2026 Iranian Protests

On December 28, 2025, protests erupted in Tehran, Iran’s capital city. The protests quickly spread across the country and evolved into the most serious challenge to the Islamic Republic since the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022–23 and, previously, the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests. On January 8 security forces launched a crackdown so brutal that some observers described it as “Iran’s Babi Yar” given its tremendous scale. It marked the deadliest incident of repression since the Islamic Republic took power in 1979.

What triggered the protests?

The protests followed a year of economic freefall and spiraling devaluation of the rial, Iran’s currency, which had lost more than 40 percent of its value since Israel’s 12-day conflict with Iran in June. Those losses were just the latest in a prolonged collapse that had erased nearly 90 percent of the rial’s value since the United States quit the nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran in 2018. The freefall was exacerbated by the imposition in September of international sanctions at a level unseen since before the nuclear deal was implemented in 2015.

What is significant about the 2026 protests in Iran?

The protests were the closest in years to matching the scale of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. But as they continued to spread, they lacked a unifying cause beyond Iranians’ mounting economic grievances.

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Bystander Video: A History: Iranian protests

They nonetheless unfolded against a tense backdrop on the international stage. In Israel and the United States, some officials and commentators had been calling for renewed strikes on Iran, just months after a 12-day conflict in which Israel disabled much of Iran’s air defenses and the United States left Iran’s nuclear infrastructure significantly damaged. Although the White House characterized the U.S. operation as a one-off mission and claimed that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated,” intelligence assessments later indicated that the strikes merely set the nuclear program back by either months or years. Iran moved quickly to rebuild, according to intelligence reports and media investigations, while the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—a 2015 agreement that was designed to curb Iran’s nuclear program—expired in October.

The Iranian government’s prioritization of security over welfare has been a particular point of tension at home for several years. While attacks on Iran in 2024 and 2025 underscored a very real security threat, the government had already been ramping up spending on security and surveillance well before the Israel-Hamas War brought conflict to the country, even as it cut subsidies and imposed austerity measures. The death of Jina Mahsa Amini—which set off the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022 and was widely seen as the result of an overly forceful police state combined with systemic government neglect—crystallized these grievances. Around the onset of the 2026 protests, Iranian Pres. Masoud Pezeshkian proposed an annual budget that reflected this imbalance, increasing security spending by nearly 150 percent while offering wage increases amounting to only about two-fifths of the rate of inflation.

Many Iranians believe regime change would end Iran’s international isolation and result in fewer economic and security restrictions on Iranians. But some Iranians, even among those who support regime change, consider it an existential necessity to confront external threats regardless of who governs. Pezeshkian, who straddles the middle, campaigned on rapprochement with the West as a path to resolving Iran’s economic problems, but he has endorsed deterrence against Israeli and American aggression.

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What was the government’s response to the protests?

The response was unrelenting. Although the government initially struck a conciliatory tone, the rapid spread of the protests, a surge in isolated violence targeting government installations, and a threat of foreign intervention shook the regime, and on January 8 it launched a brutal crackdown. According to officials in Iran’s Ministry of Health, at least 30,000 people were killed in just the first 48 hours, a number unseen for deaths by gunfire since the Nazis’ Babi Yar massacre in September 1941. That number far exceeded the initial estimates of human rights advocates, which ranged from about 12,000 to 20,000.

Iranian Pres. Masoud Pezeshkian, who had backed the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022–23, at first attempted to get ahead of the protests. He acknowledged the grievances over the economy and called for dialogue to address them. State-run media, in a rare move, covered the protests on television as driven by the economic crisis, but they did not acknowledge calls for regime change. But Pezeshkian also pressed for unity in the face of external threats, a tone that the government took on more prominently amid remarks from U.S. Pres. Donald Trump threatening to intervene as well as agitation from Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah. After security forces began their crackdown, the supreme leader Ali Khamenei took a hard line against the protests in a speech on January 9, accusing demonstrators of vandalizing “their own country just to please the president of the United States.” That same day he reportedly ordered security forces to kill protesters and show no mercy. About that time the government implemented an Internet blackout and the extent of the crackdown remained unknown to the outside world for several days. By January 12 it started becoming clear that the widespread protests had already been suppressed and without any sign of defection from the government or its security forces that might indicate a fragile regime. Government officials characterized the victims as terrorists and foreign agents, despite the enormous death toll that was later reported. The United States subsequently backed down from its threats to intervene, reportedly to avoid the risk of instigating a protracted and far-reaching war in the Middle East. Nonetheless, it undertook its biggest military build-up in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq and on February 28, 2026, it followed through in its general threat by carrying out major strikes in Iran alongside Israel.