2023 could be the year when the people of Iran finally break free

Editorial: With each protest, with every act of symbolic resistance, with each secret channel of communication opened up, the regime comes closer to eventual collapse

The protests, large and small, continue to spread, and the attempts to suppress them grow ever more desperate and ineffective (Reuters)

Could 2023 be the year of a new Iranian revolution? It almost seems too much to hope for, and too fantastical, given the iron grip the ayatollahs have exerted over the people since they came to power in 1979, supplanting the Shah.

“Civilian” presidents come and go, but the supreme leaders – Ayatollah Khomeini and, for the past three decades, Ali Khamenei – have kept a watchful and often cruel eye over the nation ever since, sponsoring terror and conducting proxy wars such as the conflict with Saudi Arabia in Yemen.

Oil-rich Iran should be wealthy, but it suffers from both fuel shortages and international sanctions. So friendless is the regime that it has taken to selling lethal drones to Vladimir Putin. The country has never been so ostracised and isolated, and its young population are growing tired of it and its misogyny. Times are changing.

Like the Shah before them, its leaders have military ambitions to be the dominant regional power, along with an extensive apparatus of state control, not least the Iranian Revolutionary Guard – virtually a state within a state – and, these days, an overmighty and incompetent cadre of moral police.

It was in the custody of these degenerate moral “guardians” in September this year that a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died after being held for the “crime” of “inappropriate attire”. Even now, after all the disturbances and explicit threats to the regime, the police are using sexual violence against female protesters, thus proving that the protesters are right to be chanting “Woman, life, liberty!”

The Qatar World Cup, with its globally visible signs of dissent from the Iranian fans and squad alike, was a further disaster for the regime, whose leaders seem to lack any sense of proportion or subtlety in their tactics. Not content with threatening the players, the authorities have victimised the family of another famous footballer, Ali Daei, who was captain of the Iranian national football team between 2000 and 2006. On a flight to Dubai, their plane was ordered to turn back after it had left Tehran.

“Industrialised” kidnappings of dual nationals offer further evidence that the rulers of Iran are looking for more bargaining counters, just as in the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Again, like the Shah before them, they are having to contemplate life after losing power.

The protests, large and small, continue to spread, and the attempts to suppress them grow ever more desperate and ineffective. Another female international competitor, the Iranian chess player Sara Khadem, has taken part in a tournament without a hijab. Some 100 illegal Starlink internet terminals are now active in the Islamic Republic, according to Elon Musk. After 100 days, there is no sign of the protests ending, or of women refraining from defiantly removing the mandatory head-covering. There is even a small-scale sport, popular among girls, of “turban tossing” – knocking clerics’ headgear off and running away.

In short, the regime appears to be losing its aura of authority, and the Iranian people are pushing and pushing their luck. With each protest, with every act of symbolic resistance, with each secret channel of communication opened up, the regime comes closer to eventual collapse.

Economically, diplomatically and politically, the Islamic Republic is failing. The fear of the Revolutionary Guard and the morality police patrols hasn’t entirely evaporated, in a land where the rule of law is routinely ignored, but there is a sense of the power of that old slogan – that the Iranian people are many, and their oppressors are few.