the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Unfortunately, mass infiltration has also proven effective, leaving dissidents both inside and outside the country confused. On the first anniversary of Jina Mahsa’s murder, regime media celebrated ADFI’s unraveling and the demobilization of opposition in the diaspora. Yet these psychological victories will not help the Islamic Republic contain the profound, indeed tectonic, cultural and ideological shifts that are occurring inside Iran. Despite ongoing campaigns of terror and intimidation, the regime continues to face widespread civil disobedience over mandatory veiling.
We are witnessing today a showdown between a regime that is ideologically defeated and paralyzed in its governance, and a civil society that shows liberal-democratic leanings and aspirations but is under sharp duress, leaderless, and politically disoriented. Dissidents inside and outside Iran are striving to overcome a toxic disinformation war and to restore a measure of truth and civility to the social-media ecosystem. In doing so, they are part of a global resistance to the worldwide assault by autocracies on liberal democracies. While their enemy commands Iran’s military, financial, and economic resources — and benefits from the support of superpowers such as China and Russia — Iranian dissidents rely on their faith in democracy and not much else. They need intelligence to identify the sources of the attacks they face, and physical as well as legal protection to resist and withstand these multifaceted assaults. Only democratic states, equipped with a long-term strategy for the global defense of liberal democracy, can provide this kind of support. They cannot expect Iran’s democratic opposition to build a viable coalition if the Islamic Republic continues to be allowed to set up false exile networks inside democracies, disrupt dissident activities, and even send assassins to plot the murder of Iranian dissidents on foreign soil.
The Islamic regime’s war against its own people is part of its global war against liberal democracy, a war waged through hostage-taking and the sponsorship of terror. Confronting the Islamic Republic along the domestic front of this war now stand countless ordinary Iranians. Their resistance is nonviolent. They have no weapons beyond their voices, nor do they want any. Honors and awards bestowed in the West on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement may serve as valuable ammunition for use along the conflict’s psychological battle lines, but this struggle is not going to be won by collecting accolades from Western elites and celebrities. Liberal democracies must build a coordinated multinational alliance to confront this cold war on democracy. The Realpolitik-based worldview is as ill-suited to the current global reality — and to the war being waged against liberal democracy — as isolationism was in 1939.
NOTES
1. “Advance Summary of the Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran to the 58th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, March 2025,” www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/ffmi-iran/ffm-iran-summary-report-a-hrc-58-63.pdf.
2. See Human Rights Activists News Agency, “Woman, Life, Freedom: A Comprehensive Report of the First 82 Days of Nationwide Protests in Iran (Sep–Dec 2022),” September–December 2022, www.en-hrana.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/82-Day-WLF-Protest-in-Iran-2022-English.pdf.
3. See the 31 October 2022 speech by Pouyan Hosseinpour of the IRGC-adjacent Seraj Cyberspace Organization at www.aparat.com/v/g1513p5. He spoke in Farsi; the translation into English of his remark is by me.
4. Ladan Boroumand, “Why Women Are Leading the Fight in Iran,” Journal of Democracy, September 2022, www.journalofdemocracy.org/online-exclusive/why-women-are-leading-the-fight-in-iran.
5. This is Alavi’s narrative as published in Farsi by IranWire. The translation of the quote into English is by me. For the original, see https://iranwire.com/fa/blogs/120610.
6. An English-language translation of Khomeini’s 3 February 1979 speech at Tehran’s Alawi School can be found in Sahifeh-ye Imam: An Anthology of Imam Khomeini’s Speeches, Messages, Interviews, Decrees, Religious Permissions, and Letters, vol. 6 (Tehran: Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works, n.d.), 41, http://staticsml.imam-khomeini.ir/en/File/NewsAttachment/2014/1700-Sahifeh-ye%20Imam-Vol%206.pdf.
7. “Vital Voices Partners with Global Women Leaders Calling for Immediate Expulsion of the Islamic Republic of Iran from the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women,” Vital Voices, 30 October 2022, www.vitalvoices.org/news-articles/news/vital-voices-partners-with-global-women-leaders-calling-for-immediate-expulsion-of-the-islamic-republic-of-iran-from-the-un-commission-on-the-status-of-women.
8. At the invitation of the French government, I was included in this group. The other members were Masih Alinejad, Shima Babaei, and Roya Piraei.
9. “‘Admiration, respect, soutien’: le message d’Emmanuel Macron aux femmes iraniennes,” Radio France, 14 November 2022, www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/l-invite-de-8h20-le-grand-entretien/l-invite-de-8h20-le-grand-entretien-du-lundi-14-novembre-2022-8887150.
10. Maryam Sinaiee, “Revolutionary Youth Groups in Iran Publish Manifesto for Future,” Iran International, 11 December 2022, www.iranintl.com/en/202212111841.
11. Mohsen Shekari’s case is recorded by Omid: A Memorial in Defense of Human Rights in Iran at www.iranrights.org/memorial/story/-8734/mohsen-shekari. See also L. Tarighi, ed., “Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran 2022,” Iran Human Rights, April 2023, 52, https://iranhr.net/media/files/Rapport_iran_2022_PirQr2V.pdf.
12. It should be noted that not all executions in Iran are for protesting; drug trafficking is also a common charge in capital cases. As of this writing in early June 2025, the Boroumand Center is reporting the total number of executions for the current year as 487, with 125 executions in May 2025 alone. For context, the Center has documented 248 executions as the number for 2020, and 317 for 2021. Thus from 2021 through 2024, the annual number of executions almost tripled.
13. “The Charter of Solidarity and Alliance for Freedom (The Mahsa Charter),” Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran, 9 March 2023, https://adfiran.com/en/docs/mahsa-charter.
14. On 18 February 2023, during the nationwide protests following the killing of Mahsa Amini, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi spoke of his fear that a “global onslaught” was underway to “delegitimize the Islamic Republic” and tarnish its image. See https://x.com/hafezeh_tarikhi/status/1825843497288511742. He spoke in Farsi; the English translation is mine.
15. On 1 August 2024, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia handed down an indictment of three named men working for the IRGC plus “other persons known and unknown” for hacking attacks. I am listed as “Victim 9.”
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