When Tehran finally falls, it will be thanks to brave young women like Rubina Aminian

Every message I’ve had lately from Iranian friends and family has a question in it: is it really happening this time? Hope and fear are mixed in equal measure, as everyone knows that more civilians will be killed before this regime is finally toppled.

Over the years, there have, after all, been so many brave attempts to rise up – instances that have always been met with brutal crackdowns.

Back in 2007, during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I flew to Iran to visit my birth family. I took advice from journalist friends as to whether it was safe to go. One told me: “Go now. It’s only going to get worse.” I managed to get a tourist visa from the embassy; if I had gone in as a journalist, I would have been chaperoned everywhere by a minder.

I went to parties in north Tehran, and travelled down to Esfahan on the sleeper train. In my mantoux (knee-length coat) and headscarf, I passed for being Iranian and was ushered into the domestic queue for the train. On board, I met an English Literature student who later took me round the city. She, like her student friends I met, loved to read, particularly the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen and JK Rowling.

Every time the people of Iran rise up, I think about her generation – and my birth family. Like so many people in Iran, they have suffered so much since the 1979 Revolution.

I spent a couple of decades searching for my biological father, who had come to the UK as an Iranian military officer in the late sixties and met my biological mother. When she got pregnant, he offered to marry her and for us to go to Iran. Instead, she decided on adoption.

When I finally met him, I discovered how lucky we were to be able to reunite, because he, like so many officers, had been imprisoned after the revolution. He survived, enduring two of the grimmest Iranian jails. Many didn't. His Iranian-born children, like so many others, have become part of the diaspora and now live in relative safety outside of Iran. It is those still in Iran who are at near-constant risk.

I offer this snapshot of one family’s history because so many brave Iranians have resisted the regime at huge personal cost. Women’s lives in particular have been totally upended by the last 47 years of hardline Islamic rule, which has destroyed the rights they had enjoyed before.

One of the most significant pushbacks against the regime came in autumn 2022, when women and other protestors rose up, following the killing of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, in Tehran. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests are thought to have been some of the biggest seen in Iran since the Green Revolution protests in 2009, when Ahmadinejad was widely thought to have been fraudulently re-elected. I joined the UK protests here and we cut off our hair in solidarity with the brave women of Iran.

Now, the protests are everywhere in Iran, with citizens finding ingenious ways of evading the internet blackout and smuggling out information, images and videos.

As others have pointed out, there is no one leader at the centre of this uprising, with protestors ranging from bazaris (shopkeepers) to students and other people who just want democracy. But it is women have been at the forefront this time.

The brave young women who have been filmed dancing and singing in the streets without their mandatory hijab have lit a fire under this revolution. So too have those who have sparked a viral trend, being pictured lighting cigarettes from a burning photo of the Supreme Leader – an act of defiance when smoking is heavily restricted for women.

Those who take part in the demonstrations face the death penalty, so the threats to such women are hardly academic. Newspapers around the world today carried a front-page photograph of Rubina Aminian, the 23-year-old fashion student, who, after lectures, had joined the anti-government protests in Tehran, only to be shot in the back of the head at close range by security forces.

As yet, nobody knows what will happen if the regime falls. The death toll is mounting rapidly. For now, members of my family are fearful for our loved ones still in Iran. As for so many people holding their breath right now, this is a time of anguished waiting – hoping that, this time, the fight for democracy is not crushed.

Katharine Quarmby is a writer and investigative journalist. Her prize-listed historical novel, The Low Road, is published by Eye Books