Mahsa Amini

On 16 September 2022, 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, also known as Jina Amini, died in a hospital in Tehran, Iran, under suspicious circumstances. The Guidance Patrol, the religious morality police of Iran's government, had arrested Amini for allegedly not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards. The Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran stated that she had a heart attack at a police station, collapsed, and fell into a coma before being transferred to a hospital. However, eyewitnesses, including women who were detained with Amini, reported that she was severely beaten and that she died as a result of police brutality, which was denied by the Iranian authorities. The assertions of police brutality, in addition to leaked medical scans, led some observers to believe Amini had a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke due to head injuries received after her arrest.

Amini's death resulted in a series of protests described by CNN as more widespread than the protests in 2009, 2017, and 2019, and by The New York Times as the largest Iranian protests since at least 2009. Iran Human Rights reported that by December 2022 at least 476 people had been killed by security forces attacking protests across the country. Amnesty International reported that Iranian security forces had fired into groups with live ammunition and killed protesters by beating them with batons. Amini's death ignited the global Woman, Life, Freedom movement, rooted in her Kurdish background, which demands the end of compulsory hijab laws and other forms of discrimination and oppression against women in Iran. During the ensuing events some female demonstrators removed their hijab or publicly cut their hair as acts of protest.