3 Years Since Mahsa Amini’s Death, More Protests Remain a Matter of When, not If

Helen of Troy’s face may have launched a thousand ships, but Mahsa Jina Amini’s name unleashed thousands of protests.

September 16 marks three years since the death of Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman, at the hands of Iran’s dreaded “morality police” for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab — the mandatory head-covering for women in Iran. While Mahsa never intended to become an international symbol of resistance against the regime, pictures of her brutalized state in a Tehran hospital and news of her death touched the hearts of millions of Iranians, launching the largest wave of anti-regime demonstrations in the history of the Islamic Republic. Reportedly, over 500 were killed and 22,000 detained during what morphed from anti-hijab protests into a national uprising against clerical authority termed the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement from 2022-2023.

Three years on, Iranian society remains volatile. Since September 2022, there have been at least 9,300 acts of protest or civil disobedience according to an open-source tracker maintained by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The Unhealed Chasm Between State and Society in Iran

The Women, Life, Freedom uprising did not emerge in a vacuum. It was not even the first nationwide act of protest in 2022. The Islamic Republic lost its legitimacy long ago, particularly among Iran’s younger, nationalist, and secular population. This means that Tehran’s aging clerics, oligarchs, and military men have increasingly looked to brute force and intimidation rather than social and political persuasion to keep their hold on power.

Specifically, the scale of the 2022-2023 demonstrations — engulfing over 150 different cities, towns, and villages across all of Iran’s 30 provinces at its peak — was brought about by a widely shared sense of national dissatisfaction and frustration with the Islamic Republic. This was made increasingly apparent in a crescendo of nationwide protests from 2017-2020, coupled with record-setting lows for turnout and even boycotts of electoral contests. By using every opportunity (read: crisis) to march against the regime, be it over environmental, economic, foreign policy, or socio-religious matters, the population signaled a sustained shift away from reform via the ballot box, as was tried in 2009, and towards change via the street.

Amid this dissatisfaction and street pressure, the state has carried out a surge of executions and arrests. Following the 12-Day War with Israel in June, for example, authorities reported over 21,000 arrests, many on charges of allegedly voicing support on social media for Israel’s strikes against the regime.

Iran’s Controversial Hijab Law in the Background

While Iranian women have been protesting mandatory veiling since 1979, enforcement efforts by the regime’s repressive apparatus have ebbed and flowed. Nearly one year after the killing of Mahsa, for example, the parliament introduced a bill broadening the methods used to mandate the hijab and increasing the severity of punishments applicable to women and even girls as young as 12. Reportedly, implementation of the law in full has been blocked by Iranian authorities who are wary of the likely social reaction. While this has led to increased civil disobedience by Iranian women, including publicly appearing unveiled, the state has not stopped its pressure campaign. According to a UN Fact-Finding Mission, Tehran is increasingly relying on electronic surveillance through facial recognition, AI, as well as acts of “state-sponsored vigilantism” through a newly created mobile application called Nazer, or “Overseer,” encouraging citizens and businesses to report non-conformity with the law.

Independent UN experts have called for the law to be fully repealed.

Present by Its Absence: U.S. Policy

Beyond a seemingly perfunctory line about standing with Iranian women in National Security Presidential Memorandum-2, its policy blueprint for Iran, the Trump administration has yet to focus on the domestic situation there. This is a mistake, as anything that could weaken the anti-American and terror-sponsoring regime in Tehran would be a net win for Washington. Under the second Trump administration, human rights sanctions against Iran pale in comparison to those levied against offenders in China and Cuba. Similarly, there has been no implementation yet of a bill named in honor of Mahsa Amini, which passed with a bipartisan majority in the U.S. Congress and was signed into law in 2024. On the third anniversary of Mahsa’s death, vigorous implementation of this law could be the way the Trump administration supports the Iranian people and prepares for the next round of protests.

Behnam Ben Taleblu is the senior director of the Iran Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he is also a senior fellow. For more analysis from the author and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow Behnam on X @therealBehnamBT. Follow FDD on X @FDD and @FDD_Iran. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.