The Islamic Republic wants the world to forget Woman, Life, Freedom. We must not let it

Four years ago, the death of the Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini in the custody of the Islamic Republic’s morality police sparked an uprising that shook the regime to its foundations. Its slogan travelled far beyond Iran: Jin Jiyan Azadi, Woman Life Freedom.

The slogan comes from the Kurdish workers and freedom movement and it represents everything authoritarian systems fear: feminism, equality, emancipation, social justice, ethnic pluralism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-nationalism. That is precisely why the Islamic Republic has fought the movement with such brutality – and also why fascists and far-right nationalists throughout the world have sought to appropriate or discredit it. “Woman Life Freedom” is a demand for a fundamentally different society that many people in the world fight for.

For four years, however, the world’s leaders have largely failed the people who made that demand in Iran. Iran’s freedom movement was never only the mass demonstrations of 2022. Nor did it end when those demonstrations became harder to organise. It lives on in women refusing compulsory veiling, in workers striking, in students protesting, in political prisoners resisting from inside Iran’s prisons and in countless acts of civil disobedience that rarely make international headlines.

While Iranians continue to resist, governments continue to talk to the very regime crushing them. In January 2026, Iranian security forces massacred tens of thousands of protesters on a scale that human rights organisations describe as countrywide mass killings. At the same time, executions have become industrialised. According to the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, more than one thousand people have been hanged so far this year. Especially religious and ethnically marginalised groups, as well as women, face severe pressure.

Four years after Jina Amini’s killing, it often feels as though the international community has forgotten Iran’s freedom movement. Perhaps this is because there is no longer one spectacular image to consume. The struggle seems quieter in the so-called West; it has become more dangerous and harder to package. For ordinary Iranians, there is little quiet at all. They are trapped between bombs from outside and bullets from within. Repression is crushing, while an economic crisis has made everyday survival increasingly difficult. Families are cutting back on meat, fruit, vegetables and new clothes. For many, eating is becoming less about living than simply surviving.

The international community needs to look beyond Iran’s nuclear programme and the Strait of Hormuz. It needs to look at Iranian civil society, as they are the only guarantee for a peaceful Iran. That means making humanitarian visas genuinely accessible to persecuted activists and journalists, identifying IRGC agents and other regime operatives operating in Europe and pursuing them under universal jurisdiction where crimes allow it.

World leaders need to understand that diplomacy with the terror regime in Iran cannot come at the price of abandoning the people who have spent almost five decades demanding freedom. They need to acknowledge Iran’s freedom movement, not just on Jina Amini’s anniversary, but every day in their Iran policy. “Woman Life Freedom” is still alive, but the question remains whether the world is willing to stand with it – or whether they support the murderous regime by looking away.

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Daniela Sepehri is a German-Iranian political commentator and journalist who writes on Iran, migration, and anti-racism. She is also a human rights activist in Iran, where part of her family lives.

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