In July 1987 the Hajj ceremony in Mecca turned into a bloodbath. Shia pilgrims, mostly Iranians, staged a protest, chanting against America, Israel, and Saddam Hussein. Saudi security forces confronted them. Violence erupted. Nearly four hundred people were killed.
I was seven years old. My favorite uncle happened to be among the pilgrims that year. In those paleolithic, pre-Internet times we had no way of knowing whether he had survived. Every afternoon state television broadcast updated lists of the identified victims. It took days before all the dead were named and we were able to confirm that my uncle was not among them.
Since I left Iran in 2011, that multiday sense of anticipation has settled into a permanent anxiety, a compulsive worry about the safety of loved ones who are hard to reach. Never is this feeling sharper than when the Iranian government shuts down the Internet and imposes a communication blackout. By now those of us who have lived in exile long enough to endure multiple such blackouts have developed what, joking with fellow exiled friends, I started calling the Gray Tick Syndrome: sending messages in group chats to people back home, then staring for hours at the gray tick, waiting for it to turn blue.
The first blackout I experienced from a distance was in 2019, when protests over a sudden spike in gas prices spiraled beyond the state’s control. The Internet was cut for five full days, and many hundreds of people were massacred across the country. The second was this past June, during the twelve-day war, when we lost contact with family and friends left exposed to Israeli bombers and drones. The third, which began on January 8 and persists as of this writing, has been the most terrifying yet.
In the West a consensus of sorts has emerged that this round of protests erupted when the national currency went into freefall and made transactions virtually impossible, prompting business owners in Tehran’s Aladdin mall—the commercial center for electronic devices—to shut their shops and take to the streets. This is partly true. And yet within barely a day people in western provinces such as Ilam and Kermanshah, hundreds of miles from Tehran, many of whom have never even been to the capital or owned any electronic device other than a cheap phone, had also risen up against the country’s increasingly unlivable conditions.
Over the past week the state has responded with ever more brutality. Thanks to the blackout we have seen almost nothing, yet the available footage circulating on social media points to full-scale urban warfare across countless large and small cities. Security forces have opened fire on protesters, who have fought back with their bare hands or with primitive weapons like rocks and Molotov cocktails. This time even landlines are down. The authorities have reportedly managed to disrupt Starlink servers as well. I have been in constant contact with Iranian friends abroad, and none of us has heard a word from our families and friends inside the country.
The scraps of information that do make it out suggest a horror show: hospitals overwhelmed with the dead and injured, morgues overflowing, bodies strewn around the streets. A doctor told Time that on the first day of the crackdown he called six hospitals in Tehran and found that they reported receiving a combined total of 217 bodies, most killed by live ammunition. We have seen horrifying footage from Kahrizak Forensic Medical Center: hundreds of bodies laid out in black bags with families wandering among them, trying to identify their loved ones. Even conservative estimates suggest that in the past five days many hundreds or even thousands of protesters have already been killed.
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In its public statements since the start of the uprising, the Iranian government has resorted to the same worn-out cliché it has deployed for decades: the protesters are not ordinary people but mercenaries and terrorists sent by Mossad and the CIA, uninterested in peaceful dissent, determined to sow chaos. After all these years, it is hard to believe that any fair-minded person would take these tales seriously.
To understand the real sources of the popular discontent across the country, we need to grasp how impoverished Iran has become in recent years, how devastating the government’s economic policies and endemic corruption have been for the population, and why, for so many Iranians, there are simply no options left but the street. There are many ways to approach this question, but perhaps the most immediate is the most basic: year after year, Iranians have grown hungrier. According to reports published by the Ministry of Welfare, the average daily caloric intake dropped from 2,600 calories in 2006 to 2,200 in 2016, and to just 1,800 in 2025.
Food insecurity is only one component of the country’s broader public health crisis, which also encompasses air pollution that takes tens of thousands of lives every year and drought so severe that, in November, the country’s president warned that parts of Tehran might have to be evacuated if the water shortage carried on. The situation is still more concerning in poorer states, typically along Iran’s western and eastern borders. It is no coincidence that one of the provinces where large-scale protests erupted most quickly was Lorestan, which has the second-highest unemployment rate in the country, and where a majority of the population lives in poverty.
At this point, especially among liberal-leaning commentators and observers abroad, it has become almost a truism to attribute Iran’s economic collapse to the economic sanctions leveled against it by the US and Europe. The sanctions certainly did much to instigate Iran’s economic precarity, yet as time went on their significance was rivaled and even exceeded by another factor: almost unimaginably deep corruption within the regime. Like nearly everything else in Iran, the state’s handling of the economy is anything but transparent. Only recently have we begun to glimpse the scale of the country’s economic mismanagement, largely because figures from within the system have blown the whistle.
One of them is an MP named Hossein Samsami. After delivering speeches in parliament and giving multiple interviews—including an extensive one on a podcast called Jomhouri Street that often features MPs and well-known pundits—he circulated a list of about a thousand Iranian corporations and individuals that managed to bypass sanctions and export oil and other goods. The resulting revenue ought to have returned to Iran. But according to Samsami the companies in question, many of which have connections with the children and relatives of senior military and government officials, pocketed a significant amount of the proceeds and invested them abroad. In a country whose total annual government spending hovers between $50 and $60 billion, he alleged, they siphoned off about $116 billion over the past seven years alone.
If even a fraction of the wealth stolen from Iran over the years were returned, it could perhaps stabilize the currency, cover the population’s most basic needs, and ensure food security. Instead the government has closed ranks into a kind of mafia, driving its people into hunger and poverty. Now, as they take to the streets to demand a better life, the state has shut down their lines of communication and resorted to massacring them.
And yet many people, some of whom I have long considered like-minded friends, still manage to look away. Within half an hour after Israel first struck Iran last June, I received nearly twenty messages of support from non-Iranian friends in the US and Australia, the countries where I have spent my years in exile. This time, five days into an Internet blackout and with a death toll already higher than that of the twelve-day war, I heard from very few people. One was reaching out to ask my opinion on how Israel might be orchestrating the protests.
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The academic left in the west, which forms the milieu I inhabit, has long had an uneasy relationship with Iran. Opposition to atrocities carried out by the US and Israel tips too often into the reductive conclusion that whoever resists them qualifies for the benefit of the doubt, if not outright support, even when they perpetrate similar atrocities elsewhere. This destructive simplification has hardened since the world witnessed Israel’s live-streamed, genocidal campaign in Gaza. The fact that Iran alone among Middle Eastern states opposed Israel directly and unequivocally has seemed, for some factions within the US left, to absolve the regime of its domestic crimes.
Much of what I hear and read resembles an uncritical report that appeared yesterday on the website Middle East Eye, after a pro-government rally allegedly drew many thousands of attendees. (Social media users soon noted that some of the images and videos circulating on state TV appeared to have been AI-generated.) “Iranian leaders urged supporters to turn out, presenting the marches as a show of unity against what they describe as a foreign-driven destabilization campaign,” it related:
Iran’s foreign minister has accused the United States and Israel of fueling violence in the ongoing unrest, which he described as a “terrorist war.” Speaking on Monday, Abbas Araqchi said the situation was “under total control” after violence flared over the weekend. He claimed Tehran had evidence that “terrorists” were being armed and directed to open fire on protesters and security forces in order to increase the death toll.
It would be only reasonable to be skeptical about such statements from a government that has shut down the Internet for days, left hundreds of corpses in the aftermath of every uprising over the past decade, and lies about virtually everything. There is no more cause to trust the regime’s spokespeople than there is to trust Donald Trump when he promises to “help” the protesters—perhaps by launching another wave of military strikes against their country.
The gap between how most Iranians see the world and how the global left understands it has grown so wide that it is increasingly difficult to find common ground. Far too few people in my own professional world seem to understand that Iranians have the ability to recognize their oppressors—that they have taken to the streets not at the behest of foreign intelligence agencies hell-bent on weakening the Iranian government but to demand a better life on their own volition, as they have done countless times since 1979. Living with acute hunger, without clean air, and subjected to strict online censorship produces a ruthless clarity, a laser-sharp focus. For Iranians the Khamenei regime is as unmistakable and nonnegotiable an enemy as this country has ever had. They know better than anyone what it has done to their lives. They have seen the piles of corpses it has left in their hands while enriching its own families and cronies. Dismantling it is their first and foremost priority.
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