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When a government fears fabric enough to deploy drones to watch it, you know the real threat was never the cloth. In Iran, the mandatory hijab since 1979 has never been about modesty it has been about ownership, a state's absolute claim over a woman's body, her choices, her right to exist outside the boundaries drawn for her. But in September 2022, that ownership was challenged when a 22-year-old named Mahsa Amini was arrested by the Morality Police for wearing her headscarf too loosely, beaten in custody, and died three days later.

Her body became the first spark. Her name became the first battle cry.

Within hours, women flooded the streets, not asking for permission, but claiming existence. They burned their headscarves. They cut their hair short in public, an act that would have meant arrest weeks earlier. The slogan that emerged was profound in its simplicity: “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi" ("Woman, Life, Freedom") spoken in Kurdish, Persian, Azeri, Baloch, a shared language across ethnic boundaries.(What they were saying was not complicated: I am not your property. You cannot tell me what to wear or how to live.)

But the regime's response proved the opposite. Within months, over 500 were killed, 20,000 arrested. Then, in October 2023, a 17-year-old named Armita Geravand boarded the Tehran Metro without a hijab and within hours was in a coma. She died 28 days later. The regime had not changed. It had only learned to hide better. Authorities deleted the CCTV footage. They refused to release evidence. Another young woman died because of her hair.

By 2024, the regime stopped pretending violence was legitimate and switched to something colder: smart repression. Surveillance drones circle Tehran, watching for uncovered hair. An app called Nazer allows citizens to report women without hijabs, automatically sending fines through text message and freezing bank accounts remotely. Universities installed facial recognition cameras at entrances specifically to identify unveiled students.

(The state did not lose patience with the streets. It decided to own the sky. To turn your neighbour into a surveillance agent. To make oppression so intimate that you cannot escape it without leaving the country.

Before the cameras came, the guns. Between 2022 and 2023, security forces fired birdshot pellets directly at protesters' faces and eyes. At least 120 people lost one or both eyes, verified by UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center.What followed was unexpected: instead of hiding, victims posted photos with a caption: "I lost my eye, but I found my vision." They turned their scars into testimony. And this terrified the regime more than any protest because suffering cannot be denied.

Then came late December 2025, and everything shifted. The Iranian currency collapsed. The bazaar, historically loyal to the regime since 1979, began shutting down in economic desperation. For the first time, women's slogans merged with merchants' cries about poverty and corruption. When the merchant class joins the women's movement, historians recognise the moment: the regime's days are numbered.

Through all of this, Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel Peace laureate, sat in Evin Prison smuggling out letters about torture, organising sit-ins among detained women, refusing to be silenced even from captivity arrested again in December 2025 while undergoing cancer surgery, showing the regime's absolute indifference.

The question left behind is simple: what government requires this much surveillance, this much violence, this many ways of watching and punishing just to keep women's hair covered? Only one that knows it is dying. Only one that senses the ground is already shifting beneath it.

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