'Women, life and freedom'

The scale of the uprising over the death of Mahsa Amini is unprecedented, but will it lead to the end of the Iranian regime?

- Patrick Wintour

THE IRANIAN PRESIDENT, EBRAHIM RAISI, was holding court to a small group of journalists at the Millennium Hilton in New York on his first visit to the US since his election in June 2021. At home, protests over the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, were heading for their sixth day.

At the start of the meeting, a short film was shown, part patriotic travel brochure and part paean to how the Iranian people "live peacefully together in a new model of democracy". Given events in Iran, it seemed the kind of absurd propaganda only a self-deluded regime would screen.

Raisi's minders were reluctant to take questions about the protests, but when he agreed, he became fiercely animated about western double standards and spoke so loudly that the words of the mild-mannered translator became hard to discern through the headphones. No final determination had been made into Amini's death, but preliminary evidence showed a stroke or heart failure was the cause, he said. He cited statistics reported in the Guardian asserting 81 women had been killed in the UK in a six-month period. How many times each day in the US are men and women Killed at the hands of law enforcement?”

More than three weeks on, it is clear Raisi had little idea of the forces being unleashed inside his country. It is still not clear that the protests are over, despite mass arrests and scores of deaths. Nor is it clear if the elderly Iranian leadership believe they are facing an existential threat that requires them to change tack.