 Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei addresses members of the Basij, a paramilitary group associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in Tehran on Nov. 26. (Iranian supreme leader office/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) | The uprising in Iran, well into its third month, continues to defy expectations, persisting even amid an increasingly violent crackdown and opponents of clerical rule uniting across class and ethnic lines. The movement, born out of long-seething anger over decades of repression, cascaded after police arrested 22-year-old Mahsa Amini — also known by her Kurdish name, Jina — in a Tehran metro station for violating Iran's conservative dress code for women, then allegedly beat her to death and tried to cover it up. What began in Amini's hometown in a Kurdish-dominated province has grown into a sustained, nationwide challenge to the regime — and one not easily defeated. As weeks passed, the government escalated its deadly crackdown, especially in Kurdish areas, but the demonstrations persisted. They have left Iran's leadership in what appears to be at an impasse, unsure of how far to go to regain control. The regime could fully unleash the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to crush the movement, but it would risk drawing even more ire from opponents at home and inviting further international condemnation. "I feel it is not too late to save myself and others in my generation," Nazanin, a university student in the city of Azad, told The Washington Post. Out of concern for her safety, she gave only her first name. She had seen no future for herself in Iran, she said, until the protests changed her, "like they changed many people." Day after day, demonstrators chant "woman, life, freedom" and "death to the dictator," and burn images of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Women cast off headscarves, standing side by side with demonstrators who choose to wear them. Major social upheaval is afoot — but Iran's clerical leadership and the security forces backing it remain strong. At the first sign of unrest, authorities followed a familiar playbook. They cut off internet and cellular access, violently disrupted protests and launched mass arrest and intimidation campaigns, even targeting doctors and schools. More than 400 people have been killed, among them more than 60 minors, and more than 18,000 arrested, human rights group Hrana estimates. On-the-ground reporting is extremely difficult under the circumstances, so exact numbers are impossible to determine. Each death, arrest and raid add to the public outrage. But Iran's security state was built to withstand popular unrest. The Shiite revolutionaries who rose to power in 1979 created a parallel security force, the Revolutionary Guard, and a separate legal system, the Revolutionary Courts, to protect the Islamic Republic and its supreme leader. Part of what's changed is that many Iranians have given up on reform. Even if Tehran were to crush the protests or offer concessions — the latter which it rarely does — many Iranians have come to reject core values of the Islamic Republic. "Even if it's repressed, there is a new discourse, new sense of defiance," said Mohammad Ali Kadivar, a sociologist at Boston College who studies protest movements in Iran. For decades, people have borne the daily injustices of an authoritarian theocracy structured around gender segregation. Young Iranians in particular "have seen declining living standards, every effort of reform closed off" and have "grown up with very little if any ideological attachment to the Islamic Republic," said Manijeh Moradian, an assistant professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College who studies the Iranian diaspora. The uprising is fueled by women and young people, but it's leaderless in part because the state has arrested, exiled or sidelined most opposition figures. In 2009, millions of Iranians protested electoral fraud. The demonstrations were violently suppressed. In 2017 and 2019, thousands revolted against economic grievances and government mismanagement, and authorities killed hundreds in the resulting crackdown. Iranians know a worse crackdown could come, as when thousands of people were killed in purges in the decade after the revolution. The United States and Europe have left themselves few good options for a response. Before the uprising, Iran was already under extensive sanctions, among the most of any country. Decades of economic isolation — coupled with internal corruption and mismanagement — have devastated the economy. In recent weeks, Washington and Brussels have reacted by designating more individuals and institutions involved in the violence. Ali Vaez, of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said while "morally justified, in practice they amount to feel-good policies" for the West, with little effect on Iran's leadership. Broader sanctions, meanwhile, serve to punish Iranians collectively, intentionally or not, and have "empowered" the Revolutionary Guard, which controls much of Iran's formal and black-market economy, he said. In recent years, Western diplomatic engagement with Iran has centered around securing (and now resecuring) a nuclear deal, which would include sanctions relief. But as a result, there has been a "reluctance" to address other issues, such as Iran's human rights violations, said Ali Fathollah-Nejad, a German-Iranian political scientist. Iran has blamed the protests on "foreign instigators," particularly Iran's foes — such as America, Israel and Saudi Arabia — though it also remains sensitive to its international image. Pressure is growing at the United Nations, whose human rights body last week voted to create an independent fact-finding mission on the crackdown. Iran's Foreign Ministry has vowed not to participate. But many Iranians these days are very connected to the wider world online and crave an end to international isolation. In recent weeks, Iranian athletes have displayed small signs of solidarity with the uprising at international sporting events, much to the state's chagrin. The unrest spilled over to the World Cup, where regime opponents and supporters clashed, and Iran's national team has struggled to balance signals for tacit support for protesters and the need to ensure their own safety. Back in Iran, people continue to be killed, arrested and scared into silence. Khamenei on Saturday praised the Basij, a volunteer militia connected to the Revolutionary Guard, in another sign that the violence could continue to worsen. The movement does not seem set to fade on its own. Iran's clerical leaders, and the security state behind them, will have to decide how far they are willing to go. Many supporters of the movement in Iran see international attention as one of their few, albeit limited, defenses. "We will be on the streets until the day we find some peace from this constant injustice and oppression," a 30-year-old woman from Sanandaj in Kurdistan province told The Post last month. Despite a near-total communication outage, she spoke anonymously out of concern for her safety — with the hope of one day speaking freely. |
 Argentina's forward Lionel Messi waves to supporters after his team won the match between Poland and Argentina at Stadium 974 in Doha on Nov. 30. (Photo by Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images) |  Argentina fans during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 in Doha. (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images) | From today's Live Q&A on the World Cup: What is the World Cup environment like in Qatar? Ishaan Tharoor: It's fascinating. All World Cups are carnivals, where fans from far and sundry places convene, hang out and usually get along. The absence of easily accessible alcohol here has, curiously, not dampened spirits. I just came back from the famous Souk Waqif area near the waterfront where Argentines, Poles, Mexicans and Saudis were all singing and posing for pictures together before their teams face off in crucial, tense matches. The smallness of Qatar also gives you this feeling that you're never not at the World Cup — it's such a totalizing event that it not only takes up all the nation's infrastructure but has generated whole new swaths of it, from roads to a gleaming metro to new urban developments and satellite cities. The tiny nation is the World Cup. As far as locals go, that depends what you count as a local. There are only 350,000 Qatari citizens in a country of close to 3 million people. The non-citizens comprise almost the entirety of the country's labor force (while citizens frankly don't have to work — such are the petro wealth-powered benefits of being a Qatari). At the World Cup, I have met volunteers and workers from easily two dozen different countries. I don't think I have met a single Qatari working at the tournament. Much of the security at the stadiums appeared to be subcontracted from Turkey, Pakistan and some nations in East Africa. Overall, South Asians and Filipinos make up the mainstay of the country's labor force and outnumber Qatar's citizens by a significant magnitude. Qatar is not a traditional nation-state in any sense; it's a kind of global emporium, run by a dominant monarchical family whose edifice of power is built on the nation's natural gas fortunes. That doesn't make it more weird or less modern, though — I think in many ways, the view from Qatar gives you a closer feel of where the 21st century is going than sitting in a Western capital would. But that's for a different conversation!  Next, Australia will play Argentina, the Group C winner. (John Sibley/Reuters) | And, wait, is that Australia waltzing into the World Cup knockout stage? From The Post's Chuck Culpepper in Wakrah, Qatar: Australia barely wriggled into this World Cup like some gritty but gasping marsupial while Denmark came in after recent heights as a sleek, fashionable pick to go far, but then there's sports, and sports always reserves the right to take your assumptions and shove them clear to Sydney. So it goes that Australia, a country that knows sports arguably better than any other, is going to the knockout stage and Denmark, the fetching Euro 2020 semifinalist, is not. So it went that the yellow-shirted Australian corner of the 41,232 in Al Janoub Stadium wound up reveling Wednesday night in the Socceroos' 1-0 win over the Danes that featured more Danish possession but not all that much flukiness. And so it ended up that the public address wound up playing a merry "Down Under" after the whistle, even if it did feel odd to sit in a country mostly dry and ponder the lyric "where beer does flow and men chunder." A keen DJ in the PA booth followed it with "Waltzing Matilda," forever touching. |
'Tried-and-true tactics'  Police during a protest against China's strict zero Covid measures in Beijing on Nov. 28. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images) | They are showing up at homes in the middle of the night, stopping people and searching their phones for banned apps, summoning individuals for questioning at police stations and holding them for more than 24 hours. Through these and other tactics, Chinese authorities are quietly trying to stamp out the demonstrations and vigils that have spread across the country within the past week, challenging the Communist Party's authority in a way not seen since the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Since the protests started in response to a deadly apartment building fire last Thursday in the city of Urumqi, police have tracked down an unknown number of demonstrators and advised them not to attend any more such gatherings, according to demonstrators, relatives of detained protesters and lawyers. The Washington Post spoke to people involved in six cases of protesters being questioned or detained, though lawyers said they were familiar with more than 20 encounters. All spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals by authorities. Chinese officials have not directly acknowledged the demonstrations, which have morphed from targeting the government's severe "zero covid" policy to demanding free speech, rule of law and in some cases, reform of the country's one-party political system led by President Xi Jinping. Instead of a visible and hard crackdown, authorities seem to be proceeding less overtly — at least for now. "The tried-and-true tactics range from the most brutal to the less discernible, applied to people based on their circumstances," said Yaqiu Wang, China researcher for Human Rights Watch. "The authorities have already resorted to harassment and intimidation of those who went to the protest scenes." One 26-year-old woman who, with her husband, attended a protest in the capital on Sunday said that they heard a knock on their door some 26 hours later. They were immediately fearful. "It was 3:50 a.m.," she recounted. "Who else could it be but the police?" Her husband told her to hide in the bedroom before he opened the door. He was taken away and did not return home until more than half a day later. She wonders if the officers came because she and her husband showed their faces at the protest or because they drove to it and parked their car nearby. She declined to discuss what her husband was asked while in custody but explained why they took part despite the risk: "We just want to live like people, with freedom and rights." Authorities may be using data from cellphone towers to track people who were close to the protests, according to one China-focused security expert. Chinese cellphone providers, as required by a 2013 law, must do real-name registration for all numbers. As cellphone users access 4G or 5G data, their devices ping those towers and the data recorded is saved and filtered by time and date. — Lily Kuo, Pei-Lin Wu and Theodora Yu Read more: Chinese police are knocking on protesters' doors, searching cellphones |
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