Woman, Life, Freedom movement

Please.

Okay, so just a little bit of context is that Ma Saimani or the Woman Life Freedom Movement, that's known by the West mostly as Woman Life Freedom Movement.

It was named, the name Ma Saimani is the name of the young girl who died in hospital after She was kind of attacked.

Nobody still knows what exactly happened, but apparently she was pushed because she was arrested by what we call the morality police.

And not just policing, possibly dying just because they don't want to wear the forced hijab.

But then it's not just that, it got way bigger.

And what also happened in January 2026 this year was actually a continuation of that woman life freedom movement still happening.

So that's a quick summary of it.

I mean, I've been covering Iran for, I mean, it's getting close to 30 years now.

And Of course, they've been frustrated and impoverished and angry for many, many years now and have managed to, you know, carve out space for themselves to have more civil liberties and social liberties through their own kind of civil disobedience campaigns, the Women Life Freedom Movement that really sort of ended dress codes in Iran.

But I didn't expect... back to them to respond to the call of Crown Prince in exile Reza Pahlavi, because for years we've covered him, you know, those of us who covered the Iraq war and saw that the role of the diaspora can be overimagined by politicians and it can be very risky to put any hopes on a diaspora leader to be part of an agenda, military or otherwise, for change, you know, in their home country.

I didn't expect them to turn out you know, in the way that they did, filling the streets of these cities across the country.

Uh, anytime that the regime faces a, a, a threat that's even reaches remotely to become an existential threat, uh, they resort to violence every time.

Every time they have done it, from the inception of the Islamic Republic, to mass executions in the '80s, to what they did, uh, to student protests in '90s, to what happened after the Green Movement, to Woman Life Freedom Movement, to right now.

Every time that the regime faces an existential threat, it resorts to death, destruction, and terror.

What we see right now, there are two tracks of executions in addition to arrests that are happening in Iran.