On Friday, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatened to continue cracking down on protesters who have risen up against his regime, calling them “vandals” working for the Americans. Years of Western sanctions and internal mismanagement have caused Iran’s economy to crater; in response to increasing domestic anger, Iran’s government has cut off access to the internet, and protests have been met violently by security forces. (Rights groups have reported dozens of deaths; a doctor told Time magazine that six hospitals in Tehran alone had recorded more than two hundred protester deaths.) The protests are only the latest problem facing Khamenei’s regime, which had much of its leadership assassinated by Israel during a twelve-day war last June. (President Trump also ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear-enrichment sites in June.) Meanwhile, Iran’s network of allies across the Middle East has been severely weakened. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad fled the country after a revolution, which Iran had helped bloodily pacify, finally achieved its goal. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s presence and influence have shrunk following Israeli attacks over the past several years.

I recently spoke by phone with Fatemeh Shams, an associate professor of Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a feminist activist and, since 2009, has been an Iranian exile. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what has made this round of protests against the Iranian regime unique, how the regime’s humiliation by Israel has weakened its standing at home, and why the crackdown on protesters might get even more brutal than in earlier eras.

We talked in 2022 during protests in Iran that were focussed on the hijab. What do you think has changed since that previous round of major protests, and since the other rounds of protests we have seen in Iran in the past couple of decades?

The main thing that is important to keep in mind, and this is a significant change, is that it has become essentially impossible for the majority of the population to make ends meet. I don’t mean just the working classes or the lower classes. Even the majority of the middle class, who were still able to cover the cost of living until last year, are almost completely paralyzed at the moment. The cost of living has significantly increased, and one reason for that is the plummeting value of the country’s currency, which has led to an inability of merchants and traders to import goods from abroad. Then there is the extreme inflation and the lack of basic foods. My mom was just telling me that it has become hard to get cooking oil. The price of chicken has gone way up. Many small businesses have been shut down or are completely unable to operate. The government has been unable to manage the situation, and basically the society cannot survive anymore. This is a riot of a starving population. This is a riot for survival. Society cannot survive without being able to manage the cost of living.

The protests are being met by brutal crackdowns: the population was already enraged. Social freedom has been extremely limited since the regime came to power and particularly in the past couple of decades. And then there is the humiliation that the regime was met with over twelve days of war with Israel last year.

Would you say that this is the broadest discontent since the 1979 revolution, when Iran’s monarchy, led by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown by Islamic clerics?

Absolutely. I think this is an explosion. This is a moment where it’s not about social freedom anymore. It’s not about bodily autonomy. It’s about something that is much more widespread. The 2022 protests, which were unprecedented protests in their own right, were intersectional in the way that they brought people of different ethnic groups, genders, and political factions together at the beginning for the bodily autonomy of women, but then it immediately, very quickly, basically moved toward the toppling of the regime and the equality for different ethnic groups in the society. This time, though, it’s about society reaching a dead end. And when I say reaching a dead end, I mean that for the people, for the population. It’s a matter of how to be able to survive and to protect their families and to put bread and food on the table when basic goods are impossible to buy or find.

I would imagine that previous protests, which were about women’s rights or ethnic minorities, and which would sometimes be characterized as a battle between hard-liners versus moderates—all of these types of protests spark opposition, whether from men, from more conservative elements in society, or from the ethnic majority. I know you said that there was a lot of intersectional stuff happening, but I still imagine that those types of protests bring with them some cleavages that a protest in response to economic disaster would not.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that’s why these are at such a large scale. We didn’t have this large scale of protests in any round of protests in the past in Iran. I don’t know if you have looked at the videos that are coming out of certain cities, like, for example, Mashhad. That’s where I come from. It’s my home town. I grew up there and also it’s the first strategic city for Khamenei in the sense that there is a sacred shrine there, and the expansion of that shrine has been part of his ideological project. I have been shocked as a Mashhadi citizen.

Previous protests were not as big there?

No, not at all. And this is a huge blow to the regime because in Mashhad you see security forces in all corners of the city. Khamenei often gives speeches there laying out his plans for the next year. This is the last place that they would have imagined such a large-scale protest.

The slogans are really important. In the last round of protests, in the previous round, the main slogan was “Woman, Life, Freedom.” It was coming from grassroots collectives of Kurdish women. Now we are hearing slogans about “death to the dictator,” which target the core of the regime. We have also never had such large-scale strikes. Strikes are something that had an important role in toppling the Pahlavi regime in 1979. And, in the previous round of protests, we saw that the Kurdish areas were very active in the strikes. Some activists were shouting that the rest of the country, including Tehran, should join their strikes, but it didn’t happen.

This time, though, the unrest started in Ala’addin Bazaar—a well-known shopping center in Tehran, which primarily sells mobile phones and digital equipment—and it quickly spread to Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. The merchants in Ala’addin Bazaar are considered conservative, religiously speaking. They’ve never protested in the past. And this is a place for electronic equipment, mobile phones, computers—this is something about trading and being able to import and so forth. So it started in the heart of the capital, then it spread to other areas of Iran, and then seven major Kurdish parties basically came together and announced that they were joining the strike.

You mentioned the Twelve-Day War with Israel. It was significant the degree to which Iran was humiliated by first Israel and then the United States, and the degree of military power that Israel seems to have displayed over Iran. I would imagine that just from a sheer nationalist perspective, anyone watching their own country get embarrassed like that would be outraged at the regime, too.

I think we have to be very careful in addressing this question because I think there was a lot of misinterpretation in terms of how Iranians responded to the war. Iranians were obviously against the Israeli actions. The majority were enraged about this, but at the same time we have to be careful—when they’re enraged about an assault on Iranian soil, it’s not about defending the regime. This is about the population that is stuck between a murderous criminal mafia that has taken over the country and, on the other hand, Israel and the United States, who follow their own interests. So they’re not defending the regime by condemning Israel.

Humiliation is something that we have to take into account. Many military commanders were killed. I think one of the things that people realized is that this regime is not even able to protect its own high-ranking officials. If they cannot protect their own officials and military bases, how are they going to protect the nation? How are they going to protect their own people? The leader of the country was hiding for twelve days. People were essentially left on their own to figure out how to defend themselves. People could not leave certain cities. They were blocked inside their cities without having any shelter to run into.

So I think the war led to this complete lack of trust in the ability of the government to protect the nation, in the case of an invasion, under a regime that has been basically attacking Israel, attacking America, and isolating the whole nation in the name of national integrity. I’ve been hearing repeatedly, especially after the U.S. strikes and during the war, that people believe the nuclear program has caused more economic devastation and minor international isolation than any success it might have brought. The immense costs associated with the program have only worsened the economic situation, leading to a more stifling environment. Unlike the regime, the people do not view this as a national interest and are instead in favor of negotiating a deal with the U.S. to lift the sanctions. There have been negotiations and discussions within the government regarding this issue, but Khamenei does not seem willing to back down.

What about Iran’s regional standing, which has weakened in the past couple of years after the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad fell and was replaced by a Sunni government, and after Hezbollah, the Iranian ally in Lebanon, was weakened by Israel? Is there some sense among the population that Iran’s regional position is weaker? Have you seen that fact manifesting itself in the way people within Iran are talking about politics and protest?

I think it is part of that humiliation that we’ve been discussing, and I think a major aspect of it was all these empty gestures and speeches by Khamenei. He was always talking about the “axis of resistance” and the defenders of Haram, which is how he referred to the soldiers that he was sending to Syria to help the Assad regime. All of this is gone and all of it was gone in such a short period of time. And I think Khamenei did not really expect this level of assault and this level of loss on a regional level. On the other hand, I think what’s really important is to take into account the Iranian people’s grievances over this matter.

One of the things that I hear a lot from people who are not even political, like just ordinary citizens, is that we are starving to death, so why is our money being sent to Hezbollah or to Hamas, for example. This financial support has been, by the way, openly announced. It’s not a secret. They’re sending money and they’re very open about it. They’re bluntly talking about financing the “axis of resistance” and not only financing it but also creating it—they were the ones who created it. And there has been mass dissatisfaction among the people who consider it a form of betrayal, putting them in a very precarious and fragile situation security-wise by exposing them to war and to invasion and to starvation and to sanctions.

I also think something that we need to think about and to take into account is that Iran has been the sole major regional ally of Palestine. Since the beginning of the revolution, pro-Palestine rhetoric has been one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s identity, with talk that we are going to conquer Jerusalem, we are going to free Palestine. Ayatollah Khomeini used to say that the path to Jerusalem goes through Karbala. And that was the slogan for the Iran-Iraq War—this sort of expansionist idea of, O.K., we want to go to free Palestine and free Jerusalem. And I think what happened in Gaza over the past two years, as horrific as it was, and there is no doubt that it was a genocide—it weakened the position of the Islamic Republic, although the world and particularly some post-colonial sorts don’t want to accept that. And they’re keeping silent at this moment because they think that by weakening the Iranian regime, the situation in Palestine will get worse. But with what happened in Gaza I think the Islamic Republic proved that they can do nothing but create even more chaos in the region.

I would imagine the sentiment among the people of Iran is very sympathetic to Palestinians. That makes it all the more striking when you say that there’s tremendous anger that the Islamic Republic has been offering support for Hamas and Hezbollah while things are out of control at home.

Yeah. And one of the slogans that has been chanted again this time, which I heard for the first time back in 2009, is “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran.” I think people are just done with these regional interventions and expansionist ideological plot that both Khomeini and Khamenei have had in mind for forty-seven years. Their main concern is, How are we going to survive?

Whatever Iran’s hopes about trying to help the Palestinians, the country where Iran has been most active in the region, with a calamitous humanitarian cost, has been Syria, and after spending an untold number of soldiers and dollars there, the Assad regime completely crumbled. And the new Syrian regime probably will not be too friendly to Iran going forward. You wonder if people in Iran are asking why all this was done.

Yeah, exactly. And when Assad fled the country to Russia, there has been—even now, as we speak, there are rumors inside Iran, outside Iran, that Khamenei is also going to flee there. I don’t believe that this is going to happen. I think Khamenei wants to stay in Iran and wants to be “martyred” or “killed” or whatever. He will never leave Iranian soil in my opinion, but the fact that there are rumors like this gives us a really interesting clue about how people are thinking about his fate, and the closest example to that of course is what happened to Assad.

The regime has shown a real willingness to be brutal when it comes to responding to protests. And I’m sure it’s no different this time. Does the worrying situation the regime finds itself in regionally make you think that it will be even less willing to compromise, that it will go all out to maintain its power no matter what?

I’m extremely concerned. And on Friday morning Khamenei basically said that all people who are in the streets are a bunch of rioters and are agents of Israel and America and they should be put in their place. So it’s obvious that they’re extremely scared and desperate. I think the internet blackout is a sign of the desperation on the side of the state because they don’t want the news to get out. In 2019, when they shut down the internet, more than fifteen hundred people were killed.

What makes them much more worried and concerned about the possibility of their survival this time is the lack of regional allies. Bashar Assad is no longer there. They have almost no control over Lebanon. The Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, recently said that the current economic situation is no longer under control. The crackdown on the protesters is going to be much more brutal.

I am also concerned about what’s going to happen in the prisons, because usually the main crackdown and killing and torture happen behind closed doors there. In the past couple of years, the number of executions in Iran has been unprecedented. Just in the past year, some two thousand people have been executed. And one of the main charges, especially since the Twelve-Day War, has been collaboration with Israel. We don’t know whether these sorts of accusations are even true. But we may see much more brutal consequences for protesters than we have seen in the past. ♦