How is the Iranian society coping with the crackdown on the protests? What is the current state of the regime […]
How is the Iranian society coping with the crackdown on the protests? What is the current state of the regime and its prospects for the future? Who is Reza Pahlavi and what might be his role in the near future? And how do Iranians view the U.S. intervention in their affairs?
Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Touska Gholami Khaljiri, an Iranian women’s and children’s rights activist and researcher based in Łódź, Poland, whose work bridges gender justice and grassroots activism. In Iran, she collaborated with multiple non-governmental organizations, including serving as head of a legal team and workshop facilitator, delivering prevention programs on child sexual abuse. Since relocating to Poland, she has remained actively engaged in advocacy related to Iran, organizing demonstrations in Łódź during the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement and contributing to international awareness efforts. In 2023, she was selected by Wprost magazine to represent Iranian women in receiving the SheO Award in the category of “Fight for Equality and Women’s Rights.” She is also involved in digital documentation initiatives, including contributing to the Iran Protests Timeline website, an ongoing bilingual (English–Polish) project providing a chronological record of Iran’s 2026 uprising. Tune in for their talk!
Find out more about the Iran Protests Timeline here: https://iranproteststimeline.com/
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.
My name is Leszek Jezdziewski and today we are going to talk about the protests in Iran. And I have a very appropriate guest today, Tosca Gholami-Kaljiri, who is an Iranian women’s and children’s rights activist and researcher based in my hometown, Łódź, Poland. In Iran, she also collaborated with multiple non-governmental organizations, served as a head of legal team, a workshop facilitator, delivering prevention programs on child sexual abuse.
And since she relocated to Poland, she’s been and remains actively engaged in advocacy related to Iran, organizing demonstrations here in Łódź and also being active in different dimensions. So, Tosca, welcome warmly to Liberal Europe.
Thank you, Leszek, for having me and amplifying the Iranian voice.
Speaking of Iranian voice, I don’t know if it’s true, but I read that the recent protests that started in December 28 last year, and they are the biggest since 1979 revolution. And according to different sources, perhaps 30,000 or more people were killed by the regime. Over 50,000 were arrested. I don’t know if these numbers are valid. It’s difficult to verify them. I wanted to ask you, what is the situation right now on the ground? Because there is also very little flow of information. And if there is anything about Iran these days, it’s about the possible US intervention. But I’m curious, what happened to the protests? What is the situation? What do we know and how do we know about what’s happening in Iran?
So, as you know, we had a few days of critical uprisings. And as you said, they are estimated to be the biggest uprising throughout this 47 years that Islamic regime is in power in Iran. After the massacre that happened on 8th and 9th of January, specifically, and the mass arrests that happened afterwards. As we were watching Iran, we saw, I would say, fire under the ashes. It was not a military situation in Iran, like from the regime’s side. But there were arrests happening on the streets in daily life, and people’s phones were taken from them. Their social media was checked to see who they follow, who they have texted. Also for almost two weeks, a curfew was going on inside Iran in different cities, especially small cities. Because with bigger cities, people do not know each other well. The network is not that strong. But when it comes to smaller cities, people are more related to each other. The network is stronger. So the control is stronger as well. People were asked to close their shops and their businesses. After six o’clock, people who were in groups of more than two, were being interrogated, asked to leave the street, to go back home. Armed cars, with machine guns on them, were going around the cities. There were search groups based on certain neighborhoods.
So this was the situation right before this week. This week, we entered the 40th day of the mass killing, and massacre. And there is this culture in Iran that people have another funeral on the 40th day of their loved one passing. It’s called Chehellum. And this is when family members come to the person who has lost someone, bring them colorful clothes so that they take off their black clothing and come back to life. Traditionally, the ceremony is a religious gathering. Quran is read, prayers are recited, and the families mourn quietly, cry, and try to get back to life after this 40th day. But I have been watching videos coming from these 40th day funerals. They have transformed from this religious ritual into an act of collective defiance. People who have lost their loved ones with a straight gunfire to their heads, to their hearts, or they have been even killed in prison under torture, they stand still. They have strong, powerful speeches. Instead of Quran recitations, music is played.
Instead of silence, these powerful speeches are going on. And families openly declared that their loved ones were protesters, they fought for freedom and democracy, they were killed because they wanted Iran to be free. They also play the national anthem that we had before the revolution. So there is no fear in the language anymore. And they chant the slogans that their loved ones were killed because they were chanting the same slogans. And the thing is that they are doing this despite knowing the IRGC forces, Basij forces, have attacked so many 40th day funerals in the past days.
They have opened fire on mourning families while they were having these ceremonies. So up until this week, I was saying that this is fire under ashes, but the fire is out again. And in a small city in Iran, I saw a huge, huge funeral going on. And then family members and people who were there announced that 3,000 people were there for a funeral for two people killed during the process. So you see, we thought that we should wait for something to happen for people to come back to the street again. But it is amazing watching how these people translate courage again.
Knowing that you might be shot on the streets, and to go out anyway is another level of courage. And they are just telling the world that nothing is over and that they will continue until this regime is down. They chant Magmar Khamenei, which is like death to Khamenei.vThey chant Javid Shah. They chant this is the last fight and Pahlavi is going to be back. They chant women, life, freedom. So these are the slogans that killed their loved ones. And they keep repeating them because they believe that they have to take this regime down before they kill more.
I wanted to ask you how those processes are different from the ones that we’ve seen a couple of years back and the famous Green Revolution. Do you see the sort of wider societal support that this is not just students or, educated women, but this is a wider swath of society taking part? And does it make any political difference? Because the nature of the regime is so autocratic and because of the revolutionary goals, the repression is so widespread, it seems they still keep control of society at large. So if you can just try to answer those two.
You know, I think it has been an action and reaction between the government and the people. Throughout all these years, Iranians tried gradual reform. So for years, people voted for so-called reformist candidates and hoping for small openings inside the system. So they were not asking for yet another revolution. They were asking for a breathing space. But the governments response to these requests was that the system absorbed these reformist and preserved the core of power untouched. And they decided that to prevent people from asking for more, they would oppress them more.
So instead of responding to students’ protests peacefully or, as you said, during the Green Movement in 2009, millions marched silently after the disputed election. So instead of responding to people’s requests, like going a few steps back to give a little bit of space to people, they moved forward towards more oppression. So their answer was arrests, disappearances, killings in daylight on the street and in prison under torture.
And there has always been hundreds of people under threat of execution in Iran. And right now, it’s not hundreds anymore. It’s thousands that are facing these executions. In my opinion, it is important to see that the way that people of Iran have come for 47 years to negotiate with the regime, that does not speak the language of peace and does not understand what people are saying. And the only language that this regime understands is gunfire, is torture, is arrests and oppression. So this is not a regime that negotiates power.
They label these people as rebels against Islam, against this theological system that they have created. So their response is to kill as many as they can to keep this system solid, to rule over people. And the reason why right now, it is not only a certain group of people on the street.
You see doctors, engineers, firefighters, young kids, families hold their babies in their hands and attend these protests and they were killed. The reason is that the government is not targeting a specific group anymore. They’re not targeting only activists. They’re not targeting students or worker councils anymore. They are targeting everyone who is saying no to their power. So this is why everyone is out on the street. In the face of every one of these people who have been killed all these past weeks, I see myself, I see my brother, I see my family because they are us. And people think, oh, they killed him and the next one is me. So if I’m not going to the streets, if I’m not raising my voice against this power, it is going to take me next. It is going to take my child next. So this is why I think people are all on the streets.
Are there signs that those peaceful protests trying to pressure the regime are turning more into the uprising, perhaps also using force because it seems that they don’t really care about how many people they need to kill to keep the power. So this sort of regime seems almost impossible to topple unless there are some signs of military or police revolts. Is there any signs that this sort of divisions are visible within the regime, that some people don’t want to shoot their compatriots after all, that soldiers who are not in the military to kill the citizens of their own country? Is there any chance that this internal division or that just these normal people who serve in the army, for example, or police might turn against the regime because they can’t keep on doing what they are told to do?
Of course, there have been disobediences inside police forces and army. We even saw a video from Abadanan, which was very viral, one of the most crowded cities compared to the population that they had, that they were passing by a police station and the police on the rooftop of the police station was showing a victory sign to people passing by. But I’d say that the Islamic regime has planned this really well. It’s been half a century almost that they’re in power and they managed to take the military power from army and from the police and give it to these pseudo-military groups like Basij and like IRGC. I personally don’t think that these pseudo-military groups would put their guns down because they have been trained as a child. So many of these people join Basij groups when they are only teenagers. We still see teenagers holding guns and shooting people. So the level of brainwash going on inside the IRGC group, the Basij, is I think very powerful. And I don’t see this happening because the ideology that they are following is so strong and so established in their system of thoughts that they won’t give it up because they think that they are fighting the enemies of God. They think that they are opening fire against people who are fighting the best religion in the world, the truth.
So they find themselves in a position of rightfulness. So I don’t see this happening. Yes, maybe in police force that happens. In army it has also happened and I think that it will. But right now the issue is that in Iran the armed forces are not only police and army. It is IRGC, it is Basij, which are I would say a religious, an Islamic cult more than a military group that wants to defend the country or defend its people. So the ideology doesn’t let them to put their guns down, to separate from these groups.
Right. I wanted to do a sort of follow-up question on this because it’s interesting for me. Do you think that despite all these mass killings, the Islamic Republic still holds legitimacy? And do you think that there’s been outside Iran many calls for the son of the late Shah, also called Reza Pahlavi, to come back? Do you think that because of what happened and also because of the very poor economic performance of Iran and sanctions and basically the failure of the policy that the Islamic revolution is losing legitimacy and sort of restoration of the previous also not democratic regime is possible at some point?
Definitely they have lost their legitimacy. I mean outside Iran we are still trying to convince people, governments, parliaments, politicians that they need to understand that this regime does not represent Iranian people. But in Iran they definitely have lost it. Even amongst religious people. There is this group of people who were before religious and now because of this regime in power they are going against their religious beliefs. They have changed totally, 100%. But then still there are people in Iran who are traditionally religious. They have their beliefs, they say prayers, they fast. But even they are not staying behind this regime. I say this because watching all these funeral videos the past few days, I see families with or without hijab, like mothers mourning their children. The thing that they have in common is that they say death to Khamenei. And death to Khamenei is not saying death to one person. It means that we want this regime down. So before, like a few years ago, it was just mostly secular, liberal activists and educated people. And they still had some support from the religious people.
But right now they have even lost their legitimacy in this group, with this group of people. So yes, they are losing it. And surprisingly, people from different social groups, from different economic groups, levels actually, they are somehow agreeing that we need a representative to speak for us outside Iran, to convince the West, to convince the free world that we have a plan for when the regime falls. And Reza Pahlavi, despite being the son of late Shah of Iran, he himself does not present himself as a future monarch. He presents himself as a facilitator of transitional period. He has repeatedly stated that the final political system of Iran, should it be republic or a monarchy, should be decided by the people through a free referendum. And people are standing by this. Of course, there are people who are constitutional monarchists. And there are secular republicans, such as myself, like members of diaspora, also some people inside Iran, that they don’t actually even have any connection to any party. They are standing in unity, calling his name, so that we can be united to take this regime down. This is what they all say, that our first and only aim right now is to be united to take this regime down.
Very quickly, because we are a bit over time, but I wanted to ask you, as we speak on February 21st, Donald Trump is preparing to launch an attack on Iran. We don’t know if he’s going to do it, but he’s threatening that he’s going to do it to force Iran to resign automatically from its nuclear program and force it into more concessions and negotiations. If it’s going to happen, how do you think that Iranians would react to it?
You know, Iranians are against war. This is something that goes without saying, of course. What they are asking right now is they are asking for an intervention. They’re not asking for an invasion. They’re not asking for an occupation. They are not asking for another Iraq. They are asking for targeted intervention. Because they are facing systematic, lethal repression. This is not helping Iranians. It’s about human responsibility. What people are asking is that the free world, especially U.S., because people are specifically calling Donald Trump and U.S. to intervene. They are asking for them to cut the hands of a regime that their influence is even beyond the borders of Iran. They are supporting and financing armed groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, this Houthi movement. They are even empowering Russia to keep the war in Ukraine. So, Iranians are asking for the hands of this murderous regime to be cut. This intervention that they are asking for doesn’t mean that they don’t realize the consequences and the strings attached to it. They realize this, but they are asking for this targeted military intervention to aim the infrastructure that is used for repression, to weaken this regime so that people can continue fighting. They are asking for intervention because they want the civilians to be protected.
This is not a call for war, I repeat. It is a call to stop systematic state violence. People empty-handed cannot do this. We need this intervention to happen, and this is not unprecedented. The NATO intervention in the Kosovo war has happened before. Even Germany was not able to become Germany again because of the Second World War if there was not allied intervention. This is not something out of the ordinary that people are asking for. They do realize that, of course, every state acts in their own interest. There are always strategic calculations. Iranians are not naive. They do understand these power relations, but despite knowing all these, they are asking for intervention because at this point, they have done their share as much as they could. Now, it’s the free world’s turn, the West’s turn to take an action.
This is a place we have to end. We don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m afraid it’s not going to be a humanitarian intervention, but I do really hope that later the resilience of Iranian protesters and democratic spirit will prevail this regime.
Tosca, thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you for having me. Hopefully, we will see a democratic state finally in power in Iran soon.
That would be an amazing outcome of this struggle and this fight.
This is all from me from Liberal Europe today. Please tune in for Ricardo Silvestre next week.