Iranian students are calling for more protests at universities after a weekend of demonstrations that were the largest anti-government rallies since country-wide unrest last month.
Students rallied in major cities including the capital Tehran, Mashhad and Isfahan over the weekend and into Monday, shouting anti-government slogans and occasionally clashing with their paramilitary forces.
Footage from at least five universities across Iran on Monday showed scores of students clapping and shouting slogans opposing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He has led the country for 37 years, and many Iranians accuse him of overseeing a decline in their economic and social freedoms.
"The main reason for the protests is that we don't want this government any more," a student in Iran told The National.
The student said every single person had lost a friend, relative or fellow student in last month's protests. At least 7,000 people were killed, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists news agency. They are working to confirm reports of more than 11,000 additional deaths.
"We know that the continuation of this government means that these crimes will be repeated again and again," the student added.
Students used social media to call for more protests later this week and into next weekend. That presents another challenge for Iran’s leadership: as Iranian diplomats are scheduled to hold a third round of talks with the US on Thursday in Geneva to reach a deal over Tehran’s nuclear programme, the government is grappling with persistent and widespread disquiet at home.
Despite the bloody crackdown last month, the renewed protests have seen students openly criticising and opposing their government. The BBC's Persian service verified footage of students at the all-female Al-Zahra University in Tehran attempting to set alight the national flag, seen by many Iranians as representative of their government. Footage frequently shows demonstrators waving the flag used before the 1979 revolution, which brought the current clerical leadership to power.
Some protesters appear to support Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former king who was ousted in 1979. “This is the last battle, Pahlavi will return,” shouted students at the same university.
Other protesters oppose both the Islamic Republic and the monarchy. Mr Pahlavi has presented himself as a viable leadership alternative to Iran’s current leadership, although he remains a controversial figure not welcomed by all Iranians, partly due to the authoritarian nature of his father’s pre-1979 rule.
“Death to the tyrant, be he king or [supreme] leader,” shouted scores of students gathered at Tehran University on Sunday.
Supporters of the former monarchy are part of the opposition, but do not represent it as a whole, the student who spoke to The National said. Because they are the only part of the opposition to the Islamic Republic that has significant money and media, they are the ones who are heard the most, the person said.
Ali Sharifi-Zarchi, an AI professor at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and an outspoken critic of Iran’s government, voiced his support for the demonstrators online.
“Students at Aryamehr University of Technology are now, for the third consecutive day, shouting their anger and hatred at the bloodthirsty Khamenei and the criminal regime of the Islamic Republic,” he wrote on X, alongside a video of scores of students gathered at a demonstration. He referred to an alternative name for the university used before the 1979 revolution.
The protests are a continuation of memorial events held last week to mark the passage of 40 days since the bloodiest nights of last month’s crackdown, and also coincided with the start of a new university term. Mourning ceremonies held 40 days after a person's death, known as “chehelom”, are an important part of Iranian culture.
Those ceremonies, which included families singing and dancing to commemorate their dead, were a way of “standing up to oppression and fear”, an Iranian student who attended one of the chehelom memorial events in the north of the country told The National.
“Collective movements such as dancing or playing music in this context are like symbols of courage and cultural resistance,” the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the risks involved in criticising the government. “These symbolic joys are a response to government efforts to silence protests and convey the message, ‘we are still alive and have a voice’.”
Those messages have continued into the student protests, which have included memorial sit-ins for students killed last month. One was held on Monday for Raha Bahloulipour, a student of Italian language and literature at the University of Tehran.
Footage posted by students online at her memorial sit-in showed groups chanting, “I swear by the blood of my friends, we will stand until the end.”
The protests are not as widespread as last month’s demonstrations, which were met with the most brutal crackdown in Iran’s modern history. There has been no large-scale state response to the student protests so far, although demonstrators have clashed on campus with members of the Basij, a paramilitary force controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Footage from Sunday showed clashes between protesters and what demonstrators described as members of the Basij in Tehran and Mashhad. The student representative said that some students had been summoned to "disciplinary committees" and had noted an increasing number of "threats by the Revolutionary Guard and Basij".
Fars News, a media outlet close to the IRGC, reported students at the Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran gathered to raise the flag of the Islamic Republic, Iran’s current national flag, and “declared their support for the ideals of the Islamic Revolution”.
The anti-government protests indicate that widespread grievances in Iranian society have not gone away, and that the strong possibility of future unrest remains.
Last month's demonstrations began as an economic protest over a sharp drop in the value of the Iranian rial against the US dollar. But they quickly spread to encompass wider political demands, including an end to nearly 50 years of the clerical rule that places tight restrictions on Iranians’ political and social freedoms.
The US-Iran nuclear talks this week come amid an enormous US military build-up in the Middle East. The US President Donald Trump is reportedly considering military strikes on Iran if diplomacy fails to reach an outcome both sides can agree on.
Iranians remain divided over military intervention. Some support the idea of US action to topple Iran's leadership. Others oppose it, either because they support the government or because they are wary of the possible consequences of foreign intervention. Many are fearful that Iranian citizens’ desires for greater political, social and economic freedoms will be sidelined in any foreign military intervention.
"It is important to me that the world does not forget the people's demands, not because I hope for foreign intervention, but because I don't want the people’s narrative to be erased,” the student told The National. “When the narrative is erased, history is written by others. And a nation whose history is written by others will sooner or later have to pay the price."
