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Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

2026-02-2213:59292466www.bbc.com

Student protesters honoured thousands of those killed when nationwide mass protests were put down by Iranian authorities last month.

Scuffles break out at Sharif University in Tehran

Students at several universities in Iran have staged anti-government protests - the first such rallies on this scale since January's deadly crackdown by the authorities.

The BBC has verified footage of demonstrators marching on the campus of the Sharif University of Technology in the capital Tehran on Saturday. They were later seen scuffling with government supporters.

Protests were also reported at other universities in Tehran and elsewhere - with students gathering to honour thousands of those killed by authorities last month.

The US and its European allies suspect that Iran is moving towards the development of a nuclear weapon, something Iran has always denied.

US and Iranian officials met in Switzerland on Tuesday and said progress had been made in talks aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear programme.

But despite the reported progress, Trump said afterwards that the world would find out "over the next, probably, 10 days" whether a deal would be reached with Iran or the US would take military action.

The US leader has supported protesters in the past - at one stage appearing to encourage them with a promise that "help is on its way".

Footage verified by the BBC shows hundreds of protesters peacefully marching on the campus of the Sharif University of Technology at the start of a new semester on Saturday.

The crowds chanted "death to the dictator" - a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - and other anti-government slogans.

A separate crowd of supporters of a rival pro-government rally - many with national Iranian flags - are seen nearby at the beginning of the video. Scuffles are later seen breaking out between the two camps.

Verified photos have also emerged showing a peaceful sit-in protest at the capital's Shahid Beheshti University.

The BBC has also verified footage from another Tehran university, Amir Kabir University of Technology, showing chanting against the government.

In Mashhad, Iran's second-largest city in the north-east, local students reportedly chanted: "Freedom, freedom" and "Students, shout, shout for your rights".

It is not immediately clear whether any demonstrators have been arrested. There have been reports of protests continuing on Sunday.

January's protests began over economic grievances and soon spread to become Iran's largest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) said it had confirmed the killing of at least 7,015 people during that wave, including 6,508 protesters, 226 children and 214 people affiliated with the government. The latest figures were updated on 15 February.

Hrana also said it was investigating 11,744 more reported deaths.

Iranian authorities said late last month that more than 3,100 people had been killed - but that the majority were security personnel or bystanders attacked by "rioters".

With Trump's threats looming, Iranian authorities are continuing to prepare for possible conflict with the US.

US envoy Steve Witkoff said on Saturday that Trump was questioning why Iran had not "capitulated" in the face of Washington's military build-up.

Witkoff told Fox News the president was "curious" about Iran's position after he had warned them of severe consequences in the event they failed to strike a deal.

"I don't want to use the word 'frustrated,' because he understands he has plenty of alternatives, but he's curious as to why they haven't... I don't want to use the word 'capitulated,' but why they haven't capitulated," he said.

The exiled opposition is adamantly calling on President Trump to make good on his threats and strike, hoping for a quick downfall of the current hardline government.

But other opposition groups are opposed to outside intervention.

The opposing sides have been involved in disinformation campaigns of social media, trying to maximise their conflicting narratives of what Iranian people want.

Additional reporting by BBC Persian's Ghoncheh Habibiazad, and BBC Verify's Richard Irvine-Brown and Shayan Sardarizadeh.

Update 22 February: This article was updated to make clear that those shown on video holding Iranian national flags were part of a pro-government rally, which was separate to the nearby anti-government protest.


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Comments

  • By JumpCrisscross 2026-02-2215:1711 reply

    “To simplify greatly, the strategy of non-violence aims first to cause disruption (non-violently) in order both to draw attention but also in order to bait state overreaction. The state’s overreaction then becomes the ‘spectacular attack’ which broadcasts the movement’s message, while the group’s willingness to endure that overreaction without violence not only avoids alienating supporters, it heightens the contrast between the unjust state and the just movement.

    That reaction maintains support for the movement, but at the same time disruption does not stop: the movements growing popularity enable new recruits to replace those arrested (just as with insurgent recruitment) rendering the state incapable of restoring order. The state’s supporters may grow to sympathize with the movement, but at the very least they grow impatient with the disruption, which as you will recall refuses to stop.

    As support for state repression of the movement declines (because repression is not stopping the disruption) and the movement itself proves impossible to extinguish (because repression is recruiting for it), the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.”

    https://acoup.blog/2026/02/13/collections-against-the-state-...

    • By akiselev 2026-02-2216:041 reply

      The book Brett uses as his main source, Waging A Good War, is an incredible book that I strongly recommend. It treats the Civil Rights movement as a military campaign and analyzes it from the perspective of a military historian.

      Not in the sense that it was viewed as a war by the protestors, but in the sense that the logistics, training, and operations of the Civil Rights movement were a well oiled machine that looked like a well organized, but nonviolent, army (including counterexamples where there was no organization).

      One of the most memorable details is how James Lawson trained in nonviolence under Ghandi and came over to train protestors in nonviolent tactics. They gathered in church basements to scream insults and spit on each other to prepare for the restaurant sitins and other ops.

    • By injidup 2026-02-2216:554 reply

      > the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.

      This interpretation reeks of Western naivete. Students were not merely arrested — they were gunned down en masse in the streets and even in hospitals. They were provoked by the U.S. president, who promised support to take on the institutions, but that support never materialized. The likely endgame of this current gunboat diplomacy is similar to Venezuela: the U.S. secures resource access while leaving the existing system intact, and the student protesters are hunted down. In other words, nothing changes for the people demanding reform.

      • By ViktorRay 2026-02-2218:494 reply

        ”This interpretation reeks of Western naivete.”

        The essay you are responding to was written by a historian.

        The ideas actually described in the essay were not developed by a Western person. They were first implemented successfully by a non-Western person.

        Mahatma Gandhi.

        And Gandhi developed these ideas from reading the writings of another non-Western person. Leo Tolstoy.

        More information can be found here.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_to_a_Hindu

        As you can see in this article the non-Western Tolstoy was influenced by many non-Western religious and philosophical figures. Tolstoy then influenced the non-Western Mahatma Gandhi to successfully implement these ideas.

      • By ordu 2026-02-2220:16

        You are responding to a short quote from the article. This quote works with some assumtions, which are also discussed in the article. It is not naivete, the article is an interpretation of facts, including those when non-violent protests didn't work. We can disagree with the interpretation, but even if I know a way to do it, we just can't do it dealing with this small quote taken out of the context.

      • By JumpCrisscross 2026-02-2217:052 reply

        > interpretation reeks of Western naivete

        The author is "an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University" [1].

        > Students were not merely arrested — they were gunned down en masse in the streets and even in hospitals

        Non-violent doesn't mean peaceful.

        People died in our Civil Rights protests. People died in the Indian independence and the Phillipines' People Power Revolution. Each of their leaders were gunned down, and the last won in an autocracy. (Even if you only read the blurb, the state's violent overreaction is part of the parcel.)

        > They were provoked by the U.S.

        Lots of Americans think the world revolves around us. The truth is we have less influence than we think. We didn't provoke these protests, though we did give them false hope.

        > the U.S. secures resource access while leaving the existing system intact, and the student protesters are hunted down

        Which opposition figure is being hunted down in Venezuela under Rodriguez?

        [1] https://acoup.blog/about-the-pedant/

      • By jfengel 2026-02-2218:002 reply

        Even setting aside my disagreements with the current President, the US has an atrocious track record when it comes to following through with support. Why on earth would they believe him?

    • By philwelch 2026-02-2216:312 reply

      This works against relatively liberal governments. It didn’t work for the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989 or for the intermittent Iranian protestors of the past couple decades because those regimes were willing to suppress those protests with overwhelming force. Fortunately, the Iranian protestors are likely to have some overwhelming force on their side soon.

    • By xphos 2026-02-2220:04

      I saw acoup and preceded to read the 11,000 word essay in full. It gave an excellent overview of Clausewitz theory of war and how it maps to the civil rights movement and the modern non violent anti ice protests. Highly recommend to passerbys as regardless of your political affiliation it makes understanding why protests like the one these students engage in are so prevalent

    • By Mikhail_Edoshin 2026-02-2218:09

      And if the state is slow to overreact the puppeteers that stage the thing will make sure the overreaction happens on time: they will try to provoke backfire or they just plain kill some protesters themselves and make it look as if the state was involved.

    • By stickfigure 2026-02-2216:153 reply

      This seems to only have a good track record in places with a democratic tradition. Some dictators have figured out you can just imprison and kill the opposition, and keep doing this until there is no more opposition.

      The Khomeini government is not going to just say "oh, you're right" and change. Neither will the Kim or Putin governments. Sometimes - sadly - violence is the least worst answer.

      • By martin-t 2026-02-2217:107 reply

        Don't say sadly. Don't further the indoctrination that violence is bad.

        It is a tool, it cannot be good or bad. States are the most prolific users of violence (even more when you also count potential/threatened, not yet materialized). Anyone who wants to claim that violence is bad has to oppose the existence of states.

        Violence is risky, dangerous, unpredictable, costly, etc. But those are practical and legal, not moral, concerns.

        Violence is also necessary, as you say, against governments or other actors which cannot be deterred, stopped or punished using other means.

        Violence is also most effective when it's certain and overwhelming/indefensible. If we lived in a world where dictators and their flying monkeys get regularly shot or droned to death, we wouldn't have dictators. Not because they'd all end up dead but because nobody would dare try becoming or supporting one.

        This is why we have to publicly support _proportional_ punishment of dictators and their supporters, both now and after they've been removed from power. Good people have to use the same tools as bad ones (after all, they are just tools, not good or bad).

      • By JumpCrisscross 2026-02-2217:54

        > seems to only have a good track record in places with a democratic tradition

        "All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power.

        The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran. Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go" (Id.).

    • By close04 2026-02-2215:36

      The theory is always easy. The role of agitators since the beginning of times was to preempt the premise of “non-violence”. They will infiltrate a protest and fire the first shots in the most visible way possible to justify a reaction in force. The controlled media will focus on those images, protesters throwing molotovs, firing guns, attacking law enforcement.

      That recipe is the theory of the ideal case. If it were that simple authoritarian regimes would be a thing of the past. But those regimes have played the game longer than most protesters have been alive. That’s why these movements barely make a dent even with covert outside support.

    • By SilverElfin 2026-02-2216:381 reply

      I thought the state’s supporters were actually very large in number and the dominant force in Iran. After all past protests, like about the woman who was disappeared and killed, were smaller and were suppressed quickly. What changed? Is it demographics - like are there larger numbers of young people who aren’t for a theocracy?

    • By skybrian 2026-02-2215:362 reply

      Good article.

      It seems like a consequence is that publicity outside Iran is only going to be effective to the extent that it mobilizes people inside Iran?

      (With the possible exception of getting Trump's attention, but I don't think air strikes are going to do it?)

      And the government of Iran seems very willing to kill people.

      I don't see this ending well.

    • By mschuster91 2026-02-2216:391 reply

      > As support for state repression of the movement declines (because repression is not stopping the disruption) and the movement itself proves impossible to extinguish (because repression is recruiting for it), the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.

      Public support for the Iranian state has been around zero among the population for years now, the problem is that the Iranian government has probably 2-3 million of armed governmental agents (from police over regular military to IRGC/Basij) [1] and is just about as willing to compromise as the CCP was and is ever since Tiananmen.

      In fact, I would say what we've seen from Iran the last weeks (credible sources say around 35k deaths) is even more deaths than in the 1989 China protests which had a death toll of (worst case estimated) 10k.

      Against that level of fanatical, money- and religion-driven bloodlust, there is no chance of successful protests, not without serious external aid shifting the power balance. And in the case of Iran, that is the US and Israel wiping the mullahs out of this world, or causing them enough trouble so that the leadership accepts an offer to escape to Moscow alive.

      Let me be clear: I despise both Trump and Netanyahu. But this is, IMHO, the one and only chance these two men have to assist a just and rightful cause for once.

      [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884956

    • By regularization 2026-02-2215:279 reply

      > non-violence

      Armed Baloch and Kurdish groups have been boasting of firing on Iranian police. The police are firing back. Hard to call them non-violent when they openly boast about armed attacks. Who knows where they are getting their weapons, with western countries also openly declaring their intent to destabilize Iran.

  • By Betelbuddy 2026-02-2215:426 reply

    I cant imagine the courage that is needed to take part in these protests. Most here, the most revolutionary act they will ever participate on in their life, is criticizing their boss choice of Azure as cloud provider...

    • By pcurve 2026-02-2216:10

      I couldn’t do it. Much respect for them. In the 80s when Korea was under quasi military regime, there were many street protests. Molotov cocktails and tear gas being exchanged. Some killed, many beaten down by riot police. Most were led by students.

    • By CommanderData 2026-02-2216:334 reply

      [flagged]

    • By roysting 2026-02-2218:07

      [flagged]

    • By SilverElfin 2026-02-2216:36

      Yep. I think in America most would be scared of what ICE and DHS would do to them. Hard to imagine facing off an authoritarian militaristic government.

    • By pphysch 2026-02-2216:482 reply

      Is it courage or desperation? There obviously is no liberal democratic utopia waiting for them on the other side. Iran will be turned into another Libya, Syria, or Gaza, like the rest of Israel's adversaries. Enormous human suffering so that a fake biblical prophecy can be fulfilled.

  • By Roark66 2026-02-2216:422 reply

    I applaud their bravery in remaining non violent, but I'm not sure that is the best strategy as the state showed their willingness to just kill everyone.

    Would organising an armed resistance be more effective? The state dissappears people. Have them organise and dissappear the leaders of the revolutionary guard or at the very least help another state (like Israel) to target them.

    Non violence works only in democracies and other systems where the rulers care about what people think.

    • By ycombinete 2026-02-2217:33

      Protest of any kind only works in systems where the rulers aren’t insulated from the sentiment of their populace by a steady stream of natural resources money.

    • By AnimalMuppet 2026-02-2216:472 reply

      Nonviolence works where the rulers have a conscience (or at least where those who carry out the rulers' will do).

      Would armed resistance be more effective? How many guns can they get their hands on? I don't know the answer to that, but my expectation is, not many. (I am open to correction.)

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