Iran’s January protests were a “bloodbath,” Nasrin Sotoudeh said as she called for international support for women from Tehran in February. Sotoudeh, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer, has been repeatedly arrested over the past two decades for her activism and has spent more than six years in prison. She was referring to protests that initially reacted to the collapse of the rial at the end of last year, then grew into a nationwide call for government leaders to step down. Iranian security forces responded with live fire, and estimates vary widely of how many they killed; from the government’s figure of 3,117 , to the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s claim that there were “tens of thousands,” and Iranian medical professionals’ estimate of 30,000.
Two weeks after Sotoudeh’s call, on Feb. 28, the bombs came. Over the following month alone, U.S. and Israeli strikes killed 249 women in Iran, all civilians, according to government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani. But beyond the direct toll on people and the destruction of infrastructure, the bombing has also provided the Iranian government with a pretext of national unity, which it has used to intensify its crackdown on feminists and protesters.
Sotoudeh saw the January massacres as a “final blow” to Iranian society and saw no other option but to publicly ask for the implementation of international law within the framework of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter and its provisions around threats to peace — but she did not ask for war. She invoked the Responsibility to Protect, the doctrine the United Nations adopted by consensus in 2005, under which the international community bears responsibility to act — through encouragement, peaceful collective action or, as a last resort, blockades or the use of force through the U.N. Charter — if a state turns its guns on its own people.
Russia or China — strategic partners of Iran and two of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — could veto the whole effort, Sotoudeh acknowledged. The Security Council is the only body with the legal power to authorize international action, from sanctions to force, under Chapter VII.
The bombs that rained down on Feb. 28 were not sanctioned by the Security Council. What began that day was a unilateral war waged by Washington and Tel Aviv and clearly illegal. U.S. President Donald Trump described the bombs that killed Iran’s supreme leader in the first hours of war as aimed at regime change and nuclear disarmament. He spoke of “safety” and “freedom” for Iranians, language that implicitly included Iranian women — women whose long struggle had captured the world’s imagination with the Woman Life Freedom protests of 2022.
It is those who claim to be on the side of the law who bombed straight past it.
But here is the irony: For years, the Islamic Republic has been cast globally as an outlaw state, a violator of international norms, while the civilians it terrorizes keep reaching for the U.N. Charter as their last line of defense. Yet it is those who claim to be on the side of the law who bombed straight past it. Between Feb. 28 and April 7, U.S. and Israeli airstrikes killed at least 2,362 civilians in Iran, 383 of them children.
“When Nasrin called for the international community to step in, I was shocked,” Elahe, a teacher from east Tehran who was at the forefront of the Woman Life Freedom demonstrations, tells Truthdig. For her safety, her full name hasn’t been used.
“But then I realized that is all we had left. We have risen up peacefully against the regime time after time. And instead of listening, they arrest us. In January, they were killing us in the streets. What other choice did we have then to call for outside protection?” She pauses, then shrugs with a long sigh. Her weariness seems to fill up the video screen connecting us.
“I felt like a traitor to my own country when I agreed with her, but I was sure that international law would help to protect us. I mean, otherwise what’s it for?”
She shrugs again, and this time her words seem painful to even shape as she tells me, “But look how wrong we were! The way the bombs came and killed those girls in Minab, in hospitals, schools, so many innocent people … and obviously [the U.S. and Israel] don’t care about the Iranian people at all. We were fools to believe in America.”
Embedded feminism
Instead of helping anyone, the U.S.-led war has “strengthened the Islamic Republic” writes Firoozeh Farvardin, a Vienna-based feminist researcher who has spent years mapping the Iranian women’s movement. In this way, the war has allowed the Iranian government “to present itself as the defender of national sovereignty … and reduced the space for autonomous feminist politics.”
There is bitter irony here too: A war launched in the name of liberating Iranians handed the Iranian government an easy excuse to do just the opposite. Criticism could be quashed in the name of national unity in the face of foreign aggression, and for sovereignty under siege.
That manipulation of a cause has been taken a step further in the use of the Women Life Freedom slogan to justify war. As Beirut-based feminist writer Sahla Omar, writing for Raseef22 noted, the slogan has been “torn from its life-affirming origins in resistance” after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked it various times from November 2024 to June 2025 to justify future military action. Israel then bombed Iran from June 13 to 24, last year.
“When we heard Netanyahu start saying ‘Zan Zendeghi Azadi’ last year when Israel fought its first war against us, we felt desperate, like our beautiful movement was being co-opted.” says Monica, a south Tehrani activist with no headscarf in sight and a belly button ring on full display. Her full name has been withheld for her safety.
The U.S.-led war has “strengthened the Islamic Republic.”
“And seeing how the war has escalated this year, I now understand the term ‘embedded feminism,’ which I learnt when I was reading feminist theory for myself but didn’t really get until now,” she tells Truthdig. “It’s where a state co-opts feminist language to sell a war as a humanitarian project. And I think now this is what happened to Iran.”
Women like Monica continue to defy the law and go out in public without a hijab, a gain they have fought for over the past year. Indeed, none of the women I spoke to over video call for this article wore a hijab.
However, they are clear that the initial easing of hijab enforcement as the bombing began this year was not because the government was conceding, but because it needed bodies on the street for “national unity.”
Iranian women told reporters exactly this in the first weeks of the current war. “Right now, they are just distracted by the war,” one woman, Zahra, told France24 . “But after that, who knows what they will do about it.”
On July 21, she was proven right. Cafes — the most visible public spaces where the unveiled and the veiled sit side by side — were shut down for failure to observe Islamic norms. On central Tehran’s Sanaei and Iranshahr streets, cafe owners were given a range of justifications for the closures, from women’s noncompliance with mandatory hijab to blocking the pavement.
Repression of dissent
With the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, one might have expected the resulting changes in the top levels of government to bring some moderation. But the wave of executions of prisoners that followed — including some protesters from the January demonstrations — dispels that notion.
“Iranian authorities are using the cover of what they call ‘wartime conditions’ to intensify their repression of dissent through mass arbitrary arrest,” noted Amnesty International.
Those killed are not abstractions.
The government police chief, Ahmadreza Radan, confirmed the scale of repression himself on May 17, announcing that more than 6,500 “traitors and spies” had been arrested since the war began. Amnesty International has also documented at least 41 people “arbitrarily executed” since the bombing started this year, with at least 78 more protesters and dissidents currently facing death sentences.
Every one of those trials and executions violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Iran ratified in 1976 . Likewise, every strike that kills civilians, as opposed to military targets, violates the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. Yet neither Tehran nor Washington nor Tel Aviv seem to feel bound by these laws they themselves have ratified .
Those killed are not abstractions. They are daughters, teachers, filmmakers and children. Whether it is Israel and the U.S.’ illegal bombs, or the Iranian government’s war against its own people, Iranian civilians are beset by forces seemingly determined to ignore international law.
Economic impact of the war
The damage of the bombings only starts with the body count. When hospitals are hit, when pharmaceutical factories are destroyed, it is society’s most vulnerable — women, people with disabilities or long-term illnesses and the elderly — who suffer, deprived of the medical services they need.
The war has compounded existing economic problems, seeing inflation increase further and the country’s supply of goods impacted by trade isolation. Employers are tightening their belts, with unemployment following.
In a harsh economic landscape, it is always women who suffer more. The Statistical Center of Iran reported in June that women’s labor-force participation has collapsed to 12% , and it explicitly blamed “the shadow of war.” The center noted that men who lost work are finding their way back, but women are not.
Youth unemployment among women stands at 35% , almost double the rate for young men. Layer that onto food inflation running at 134.6% from a year ago, and this is what so-called “liberation” costs.
Mariam, an artisan in Isfahan, runs her own small fashion brand using her town’s famous traditional block printing called qalamkari to create tailor-made contemporary clothes. “I haven’t had an order since June last year,” she tells me in her lilting accent. For her safety, her full name has not been used.
The damage of the bombings only starts with the body count.
Like millions of Iranian entrepreneurs, she used to have a business account on Instagram. Before the two internet blackouts this year — first in January during the protests, then for 88 days during the war — Iran’s Chamber of Commerce estimated at least 500,000 solely Instagram-based shops were operating in the country, supporting roughly one million jobs. Afshin Kolahi, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, put direct daily losses due to the internet blackouts at $30 million to $40 million , with indirect losses likely twice that.
Iran’s communications minister, Sattar Hashemi, put the number of jobs dependent on internet connectivity at roughly 10 million people. A lot of those entrepreneurs were, like Mariam, women.
“My family is out of savings now, my Ph.D. place at a university in the U.S. was canceled, and honestly, soon I am not sure how we will manage,” she says.
Multiply her story by the millions like her, and here is what the war’s cheerleaders in Washington, in Tel Aviv, in the comfortable corners of the diaspora, cannot explain away. Nasrin Sotoudeh, and those Iranians appealing for international support, did not ask for this. Sotoudeh asked, on the record and weeks before the first strike, for the world to protect Iranian civilians under a doctrine built for exactly that purpose, through the one institution with the legal standing to make it possible.
What she got instead was a war that bypassed that institution entirely and that has left the movement she spent her freedom defending mute, fractured and afraid. The war has contributed to putting more women and dissidents on death row, not fewer, and has priced women out of work and out of public life.
Sotoudeh is still, as far as we know, alive and out on bail in Iran, but paying with charges for what she said in February, as are many other women’s rights activists. They asked for help, and asked for it lawfully. Instead, they were used as fodder for an argument for someone’s illegal and inexplicable war.
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US War on Iran Is Devastating for Women Who Want Life and Freedom
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