Washington D.C. – Today marks the solemn anniversary of the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, whose death in the custody of Iran’s morality police in September 2022 sparked the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. Her death, after she was detained for allegedly violating mandatory hijab rules, ignited nationwide protests demanding fundamental rights and freedoms.
Iranian authorities responded with severe repression, including killings, mass arrests and other serious human rights violations. Yet, at tremendous cost, Iranians themselves also won meaningful social change. Women increasingly defied mandatory hijab requirements in public, transforming social norms and effectively forcing the state to retreat from the level of enforcement that existed before the uprising, even as authorities have continued efforts to claw back those gains.
As this anniversary takes place as Iran remains under attack from an illegal war launched by the U.S. and Israel, we must consider how those with a pro-war agenda have attempted to co-opt the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. While Iranians themselves demonstrated their independence and agency and drove far-reaching societal change, others have argued that military action can deliver the rights and freedom that Iranians seek. That appropriation was on stark display in June 2025, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked “Woman, Life, Freedom” while announcing Israel had commenced bombing Iran, attempting to frame military strikes as the realization of the aspirations of the Iranian people.
These arguments crested in the next major protest movement in December 2025-January 2026, which took place between phases of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Protests started organically amid widespread economic grievances, but morphed into a confrontation with the political system as a whole. Extensive violence accompanied the protest wave, and Reza Pahlavi urged them on from outside the country, issuing calls to seize and hold city centers. Iranian security forces responded with overwhelming force on January 8 and 9, 2026, leading to thousands of protesters being killed. President Donald Trump promised that “help is on the way,” and by the end of the following month launched a massive war against Iran aimed at forcing political change, which has thus far failed to produce that outcome.
In the wake of so much bloodshed, Iranians inside and outside the country face fractured narratives. The Iranian system’s authoritarianism and human rights abuses are well documented, but so too are efforts to invoke those abuses in support of military intervention that has itself killed thousands of Iranians and left the country, the wider region and global economy reeling.
In our view, the experience of 2022 demonstrated the power of organic, grassroots movements rooted in the agency of Iranians themselves to reshape Iranian society, even in the face of severe state repression. By contrast, the war in 2026 has imposed enormous costs on Iranians while further degrading the rights and freedoms its proponents claimed military intervention would advance. Where Woman, Life, Freedom centered the agency and aspirations of Iranians themselves, war has killed, wounded and impoverished Iranians irrespective of gender, class or political ideology.
We commend the people of Iran for their bravery and perseverance in the face of brutal repression by the Iranian government and a catastrophic war imposed by the American and Israeli governments. We know that ultimately, despite the enormous obstacles they continue to encounter, the Iranian people will prevail.