In mid-February, 14 people were sentenced to death on charges of ‘enmity against God’ following express virtual hearings before a judge of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court known for processing cases against protesters en masse. Not all the accused were protesters: one, a motorcycle courier, was arrested after stopping to help two injured women. But all cases were marred by due process violations, with the accused reportedly signing confessions under torture.

The sentences were among the first judicial consequences of a crackdown that has seen casualties on a scale unprecedented in the Islamic Republic’s history. The latest protests began on 28 December, when shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar shuttered their stalls following the collapse of Iran’s currency, the rial, to a historic low. Within two weeks, people were protesting in all of Iran’s 31 provinces. By 8 January, authorities had imposed a near-total internet shutdown and security forces were firing live ammunition at crowds, killing thousands.

After crushing the protests, the theocratic dictatorship has launched a second, quieter campaign of nighttime raids, enforced disappearances and mass detentions in unofficial holding sites operating outside the legal system. Alongside protesters, those arrested include doctors who treated the wounded, lawyers who provided legal assistance and bystanders who expressed solidarity and posted supportive statements online. Authorities have detained over 50,000 people.

Economic triggers

The protests were triggered by a specific event but rooted in years of accumulated grievances. The second half of 2025 saw at least 471 labour protests across 69 Iranian cities, including by bakers, nurses, oil and gas workers, pensioners and steel workers, mobilising as price rises rapidly outpaced incomes. In November, inflation reached 49.4 per cent compared to the previous November. Purchasing power of wages continued to decline, despite a minimum wage increase of 45 per cent in March.

Several acute shocks compounded the crisis. The 12-day war with Israel in June had immediate economic consequences: the Tehran Stock Exchange fell by around 40 per cent, job vacancies dropped by 81 per cent and around 40 per cent of surveyed workers reported losing their jobs in the aftermath of the conflict. In late September, the United Nations (UN) Security Council reimposed nuclear-related sanctions against Iran, followed by European Union (EU) and UK sanctions. In November, the government cut longstanding fuel subsidies and in December it slashed exchange-rate subsidies that kept the price of essential imported goods down, sending the rial tumbling.

Over 40 per cent of Iranian households now live below the poverty line and around half the population is malnourished, consuming fewer than the recommended 2,100 calories a day. During 2025, over a million students dropped out of school due to financial hardship. It was against this backdrop of acute shock, chronic impoverishment and institutional unresponsiveness that typically conservative bazaar merchants reached a breaking point.

Political grievances

An unusually broad cross-section of Iranian society took to the streets together, including people of all ages – often entire families – and occupations. The movement reached deep into rural provinces and predominantly working-class communities. In this sense it was different from the 2009 Green Movement, a wave of pro-democracy protests sparked by allegations of widespread presidential election fraud, which was largely middle-class and centred on Tehran.

What began as a targeted economic stoppage rapidly evolved into political defiance. For the millions of students and workers who joined the striking merchants, the plummeting currency and rising cost of food weren’t just market fluctuations; they were tangible proof of the theocratic regime’s corruption and ineptitude. Despite the severity of the economic crisis, no looting was reported even in the most impoverished areas. As civil society activists noted, this restraint suggests the primary driver wasn’t immediate hunger, but a deep collective rejection of systemic injustice.

Generation Z, people aged 14 to 29, played an important role, carrying none of the ideological attachments of previous generations and seeing no viable future for themselves in Iran. This was reflected in protest slogans that moved beyond demands for change within the system and increasingly targeted the pillars of the theocratic regime. Lethal repression reinforced the view that the system was beyond reform.

A massacre in the dark

The state’s response evolved alongside the protests. Initially it was reactive: as shopkeepers began striking, the state used its standard crowd control measures – batons, teargas and limited arrests – while attempting to offer small economic concessions, such as a US$7 monthly subsidy. It shifted to total attrition when it became clear the merchants’ strikes had given way to a widespread movement with political demands. The turning point was the total internet blackout imposed on 8 January, just as security forces were authorised to use military-grade weapons and fire indiscriminately at protesters. At this stage, the state no longer tried to manage crowds, but to physically break the movement by any means necessary.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) spearheaded the repression. This parallel military structure, established after the 1979 revolution, constitutes a major political force and economic empire with a direct stake in the regime’s survival. Alongside it, the IRGC’s affiliated Basij paramilitary networks, embedded in neighbourhoods, workplaces and universities across Iran, played a central role in street-level violence. Meanwhile the Ministry of Intelligence coordinated arrests and targeted people who’d been vocal on social media or involved in previous protests.

The groundwork for the crackdown was laid before the first shots were fired, as the state systematically targeted human rights organisations, professional associations and unions, which could have documented abuses, further creating an information vacuum.

Seventeen days into the crackdown, the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights estimated that at least 3,000 civilians – including 44 children – had been killed and over 20,000 people detained. The state’s violence was characterised by deliberate shoot-to-kill tactics targeting vital organs and raids on medical facilities.

The internet blackout and the absence of international observers made the casualty count difficult to verify, yet all available data points to a massacre of unprecedented proportions. Various organisations collected partly overlapping lists containing thousands of names. By mid-January, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei conceded that ‘several thousand’ had been killed while the Norway-based organisation Iran Human Rights reported that Ministry of Health and Medical Education sources had acknowledged the deaths of at least 3,379 protesters in 15 provinces, with many more injured. There were eyewitness accounts of protesters being shot dead as they raised their hands in surrender. On 12 February, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported that verified fatalities were over 7,000, with around 12,000 further cases under review. Time magazine cited hospital records suggesting that as many as 30,000 protest-related deaths may have occurred during the peak of the violence. Any of these figures represents a staggering escalation from the 537 deaths recorded during the 2022-2023 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

By 16 January, large-scale marches had mostly stopped and the state declared that calm had been restored. This was achieved through military occupation: checkpoints and nighttime curfews cleared the streets, authorities used facial recognition technology to identify protesters and house-to-house raids facilitated a wave of state-led abductions.

Revolutionary Courts have fast-tracked thousands of indictments through summary trials often conducted online and lasting mere minutes, with defendants denied access to independent lawyers and confessions extracted through torture. Protesters are accused of ‘corruption on earth’ or ‘enmity against God’, vague offences that carry the death penalty, and sentenced within weeks of their arrest.

Technically, death sentences issued by the Revolutionary Courts can be appealed against, but for protesters, this is a legal fiction. For 18-year-old Saleh Mohammadi, the court ignored the retraction of a confession he made after interrogators broke bones in his hand. Once the Supreme Court upholds a sentence, an execution can happen at any moment, often without notice to families or lawyers. To instil fear, authorities have signalled a return to public executions, with the sentence for Mohammadi specifically ordering him to be hanged publicly at the site of his alleged crime. He and dozens more are at immediate risk of execution.

What’s next

The crackdown has, for now, worked. The streets have been cleared, the security forces have held together and there have been no significant elite defections. With its 190,000 officers and Basij networks, the IRGC retains formidable capacity to suppress dissent. As it has no viable exit, the Islamic Republic’s leadership will continue to use whatever force is needed. Yet the decision to deploy IRGC ground forces, typically reserved for full insurgency situations, shows the regime is finding it harder to sustain control with each protest cycle.

International responses briefly suggested otherwise. Donald Trump told Iranian protesters that ‘help is on its way’, threatening military intervention and deploying aircraft and ships nearby. The EU listed the IRGC as a terrorist organisation and the UK announced sanctions against 10 people and Iran’s law enforcement forces. The Iranian diaspora held at least 168 protests in 30 countries and 73 cities around the world.

For protesters in Iran, this signalled that the world was watching and might act. But it largely didn’t. Sanctions have had limited practical effect while the international noise enabled Iranian authorities to frame protests as foreign-directed. The prominent role of diaspora figures such as Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah, closely aligned with Israel and the USA and seeking restoration of the monarchy, reinforced the regime’s narrative.

The question is whether this uprising has brought change any closer, and in the short term it would seem it hasn’t. There’s no sign of fracture within the security forces, no unified opposition and no credible alternative leadership. The regime is weaker than it used to be: the economy is in ruins, its nuclear programme battered, its regional proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis – weakened and its social legitimacy vanished. This means it can only sustain order through rising levels of violence. But a weakened regime isn’t a collapsing one, and the Islamic Republic has proved it can endure in this condition for years.

What’s missing is an opposition capable of converting widespread discontent into sustained political pressure. The exiled opposition is fragmented – it includes ethnic minority organisations, Islamist reformers, leftists, monarchists and republicans – and often seems more interested in fighting each other than the theocratic regime. Pahlavi has significant name recognition and is the most visible diaspora figure, but doesn’t command widespread support, particularly among ethnic minorities and younger Iranians. The most credible figures inside Iran – including Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, reformist politician Mostafa Tajzadeh and veteran opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi – are either imprisoned or entirely cut off from public life.

The most plausible short-term trajectory is a deepening crisis, with a regime that can only maintain order through escalating violence facing a population with diminishing tolerance for it amid a still broken economy where people have few reasons to comply.

As international attention moves on, the violence is likely to become quieter and harder to track: summary trials, executions and relentless pressure on the families of those killed, carried out under a tightly controlled internet. The latest uprising may be over. The conditions that produced it however are not.