Three-minute read
The clerical regime in Iran has spent every anniversary of the 2022 uprising trying to prove that the fire has gone out. It floods the streets with security forces, arrests families of slain protesters, warns against “disturbances,” and stages loyalist rallies to occupy public space before the public can. But the choreography betrays the message. Confident governments do not turn cemeteries into checkpoints or mourning into a national-security problem.
The revolt began after the killing of Mahsa (Jina) Amini following her arrest by the morality police. Yet to describe what followed merely as a protest over women’s attire is to mistake the spark for the combustible material. The compulsory veil mattered because it condensed the regime’s cruelty into a daily act of domination. But the uprising quickly reached beyond it. Its fuel was poverty, corruption, ethnic and social humiliation, youth despair, the executions of protesters, and the hard-earned conclusion that reform had become a dead language.
That is why the slogans of 2022 escaped the vocabulary of dress codes almost immediately. Protesters did not ask only for a softer police force or a looser social rule. They denounced the supreme leader, rejected the ruling theocracy, and refused the false choice between the current dictatorship and the monarchy it replaced. In city after city, the message was not reform this system; It was “Down with Khamenei!”
As the 1st anniversary of #Iran's 2022 uprising draws closer with each passing hour, 2 opposing fronts brace themselves for another faceoff. On one side, the people are fueled with determination, strategizing ways to coordinate, assemble, and initiate the upcoming protests. 1/ pic.twitter.com/jGoJG4itlB
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 30, 2023
Tehran understood the breadth of the revolt better than many outside observers. Its own media and officials treated the anniversary not as a memorial but as a possible launchpad. They spoke of enemy networks, foreign-backed rioters, hostile media and organized cells. They publicized counter-demonstrations as proof of popular loyalty.
The most revealing evidence is not only in the streets but inside the state itself. After six months of nationwide revolt, measures that once might have been rushed through the machinery of repression began to stall. The hijab bill moved awkwardly between the judiciary, government, Majlis commissions and the Guardian Council, repeatedly revised, delayed and repackaged. Internet restriction plans followed a similar pattern: partially imposed in practice, endlessly debated in law, too useful to abandon but too explosive to enact cleanly. The regime wanted harsher control, but it also feared the political cost of admitting it.
The newer anti-spy and counter-infiltration legislation shows the same nervous reflex. Drafted to criminalize a sweeping range of contacts with foreign media, institutions and governments, it has faced revisions, objections and procedural delays among regime bodies over definitions, penalties and constitutional language. The issue is not liberal restraint. It is fear of overreach becoming a detonator. The regime remains brutal, but it is no longer politically carefree. The uprising changed the balance between what the regime wants to do and what it dares to do openly.
#Iran Marks Anniversary of 2022 Uprising as Protests Continue Over Regime Corruption and Inefficiency https://t.co/73ZKGLIsN8
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 16, 2025
The roots of that uprising have not withered. They have multiplied. Inflation has devoured wages. Pensioners, workers, teachers, nurses, truckers and oil-sector employees continue to protest over unpaid salaries and stolen futures. Executions have expanded as a tool of intimidation. Factional infighting has grown louder, not quieter. Officials accuse one another of incompetence and corruption while offering the country nothing resembling a path out. The regime can still impose fear. It can no longer command belief.
Nor did repression erase organization. The MEK Resistance Units appear more agile and experienced than before 2022, and more adept at operating under surveillance. Their actions are not conventional demonstrations: public projections, placards, graffiti, coordinated slogans and fast-moving operations across multiple cities. Their purpose is psychological as much as political. They puncture the regime’s claim of omnipresence and show that organized defiance can surface even in a locked-down environment.
The reported acceleration of these operations after the January uprising is significant. Authoritarian systems survive by persuading citizens that resistance is isolated, futile and doomed. Repeated acts of defiance, especially when geographically dispersed and timed to symbolic moments, attack that psychology. They tell people that someone is still there, still organizing, still taking risks. In a country where politics has been forced underground, that message can matter more than a manifesto.
On the anniversary of the 2022 uprising, our long-suffering people in Iran, the dedicated generation, and the rebellious youth honor the memory of that great surge and all its martyrs, wounded, and fighters by preparing for a thunderous uprising. https://t.co/Dl4l2owZXr pic.twitter.com/LSM61YqlnY
— Maryam Rajavi (@Maryam_Rajavi) September 16, 2026
This is why the regime’s fear is rational. The 2022 uprising did not end because its demands were answered. It was beaten back by violence. That distinction is everything. A suppressed movement returns with memory. A wounded society returns with fewer illusions. A regime that hesitates over hijab enforcement, internet control and espionage laws is revealing that it knows the country has changed.
Four years on, Tehran’s official narrative is victory. Its behavior says otherwise. It surrounds anniversaries with arrests, warnings, counter-rallies and the language of siege because the anniversary is not only a date. It marks the moment millions discovered that their private anger was shared, that slogans could converge, and that the target was not a policy but the regime itself.
That discovery cannot be buried by state television or dispersed by riot police. It can be delayed, punished and forced underground. But it survives wherever poverty meets humiliation, wherever mothers are denied justice, wherever workers protest hunger wages, and wherever young Iranians look at the future and see only a wall. The regime has good reason to fear the next eruption. The conditions that produced the last one are still present—and worse.