On September 13, Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, was detained by Iran’s morality police in Tehran, allegedly for breaking the law on wearing the Hijab or headscarf. She died three days later.
Amini’s family alleged that officers beat her head with a baton and banged her head against one of their vehicles. The police, on the other hand, say she died of “sudden heart failure.”
Amini’s death shook the conscience of most Iranians. Particularly, Iranian women-led protests against brutality meted out to Amini. Many expressed their disgust–online and offline–at the grotesque injustice meted out to her.
As a symbol of protest, several women removed their Hijab, chopped their hair and posted videos online. After Amini’s funeral, women began protesting by waving their headscarves in the air or setting them on fire to chants of “Woman, life, freedom” and “Death to the dictator” – a reference to Ayatollah Khamenei.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, claimed that the United States and Israel are engineering the “rioting” because they could not tolerate Iran “attaining strength in all spheres.” Addressing a graduation ceremony of police and armed forces cadets, he said:
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