Kaitlyn Hughes | news editor

Asal Hamidi, a graduate student at Duquesne who is from Iran, can not believe the events that unfolded over the past month in her home country.

On Dec. 28, protests broke out in the streets of Iran after their currency dropped to a record low against the U.S. dollar. As the days went on, chants from protesters began to oppose the current government. Iranian authorities responded with a deadly crackdown, killing 6,221 people as of Tuesday, according to the Human Rights Activist News Agency. Internet and telephone access was cut off on Jan. 8, although since then service has intermittently been restored.

Hamidi thinks it is a tragedy.

“They just ask for their basic human rights. No one should be killed or the internet shouldn’t shut down because they simply have raised their voices,” she said. “We are carrying a deep sense of grief right now.”

This is not the first time Hamidi saw protests flood the streets of Iran. While she was living there in 2022, the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini set off a wave of protests throughout the country. Amini was arrested for allegedly breaking Iran’s strict dress code, which sparked demands for democracy and the opposition of the current government. 469 protesters were killed, according to Iran Human Rights, a nonpartisan human rights organization.

“This regime tries to silence them,” Hamidi said.

Growing discontent

The Islamic Republic of Iran was created shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

“To understand the protests, one has to understand how deeply unpopular the current regime is,” said Mark Haas, a political science professor at Duquesne.

Over the years, there has been growing tension in Iran because of oppression, Haas said.

“When sparks happen or events happen which create a significant increase in opposition, all that latent tension and animosity becomes overt,” he said. “It’s the activating event in combination with significant perpetuation of hostility toward the government.”

Dina Huehn, assistant teaching professor of international relations and security studies at Duquesne, said this series of protests is a microcosm for what has been happening in Iran for the past decade.

“[The government] is failing to live up to just basic standards,” Huehn said. “The more it’s incapable of doing that, the more dissatisfied the population gets, the more you start seeing outbreaks of protest or dissent, the more the regime then cracks down, and then it turns into this vicious cycle of very heavy-handed responses that are essentially radicalizing the population and sort of breeding that discontent. And so I think what we are seeing today is a culmination of all these things.”

Hamidi said that the people of Iran want the current government to fall and for a democracy to take over.

“They don’t want a system that tells them what to do, what to say, what to wear,” she said.

Sogand Seddigh, a student at the University of Pittsburgh who is from Iran, said she feels helpless as she attends classes like normal while people in Iran are getting killed fighting for freedom.

“I wake up and I feel ashamed,” Seddigh said. “A government is supposed to protect its people, but this regime has turned against its own children.”

Alongside the mass amount of casualties, Haas said one of the factors that sets apart the current round of protests from past demonstrations is that the government feels a heightened vulnerability. This is because of the weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah as well as Syria and Russia’s inability to support the allies in the region. Additionally, Iran was in a 12-day war in June where they faced strikes from Israel and the U.S.

“You add these things up, and I think the government is feeling much more vulnerable than it has in the past,” he said. “I think there was a real fear that the protest could turn into a revolution.”

But Haas said that successful revolutions are difficult and rare.

“It’s really hard to overthrow a government when the government is willing to fire on its own citizens so consistently and without remorse,” he said. “What it would take for the protest to transform into a successful revolution, is that some powerful group has to decide not to use force.”

This either comes in the shape of the military deciding not to use force or the government leader deciding to not order the military to act. Haas said this was seen in the Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev refused to give the order to crackdown in Eastern Europe because he believed that it would engage a bloody repression to maintain the empire.

Huehn said that a revolution would be challenging to accomplish because the civilian population has no access to firearms.

Haas said he doesn’t think a revolution can succeed right now.

“Either the population has to be willing to accept mass casualties or somebody has to stop shooting. Right now, the main conditions are not in place for that,” he said.

U.S. intervention

President Donald Trump originally said that the U.S. was going to help the protesters in Iran, but he has since changed his position. He said that authorities told him that the executions have stopped. But Iranian officials said that suspects detained nationwide would face trial and execution.

Hamidi said that Trump’s intervention is a controversial and complicated topic among Iranians.

“They are so done with the regime right now it would be a better situation if the U.S. intervened,” she said.

Seddigh said she thinks Trump’s intervention would be positive.

“As someone who is in the U.S., I do want Trump to take over because at least Iranian people will benefit from it,” she said.

If Trump were to intervene, Haas said it is unclear as to what he would do.

He said that the U.S. is not going to invade Iran to overthrow the regime, so Trump is left with the choice of bombing.

“Bombing to overthrow a regime without significant force on the ground tends not to work,” Haas said.

He said if the U.S. were to drop bombs it would intensify the feelings of the government that the existence of the regime is on the line.

“It’s difficult for an outside power, even one as strong as the U.S. to overthrow the regime,” he said.

‘A rock and a hard place’

Haas said it is hard to tell what options the people of Iran have because their lives are intolerable from both a political and economic perspective. But protesters are not getting their primary demands because the regime feels threatened.

“They’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he said.

But Hamidi is hopeful that the protests will lead to positive change.

“We should keep fighting for democracy, and I believe we will get it really soon,” she said. “As long as we fight and as long as we raise our voice the world will hear us. Democracy is not something you gain overnight. It’s something you fight for all the time.”

Kaitlyn Hughes can be reached at hughesk10@duq.edu