No to War, No to the Islamic Republic

On International Women's Day, the war in Iran carries the name of a movement whose participants rejected the bombs within hours. The uprising was crushed in January. The bombs arrived in February. The timing is the proof.

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Within hours of the February 28 strikes, Iranian feminist and left-wing organizations rejected the war. Not because they support the Islamic Republic. Because they reject both. “Iranian women and men are trapped between two forms of violence,” the Internationalist Workers’ Organization wrote. No to the bombs. No to the morality police. No to the proposition that the first will eliminate the second.

It is March 8. International Women’s Day. Tomorrow the UN opens CSW70 — the 70th Commission on the Status of Women — under the theme “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls.” The United States will attend having withdrawn from UN Women’s Executive Board three weeks ago, cut all funding, expanded the Global Gag Rule to cover all non-military foreign assistance — US family planning funding fell 94% in 2025 — and launched a war in which the liberation of women is invoked as justification.

Nobody asked the women. Some of them answered anyway.

Here is the timeline that matters.

On December 28, 2025, protests erupted across Iran. Economic grievances expanded into political demands within days. By January they had spread to over 200 cities across all 31 provinces — the most extensive unrest since the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising of 2022.

On January 8-9, the Islamic Republic crushed it. HRANA — the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the most systematic documentation effort inside Iran — published its “Crimson Winter” report on February 23 confirming 7,007 dead: 6,488 adult protesters, 236 minors, 207 security force members, 76 bystanders. Nearly 12,000 additional cases were under review. Amnesty International called it “the deadliest period of repression by the Iranian authorities in decades.”

The international response: sanctions. Designations. Statements of concern.

On February 28 — seven weeks after the crackdown, after 7,007 confirmed dead, after the uprising was already drowned in blood — the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury.

The massacre of protesters produced sanctions. The nuclear program produced bombs. The variable is not what happens to Iranian women. The variable is what threatens American and Israeli security.

Her name was Jina.

The world knows her as Mahsa Amini, but Jina was the Kurdish name her family gave her — the one the state refused to register because Iran’s civil records don’t accept Kurdish names. On September 13, 2022, she was arrested in Tehran by the morality police for wearing her hijab incorrectly. She was twenty-two, visiting from Saqqez, in Kurdistan Province. She was beaten, fell into a coma, and died three days later.

The slogan that followed is a translation. The original is Kurdish: Jin, Jiyan, Azadî. Woman, Life, Freedom. It came from the Kurdish women’s liberation movement in the 1980s and was first chanted in its Persian form — Zan, Zendegî, Azadî — at Jina’s funeral in Saqqez. It became the defining expression of the most significant women’s rights uprising inside a theocracy since the Iranian Revolution.

Every word of that slogan is an internal political demand. End the morality police. Restore bodily autonomy. Achieve political and cultural freedom for women within Iranian society. These are demands that can only be fulfilled by internal political change — by Iranian women, within Iranian structures, against the specific theocratic architecture that killed Jina for a piece of fabric on her head.

Bombs do not reform morality police. Bombs do not change civil registration laws. Bombs do not produce the institutional culture in which a woman can walk in Tehran without covering her hair. External military force applied to a nationalist state produces nationalism — the rally-around-the-flag effect that has strengthened every authoritarian regime that survived foreign bombing in the history of the practice.

The people who understood this most clearly are the ones closest to the movement.

On February 22, five Kurdish political parties formed the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan: PDKI, PAK, PJAK, Khabat, and Komala. These are parties operating in the geographic heartland of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî — the Kurdish regions where Jina was from, where the slogan was born, where the 2022 protests burned longest.

On March 4, Trump spoke with Kurdish leaders and said he’d be “all for” a Kurdish ground invasion, promising “extensive air cover.” By March 5, all four major Kurdish parties denied that any coordinated offensive had begun. PDKI told Rudaw: “None of our forces have entered the territory of Eastern Kurdistan.”

The coalition’s demands are political, not military. Federalism within a post-regime Iran. Recognition of Kurdish national rights in any political settlement. Cooperation conditional on “recognition of the Kurdish right to self-determination.”

They were offered an air force. They asked for a seat at the table.

This is not naïveté. Al Jazeera documented the reason: the US-Kurdish abandonment cycle. Kissinger armed Iraqi Kurds in 1975 and abandoned them when the Shah cut a deal with Saddam. Bush encouraged Kurdish uprising in 1991 and watched Saddam’s helicopters massacre them. Trump withdrew from northeastern Syria in 2019 and left Kurdish forces exposed to a Turkish offensive. One analyst told Al Jazeera there can be “little trust or faith” that US support will be honored.

The groups closest to the movement’s political vision declined the proxy role. They understand what the bombing planners apparently don’t: political legitimacy in a post-regime Iran requires Iranian agency. You cannot install freedom from thirty thousand feet. The record says so — Iraq, where “mission accomplished” preceded the dismantling of women’s legal protections and the rise of ISIS, which enslaved Yazidi women by the thousand. Libya, where Gaddafi’s overthrow produced a failed state in which women lost freedom of movement and human trafficking surged. Afghanistan, where twenty years and two trillion dollars ended with the Taliban banning girls from school past sixth grade.

Each began with the promise of liberation. Each ended with women worse off than before the first bomb fell.

What does it mean to invoke women’s freedom while dismantling the institutions that protect it?

The same administration that cites Iranian women as justification for Operation Epic Fury reinstated and expanded the Global Gag Rule on January 23 — now covering all non-military foreign assistance, restricting reproductive health services for millions of women worldwide. It withdrew from UN Women’s Executive Board on February 13 and ended all funding. It attends CSW70 tomorrow.

The contradiction resolves if you understand what “freedom” means in this context. It does not mean women’s autonomy. It means sovereignty from the wrong kind of authority. The morality police are the wrong kind. The Global Gag Rule — which denies reproductive health care to women across the developing world — is the right kind, because it originates from the correct sovereign. The objection is not to controlling women’s bodies. It is to the wrong government controlling them.

I have written about this war three times. The diplomatic architecture. The AI in the targeting chain. The financialization of its violence. Each piece examined the machinery.

This is the first time I am writing about what the war claims to be for.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement was the most significant internal political challenge to the Islamic Republic since 1979. Its participants built it from the streets of Tehran, Saqqez, Isfahan, and Shiraz, at the cost of their lives — in 2022, and again in the uprising that started December 28 and was broken by January 9. Seven thousand confirmed dead. Twelve thousand more under review. These are people who fought for exactly the freedom the bombs claim to deliver.

They did not ask for the bombs. They rejected them the same day.

The state killed Jina Amini for a piece of fabric. The movement that followed demanded the right to walk free — demanded it from within, in Kurdish and Persian, feminist and cross-ethnic, specific in its aims and clear about who had to deliver them: Iranians, inside Iran, through political transformation that no missile can substitute. What Operation Epic Fury can deliver is a different thing entirely, and the historical record is unambiguous about what that thing is.

It is International Women’s Day. The least anyone can do is listen to what the women said.

They said no.

Sources

- Solen