Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Pages 4 and 5 At the time of writing, bloody repression seems to have quelled the mass protests in Iran that began in late December and spread to nearly 200 towns and cities across all of Iran’s 31 provinces. The dynamics of these protests recall those that erupted in 2017 and 2019: both were similarly marked by rising living costs and subsidy cuts, abuses by the religious police in enforcing the veil on women (especially students), and the involvement of ethnic minorities. According to international estimates, the victims of those previous waves of repression amounted to 400 and 550 respectively, while there is still uncertainty about the scale of today’s massacre, with estimates ranging from 2,000 to 20,000 victims. Iranian government sources, quoted by Reuters , mention 2,000-5,000, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, in a speech on January 17 th , speaks of thousands of deaths and enormous damage c...