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Today, the world is witnessing an imperialist war being waged on Iran by US-Israel with European support. The war has already claimed hundreds of lives and has spiralled into attacks and casualties across the Middle East region.
The Islamic regime in Iran has long faced internal resistance by women, students, and workers, against brutal suppression of rights and the worsening conditions of living. Today, that same resistance is being used by the imperialist powers to justify the ongoing war. The question of women’s rights has been repeatedly used by imperialism to label some nations as civilizationally ‘inferior’ thus making it necessary for ‘superior’ or ‘developed’ nations to intervene in their affairs, even through military means. In October 2023, the Israeli attack on Palestinian people in Gaza was similarly justified. Recall the image of an IDF soldier standing on rubble in Gaza with an Israeli flag with the words ‘In the Name of Love’ written on it. It was circulated as a marker of liberal and free Israel prevailing over a ‘backward’ Palestine where homosexuality is a criminal act under Islamic rule. In the 2004 war on terror in Afghanistan, similar rhetoric of ‘saving Afghani women’ from the ‘barbaric’ Taliban was instrumentalized by the same imperialist forces who gave rise to the Taliban in the first place as a proxy against the USSR to protect its interests in the Cold War period.
The narrative of the imperialist powers conveniently omits a crucial aspect of peoples’ resistance in Iran: the fight has always been about worsening conditions of life, caused not only by the Islamic regime but by an economic order imposed by Western imperialist forces themselves. Iranian women have shown time and again, in building solidarities with other struggles against worsening conditions, that the question of liberation of Iranian women is not separate from the questions affecting its working masses.
December 2025: A wave of unrest, following economic crisis causing sharp inflation, a devalued currency and an energy deficit. These were the direct consequence of the UN’s reimposition of sanctions on Iran in September 2025 and yet it has been used to create international consensus on the need for external intervention in Iran.
September 2022: Nationwide demonstrations erupted following the death of Magda Amini for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. It gave way to the influential ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement which notably took the form of a mass movement against police repression. People rose against state driven attacks on women, the working class, and oppressed communities such as the Kurdish Saqqez.
2019-2020: A pivotal moment when several regions saw militant uprisings which were responded to with brutal repression resulting in the deaths of over 1,500 protestors. The immediate trigger for the protests was a rise in fuel prices as well as oppressive taxation policies which favored the elite. This was the culmination of a series of upheavals since the 2010s against economic conditions and corruption in Iran, which have had varied stakeholders from teachers to railway workers to oil workers along with women’s groups.
Iran’s long history of political turmoil is deeply tied to the role imperialist powers have played in its internal matters. Before the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iran was governed by the US-backed Shah regime which was portrayed by Western propaganda as one of freedom and peace. In reality, the Shah regime was a period of hardship for Iranian people and the decade preceding the revolution was filled with protests from different sections, including workers, students and teachers. It was these same sections and masses organised through workers’ councils that eventually overthrew the Shah regime. The Islamic regime following 1979 co-opted these wins and stifled the working class masses which had toppled the Shah. Meanwhile, the US imposed harsh sanctions, an action taken against the toppling of the Shah who best represented their interests. Notably, western media has focused only on the question of women’s rights to describe the brutality of the Islamic regime. It contrasts this oppressive rule with the liberalism of the Shah, hiding the real costs of US sanctions and interventionist tactics which are paid by the masses of these nations.
One of the first targets in the US-Israel launched war this past week was a primary school for girls with the latest death toll hovering over 170. Whenever a ‘barbaric’, ‘undemocratic’ regime is toppled by US imperialism in favour of a pro-US regime, the resultant policies are in favour of empire and not the common people. In the latest developments in Iran, its control over strategic waterways and its oil reserves are the primary targets in order to establish complete US control over the middle-east region.
It is not simply through the taking off of the ‘veil’ that Iranian women can find freedom. The same imperialist powers which speak of saving Muslim women are also responsible for creating conditions which worsen their oppression and living conditions, through increasing sanctions and deepening economic hardship. The trope of saving Muslim women has fuelled the US imperialist war machine since 2001, selectively co-opting real dissent and resistance to serve its own interests. It has homogenized one definition of liberation for women, based on western cultural norms couched in the rhetoric of bodily autonomy and choice – a neoliberal co-option of the wins of feminist struggles even in the West. Structural conditions oppressing women, including the role of imperialism itself in these contexts, do not feature in western propaganda which delimits freedom as a choice between the oppressive ‘veil’ versus other western models of clothing and self-fashioning. However, as was famously coined in the 2022 ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement, Iranian women have also shown that the fight is against patriarchal oppression, western imperialism and the Islamic regime at the same time, and importantly their fate along with the fate of the Iranian masses must lie in their own hands and not become tools for US imperialist interests.
