Mick Hartley

Iran is finally making the headlines – even the BBC, though they frame it as just another series of protests met with the usual brutality.

As protests in Iran continue and Iranian authorities issued coordinated warnings to protesters, a doctor and medic at two hospitals told the BBC their facilities were overwhelmed with injuries.

One doctor said an eye hospital in Tehran had gone into crisis mode, while the BBC also obtained a message from a medic in another hospital saying it did not have enough surgeons to cope with the influx of patients.

Janice Turner in the Times:

For days the shooting of a protester in Minneapolis has dominated news cycles. A tragedy and a reckoning for America, no doubt. Meanwhile on the streets of Iran, the toll of unarmed demonstrators shot by police including, reportedly, children runs into the dozens, yet until Thursday you scoured the BBC website in vain for news.

The Islamic Republic, a vast tyranny with no free press, which bars foreign journalists and regularly blacks out the internet, makes facts hard to confirm. Plus our Atlanticist mindset skews more to Minnesota than the Middle East. And, well, these brave Iranians marched us up the hill in 1999, 2009, 2017 and in 2022 with the exhilarating Woman, Life, Freedom movement, only to be beaten down again.

But what if this time is different and Iran is truly at a tipping point? Dissidents, who are conduits for news at home, say they barely dare hope. Yet night after night, immense crowds fill wintry streets in every Iranian province and even religiously conservative cities; a government building in Tehran was set alight; CCTV cameras were destroyed; rumours swirl of mullahs in Moscow airport and regime high-ups scrabbling for EU visas.…

What has changed? For Trump-haters it will be hard to stomach that his threat to strike the regime, if it butchers peaceful protesters, has helped. The US president’s words make Iranians feel less invisible and alone. “Trump made us braver,” I’m told. Older people, often for the first time, join their children on the streets. His threats “tell the regime that impunity is over”, says Alinejad. “And in that moment, many in the security forces may choose to put their weapons down.”

Moreover, as the former security minister Tom Tugendhat has noted, in exfiltrating President Maduro, Trump has severed Iran from its principal money launderer. Venezuela allowed it to swerve sanctions by creating back channels through which Iran could sell drugs and produce the Shahed drones which nightly menace Ukraine. In his speech on Friday, the frail, quavering Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei railed against Trump and said the Islamic Republic was born of “the blood of hundreds of thousands of honourable people, and will not back down in the face of saboteurs”.

Still silence on the left, though.

What Iran’s opposition needs is the world’s unwavering attention and support. So where are the marches, the angry statements on X from those who oppose war in Gaza? In the 1970s, Iranian leftists enabled the Ayatollah’s rise to power only to be later hanged in their thousands for anti-Islamic crimes. Yet western progressives never learn: they ignore Iran’s 2,200 executions last year, its suppression of human rights, sharia laws that ban women from dancing or singing, or working without a husband’s permission, and mean they may be beaten, arrested or (like Mahsa Amini) murdered for merely showing their hair.

Iran gets a free pass from so-called progressives because it has all the right enemies: America, the West and, crucially, Israel. Which is why Jeremy Corbyn celebrates the Islamic Revolution’s anniversary and last month, as protests for democracy grew, The Guardian ran an op-ed column from the Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi. Even now, neither the EU nor the British government (which promised to act in May) has proscribed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, (IRGC) which assassinates dissidents and orchestrates terror across the world.

In a darkening world, there would be no brighter light than a democratic, secular Iran. An end to the regime that funds Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen, which aids Russia’s war against Ukraine and allies with China, and whose nuclear weapons programme imperils the world would be as consequential as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Iranians abroad, highly educated and cultured, who have enjoyed the benefits of democracy, who believe their country could be as rich as the UAE, as free as Britain and must be open to the West, will flood home to rebuild a free Iran.