Good morning everyone. Thank you to the Washington Kurdish Institute and other friends who arranged the meeting. Ceng you asked me a very difficult question.
What is this uprising and is it different from the previous one? We had one in 2009, Green Moment, then we had one three years ago. We have a different situation now. Previously, we didn’t have this close cooperation among Iranian ethnic groups. We saw very common slogans around Iran. We saw for the first time since 2009, the return of university students. We have a city that is always the center of religion, the city of Qom, which is a religious school.
They’re burning the security forces’ vehicles in Mashhad, the city of Khomeini! Or the city of Kerman, which just three years ago was the center of the funeral forQassim Soleimani. Over close to a hundred people died. They’re burning a huge banner in the city. So we are seeing very young people. And again, importantly, women are at the forefront of this struggle. So we are going through this very new phase of the revolution in Iran. Is this revolution going to bring down this regime? It’s difficult to say, but I’m sure, all dictators, if you look at the history of Romania,didn’t accept his defeat. Just look at the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring, Egypt, or around the world. They did not accept the reality. Yes, the time before the death of Jina Amini, can not be changed, the clock cannot be turned back to what’s happening. This is developing further and I know the regime is trying to use some tactics. They filter social media. We have no internet, but the protest is continuing using different tactics. Maybe we don’t have as much of a protest in smaller cities. But in most of the big cities, the center of this uprising continued.
Now we are going to the second phase of this uprising, which is the general strike among different groups. The truck drivers, the energy sectors, and the teachers. Now we have strikes by students, university students, and schools around the country. We have some similarities with what happened in 1979. So if you remember in 1979, it brought down one of the most powerful military regimes in the Middle East, it just happened in two days. The final days were when the people finally had a hand on their guns and they brought down the regime. Just the weeks before the 1970 revolution, we had strikes in the energy sector, which is very famous for Iran’s economic market.
We’ve seen some similarities, plus more importantly, we see that even though the internet is really down in Iran, the world’s eyes are on what happens in Iran. So I definitely can see this regime is passing through its final phases. I can’t say it’s gonna happen tomorrow or next week or within a month. But definitely, we are going through its final phases when eventually, something happened you know in 1979, the Kurds were among the first group, and they did not accept this regime. The Kurds did not vote for Islamic Republic Referendum in April 1979, the majority [voted] “no.” Then they had an armed struggle in the eighties for a decade.