This Is Not Solidarity. It Is Predation.

"Over the past weeks, security forces of the Islamic Republic have responded to mass protests with live ammunition, mass arrests, executions, and a near-total Internet blackout. As of January 15, the Human Rights Activists News Agency, a well-established Iranian human rights organization, has documented at least 2,615 deaths, including 2,435 protesters, alongside 153 security force fatalities, as well as at least 18,470 arrests nationwide, with hundreds of additional deaths still under investigation."

"This violence is neither incidental nor episodic. It reflects a governing approach that has consistently treated mass dissent as a security threat to be crushed rather than a political demand to be addressed. This brutality must be spoken about plainly and without evasion, neither justified nor minimized. For decades, the Islamic Republic has failed to deliver the political inclusion, economic security, and social rights repeatedly demanded by large segments of its population."

"But the Iranian people are not only being crushed from within. They are also being exploited from without. As security forces fired on protesters, Donald Trump publicly warned that if Iran killed protestors, the United States was "locked and loaded" and ready to intervene militarily. Days later, he went further, urging Iranians to keep protesting, to take over state institutions, and promising that "help is on the way." Then, just as abruptly, he backtracked, claiming that the killing had stopped and echoing the Iranian"

Security forces of the Islamic Republic responded to mass protests with live ammunition, mass arrests, executions, and a near-total Internet blackout. The Human Rights Activists News Agency documented at least 2,615 deaths by January 15, including 2,435 protesters and 153 security force fatalities, and at least 18,470 arrests nationwide, with hundreds of additional deaths under investigation. The governing approach treats mass dissent as a security threat to be crushed rather than a political demand to be addressed, relying on criminalization, narrowed representation, and routine coercion. Protesters are citizens who exhausted electoral and reformist pathways and now risk their lives for change.

Read at The Nation