A few days ago, my phone vibrated. On the line was a friend who fled Iran for Vienna three decades ago. She is a refugee whose Armenian family felt the brutal hand of the ayatollahs’ regime simply because they were “other.” She did not call to ask for pity. She called to hurl a bitter truth at the face of the world, her voice breaking.
“Tell Israelis that Iran is cut off. There are no phone lines, no internet. I cannot reach my family,” she said. “Your leaders told us, ‘Go to the streets and we will help,’ so where are you? Where is the world that fills city squares over Gaza but stays silent in the face of the slaughter of Iranian women? Why is our blood invisible to you?”
Her monologue was not only an expression of personal despair. It was an indictment of international hypocrisy. While the BBC’s newsrooms and Europe’s passive leaders devote endless prime-time coverage to conflicts that fit a convenient narrative, Iran is undergoing what can only be described as a silent kill, a total digital blackout designed to let the Revolutionary Guard kill men and women in alleyways, without witnesses and without documentation.
To understand the intensity of the fire burning in Iran’s streets, one must understand who the modern Iranian woman is. This is a generation that grew up under repression but refused to become a victim. Iranian women are the country’s most educated, determined and politically conscious force. For them, the uprising that began with the death of Mahsa Amini is not a shallow “hijab protest.” It is an existential struggle over sovereignty, over their bodies and their future.
Fires in Iran
The images that manage to leak out reveal a fighter with nothing left to lose. Women are seen pushing aside high heels, tightening the laces of military boots, tying back their hair and heading into the streets. More and more women appear on camera with uncovered hair, openly shattering the walls of fear.
In other videos filmed in recent days, women are seen burning the Islamic Republic’s passport, a declaration of total severance from an identity imposed on them by the regime. Others set fire to portraits of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, using the flames to light cigarettes in an unmistakable act of contempt.
Yet the most powerful expression of Iranian women’s defiance is the “dance of fire” that has become a symbol of the uprising. In footage from the heart of Tehran, crowds dance around makeshift bonfires as women throw their hijabs into the flames, to the sound of clapping and chants.
In that moment, oppression turns to ash. Dancing, banned for women in Iran since 1979, becomes the strongest possible response to an attempt to erase them. They dance in front of rifles, batons and the digital blackout imposed on them.
The cry from Vienna is a wake-up call. Iranian women are no longer waiting for Europe’s passive leaders or for BBC correspondents to notice them. They have already laced up their boots, burned their passports and danced around the fires, hair uncovered.
This revolution has already happened in their hearts. Now it is only a matter of time before the fire lit by women in Tehran consumes the regime that oppressed them.
The only question that remains is where the world will stand when history is written.