Over 6,000 people have died in nationwide protests in Iran against the country’s regime and continued economic uncertainty, according to NPR. Some experts in Iran believe the death toll is as high as 30,000.
Elahe Javadi is an associate professor of information systems at Illinois State University. Close to 100 members of her immediate and extended family still live in her hometown, Hamedan.
The current wave of protests and subsequent attacks from the Iranian government started in Tehran on Dec. 28, 2025 and within days spread to other cities, primarily those with universities and a younger, more metropolitan population.
“So, the uprising this time is surprising for me, too, because Hamedan is usually a quieter town,” Javadi said in an interview on WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “It’s a center for…a lot of younger generation, they go for school because we have good engineering programs. We have [a] good medical school.”
That makes Javadi think many of the protestors in Hamedan are probably not native to the city.
Javadi was born in 1980 right after the Iranian Revolution and lived there for 24 years, having immigrated in 2004. She remembers how restrictive it is to live under the regime.
“To give you a trivial example, they would not let us [wear] light color socks in school. Like they would check our socks. Can you believe that? I couldn’t put yellow stripey or white socks in a school,” she said. “It’s not modest. Women have to be modest. It’s not modest for the girls to put colorful socks on them.”
Javadi said for 47 years, the people of Iran were worried the regime was destroying the country by using depreciated currency, destroying natural resources and underselling minerals.
“I didn’t know there would be a day that the biggest thing they’re stealing from us is our future, because these folks that are being killed, they are the ones who are supposed to build Iran,” she said. “The ages between 13 and 30, they would be the managers, they would be the teachers, they would be the contributors to the future of the country. And this is the biggest theft they’re doing right now.”
Iran’s history of protesting
When the unrest started in late December, Javadi remained hopeful, but eventually the protests became more and more brutal.
“We were really hopeful that the international community will notice. We were hopeful that maybe Israel, maybe America will intervene,” said Javadi. “The Islamic regime has made it a core propaganda item for themselves to be against Israel, so we were hopeful that Israel will do something, America will do something.”
But then Iran put an internet and communication blackout in place, making it difficult for Iranians to speak out about their experiences.
Javadi was okay at first but became increasingly anxious the next week.
“It was the worst type of torture that I have personally experienced under this regime. Obviously, my childhood was not easy under this regime, but compared to everything they have done for me... they have done worse things to the Iranian population,” she said.
“In seven days, I was sick. I was going to the group chats on Telegram, on WhatsApp. I was not hearing any word from my friends and that’s when I think I collapsed emotionally.”
The internet was partially restored on Jan. 30, but Javadi is not able to communicate fully with her friends and family back home.
In 2009, Javadi said the people of Iran looked to former President Obama for intervention in their rigged elections, but the administration took no action. She said no action was taken either in 1999, when hundreds of students died at the University of Tehran at the hands of the Iranian military.
In both cases, the U.S. did not take any action.
“They raided the dorms, and we hear the stories that they were pushing down students up from the top floors, and it was ruthless,” she said in reference to the 1999 killings.
Since then, Iran reported a few hundred students have died, but Javadi assumes the number is higher due to the regime’s history of underreporting deaths. She believes the same thing about the reported more 3,000-plus deaths by the regime from these protests.
“I think the numbers are closer to 36,000 and counting,” she said. “They’ve done that for every uprising since the Islamic Revolution. I think the only one that they openly admitted, a couple thousand. It was just after the revolution; they did a mass killing of political prisoners because they wanted to scare people.”
Possible U.S. intervention
Javadi said the Iranian population often hopes for outside intervention, because she said Iranian leaders are corrupt.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] was recently designated as a terrorist organization by the European Union.
President Trump has threatened military action and placed the USS Abraham Lincoln and guided missile destroyers in range of the country. A common argument against intervention is the threat of the situation becoming a forever war.
“I understand this is going to be a cost…and I think everybody agrees, we will not be another Afghanistan, we will not be another Iraq.” she said. “Look at our history, 50 years ago. People pay attention to education, people read a lot, people pay attention to global politics.”
Javadi said the corruption of the regime is continuing to keep people down despite their education. She said the people of Iran crave freedom.
“You have to be connected to someone and the circle of people whom they accept to be productive members of society is getting smaller and smaller, and they prefer to hire or include somebody in the system that is a good listener, that plays the game and the person contributes to their agenda,” Javadi said. “So, if you’re an educated person not connected to the government or not supporting their mission or propaganda publicly, you wouldn’t be having a chance to get your merit.”
Still, the argument against U.S. intervention persists through American politics. In the 2020s, President Biden pulled troops out of Afghanistan and sent military aid to Ukraine, while President Trump invaded Venezuela last month. Both sent aid to Israel.
Some Americans argue the country does not have the bandwidth to be the world’s policeman.
“I acknowledge the concern, because I’m also an American citizen,” said Javadi. “But there is also a responsibility that comes with the position that America has with the largest military, with the best democratic experiments that the world has seen in its history.”
Javadi and other supporters of the protestors have signed petitions for President Trump to take action.
She plans to join a rally in St. Louis on Feb. 14 to mark Global Action Day. Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has called for mass demonstrations across the globe that day in support of Iranian protesters.
