NEDA of Iran

We tell ourselves stories in order to survive. That’s the first lie. Some stories come for us regardless. Some knock on the window and whisper in the dark until we look, and see the thing we were warned never to name.

On June 20, 2009, they killed a girl named Neda Agha-Soltan on a side street in Tehran. Her name meant “voice,” and for the first time in a long time, Iran listened to itself speak.

She was wearing jeans and a black manteau. She was walking with her music teacher, not a protester, not a dissident—just someone who had stopped her car in traffic because crowds were chanting “Where is my vote?” and she wanted to see.

She was 26. A philosophy student. Someone who read poetry and liked to sing. Someone who, by sheer bad geometry, stepped into the crosshairs of the Basij, the militia most used when the regime wants to show it can kill without consequence.

They shot her in the chest. The video is just under forty seconds long. You can still find it if you look, but you don’t have to. The sounds are enough: the shout, the slow collapse, the blood. Her eyes widened, then fixed. Her mouth opened. She tried to speak but didn’t.

You don’t need to see it. Everyone saw it. That’s the problem. That’s the point.

It wasn’t just a killing. It was a warning. It was also an answer.

Because what happened next wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t just grief or rage or silence—it was recognition.

We live in cities where things happen and then don’t happen. Where memory is a liability. Where names disappear. But sometimes, someone dies and the forgetting doesn’t take.

It has been sixteen years since Neda Agha-Soltan was shot in the heart by a sniper from the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Basij militia during a street protest in Tehran. She was twenty-six. She had not come to be a martyr. She was not holding a banner. She wasn’t shouting. She wasn’t even marching. She had simply stepped out of her car because she was curious.

She died on Kargar Avenue at approximately 6:30 p.m., surrounded by people who screamed when the blood bloomed across her chest. A stranger filmed the moment she fell. Her eyes wide. Her mouth twitching. The blood pushing out of her with too much insistence. She seemed surprised. Everyone who saw it did. The video went around the world before state TV even said her name.

The regime said the footage was fake. They said the CIA staged it. They said she was alive. They said she was an actress. They said she had no family. They said her family was lying. They harassed her parents, banned her grave from being decorated, cracked down on mourning ceremonies, arrested those who tried to speak of her.

None of it worked.

Because Neda became something the Islamic Republic of Iran can’t kill—an image. A rupture. Not a person anymore, which is what she deserved to remain, but a ghost that didn’t go quietly.

Great. Let’s continue with Section II: The Green Movement, in full Didion-influenced tone—controlled, observational, exact. This picks up right after the moment of Neda’s death and turns to what the people did next, and how the regime responded.

The Green Was Never Just a Color

The people came wearing green.

Not because they were naïve. Not because they believed, in any concrete way, that the regime would permit a peaceful transition of power. But because green was the campaign color of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who had not yet been blacklisted. And because green was the color of Islam, and they thought—perhaps mistakenly—that the state might not shoot at its own symbols.

The election took place on June 12, 2009. By midnight, the outcome was declared: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won in a landslide. Mousavi had not just lost—he had been erased.

The vote was counted, we are told, before it was finished.

No one believed the numbers. Not even those who had stayed home, who had never loved the ballot box, who had learned from past elections how numbers in the Islamic Republic are elastic. What mattered was the feeling. And the feeling was insult. The feeling was theft.

And so the people came out.

Not just students. Not just reformists. Not just those who had placed their hopes in Mousavi. It was larger than a candidate. It was about the absurdity of the lie. It was about dignity.

They came chanting “Where is my vote?” They did not demand revolution, not yet. They asked for accountability. They asked for honesty. Some believed they might still get it. Those were the early days.

By June 15, three million people were on the streets of Tehran.

They moved in silence. No one broke windows. No fires were lit. There was no looting. Just people—walking, watching, waiting.

And then the crackdown began.

Not all at once, and not everywhere. A studied rollout of suppression. The plainclothes police, the Basij on motorbikes, the snipers on rooftops. Tear gas followed by truncheons. Truncheons followed by bullets. Arrests without warrants. Disappearances without paperwork. Students dragged out of dormitories in the middle of the night. Beatings. Torture. Rape. Death.

Neda Agha-Soltan was not the first to die. She was not even the last that day. But her death, captured on camera and uploaded before censors could stop it, became the event that the regime could not control.

The Islamic Republic of Iran responded not just with violence but with narrative.

State media claimed she had been staged. That she was an actress. That the blood was fake. That her death was orchestrated by Western intelligence agencies. That the camera operator had been paid. That the man next to her—her music teacher, not her boyfriend—had killed her himself.

These are not exaggerations. These are direct quotes from IRIB and state officials in the days and weeks that followed. The absurdity was the point. The goal was not persuasion but exhaustion. If enough versions of the story existed, then no one could trust any of them. Least of all the truth.

When people continued to chant her name—“Neda-ye ma namordeh!” (“Our Neda has not died!”)—the regime escalated. Memorials were raided. Her family was pressured into silence. Her grave, vandalized. Her image, banned.

But the Green Movement had already moved beyond her.

It was not a revolution. It was something quieter. More restrained. A brief, national inhalation. A glimpse of what might have been.

And then it was over.

By December 2009, the crackdown was total. 5,000 had been arrested and hundreds were slaughtered in the streets. Leaders like Mousavi and Karroubi were placed under house arrest. Thousands of protesters were sentenced in sham trials. Torture became routine. The internet slowed to a crawl. International attention shifted elsewhere.

But something remained.

Not hope, exactly. Something else. Something less visible. A memory of having once spoken freely, and the sound of others answering back.

Aftermath & Memory

Silence is never just silence. Sometimes it’s strategy. Sometimes it’s survival.

By the winter of 2009, the streets were mostly quiet. The regime called that victory. But silence has contours. You can tell the difference between silence that’s chosen and silence that’s forced.

In this case, it was forced.

The Islamic Republic of Iran never officially acknowledged wrongdoing. There were no investigations, no apologies. There were only warnings: don’t talk, don’t mourn, don’t remember.

And yet, memory persisted. Not always in words. Sometimes in what wasn’t said. In the way people lowered their voices. In the way mothers looked past cameras during interviews. In the way her name, Neda, still came up in coded conversations and quiet moments.

She became, as one protester later said, “a symbol none of us asked for but all of us needed.”

Her face appeared in graffiti, on t-shirts smuggled into exile, in banned documentaries, in the background of foreign news segments. A mural of her was painted on a bombed wall in Syria. Her name was scrawled in the margins of banned books. Even those who didn’t know what she looked like knew what she meant.

The regime tried to reclaim her, absurdly. A few years later, a state-funded “documentary” claimed she had been killed by foreign agents. The footage was edited, the witnesses recast. No one believed it. But that was never the point.

The Islamic Republic has always understood that control over memory is more dangerous than control over speech. You can survive a shout. A name, repeated over years, is harder to erase.

In Tehran, the site of her death was unofficially renamed by locals. Just a corner of Kargar Avenue, between a clinic and a billboard. A place where people sometimes left flowers. The authorities tore them out within hours. Still, they came back.

They always come back.

Women, Life, Freedom

On September 16, 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Jina Mahsa Amini died in custody of the Islamic Republic’s so-called “morality police.” She had been arrested for “improper hijab” while visiting Tehran. She died three days later. The regime said it was a heart attack. The bruises on her face said otherwise.

The country knew the truth before the state finished its lie.

The next morning, people poured into the streets. Women first. Then students. Then everyone else. Not in mourning clothes. Not in green. This time, they came as they were.

And they chanted something new:

Zan, Zendegi, Azadi.

Woman, Life, Freedom.

It began in Saqqez, her hometown, and moved like electricity. Kurdistan first. Then Mashhad. Shiraz. Tabriz. Tehran. Then smaller cities, villages, diaspora cities across Europe and North America. It wasn’t a protest. It was something else. A rejection—not of an election, but of the system itself.

Women tore off their hijabs in public. Burned them in bonfires. Danced in the streets in open defiance of the dress codes enforced since 1981. Teenagers filmed themselves confronting clerics. Schoolgirls pulled down portraits of Ali Khamenei. The veil was no longer a piece of fabric. It was a boundary line.

The regime did what it always does.

First came the tear gas. Then came the bullets. Then came the denials.

Over 500 protesters were confirmed dead. More than 22,000 arrested. Children included.

Torture was widespread—rape, electric shocks, forced confessions, psychological abuse.

Public executions followed. Mohsen Shekari. Majidreza Rahnavard. Others whose names we never learned.

They sentenced a rapper, Toomaj Salehi, to death for songs critical of the regime. They arrested journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, whose only crime was reporting the truth about Amini’s death. They shut down the internet, jammed VPNs, surveilled phones.

But they couldn’t stop the movement.

Because the chant had already cut too deep.

Because the women had already burned too much to go back.

Crimes Beyond Gender

The violence of the Islamic Republic of Iran has never been limited to women. The slogans might shift, the symbols might change, but the system is consistent. It crushes whatever threatens its control.

If you are Kurdish in Iran, you live under permanent suspicion. If you are Baloch, you are poor by design. If you are Ahwazi Arab, you are arrested for speaking your own language. If you are queer, your identity is a death sentence.

These are not policies. These are tools.

In Zahedan, the capital of the Sistan and Baluchestan province, dozens of worshippers were massacred by security forces on September 30, 2022, during Friday prayers. The regime claimed it was a confrontation with “terrorists.” Witnesses say otherwise. They call it Bloody Friday. Over 100 people killed in a matter of hours. Most shot in the back.

No one resigned. No one was punished.

In Kurdistan, surveillance is constant. Schools are monitored. Teachers fired. Writers imprisoned. The city of Sanandaj has seen more military convoys than ambulances. Children are detained for drawing protest symbols in their notebooks.

Labor organizers, especially in oil and petrochemical sectors, face long prison terms under charges like “collusion against national security.” One teacher, Esmail Abdi, was sentenced to ten years for attending an education conference abroad. His only weapon was a PowerPoint.

Environmental activists who warned about drying rivers and illegal dams have been accused of spying. Niloufar Bayani was tortured, held in solitary confinement, and sentenced behind closed doors. Her research: saving endangered cheetahs.

The Islamic Republic claims these are isolated cases. They are not. They are policy—repression by demographic.

And if you are LGBTQ+, your existence is not recognized. Trans Iranians are sometimes forced into state-approved gender reassignment surgery, not out of affirmation but erasure. Others are simply disappeared. The execution of gay men under “morality” laws is a quiet practice—no names, no graves, just rumors and closed files.

This is what it means to live under occupation from within.

This is what it means when the state is not your government but your colonizer.

When the Bombs Fell

In April 2024, Israel struck deep into Iran. Not covert sabotage, not cyberwarfare—real missiles. Real explosions. Real targets. IRGC sites. Military compounds. Infrastructure used by the same regime that sends militias to Syria, weapons to Lebanon, Hamas, Houthis and death to its own citizens.

It was war, technically. But inside Iran, something unusual happened. People smiled. Quietly. Carefully.

Some took to rooftops and whispered “Let it burn” amidst fear for their own lives of being killed by bombs.

They weren’t celebrating war. They were celebrating something simpler. The idea, for a moment, that the regime might be hit the way it hits them.

The Islamic Republic of Iran reacted immediately.

They issued warnings. New laws. Anyone caught “expressing joy” at the Israeli strikes, “supporting the Zionist enemy,” or “spreading psychological warfare” would face arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment. Dozens have already been detained. Their phones searched. Their social media accounts used as evidence.

One man in Mashhad was arrested for posting a meme about the IRGC. A woman in Shiraz was taken in for texting a friend “Did you hear? They hit the base near us, I’m so glad” That was enough.

This is the regime’s new doctrine: joy is treason.

Celebration is confession.

Dissent is foreign propaganda.

Hope is Zionism.

They are weaponizing the war—not just against Israel who one could argue may or may not deserve it, but against their own people.

And now, every protest, every song, every whispered joke can be reframed as collaboration with the enemy. Not because it is but because it serves the narrative.

Because the regime survives by pretending it is the nation.

It is not.

It is a state that rules a country it does not belong to. A power structure that occupies a population that has never truly accepted it.

And as the missiles fall, the regime tightens its grip not just on the enemy beyond its borders, but on the people trapped within them.