Iran

I don't have a handle on the specifics (I'm an ignorant ass American), but generally speaking, life is hard and getting much harder under a heavy-handed and authoritarian religious/fundamentalist government. There was a fundamentalist revolution in 1979, and that's allegedly what the people are protesting. (At least that's what the Washington Post says.) artiman, the mod here, lives in Iran and has been sharing what they see through a wide variety of news sources. Scrolling through the posts of this community can give you an idea of what's happening on the daily and what some of the protesting is about: repeated school closures due to air pollution, insufficient power leading to daily blackouts, insufficient water and poor management of water resources leading to farms turning to dust, protestors--even children--being killed, skyrocketing inflation, a Nobel Peace Prize winner's arrest being so violent that she was brought to the emergency room two different times for it. Yes, it's only coming from one person, but these aren't little one-off instances or outliers.

There are morality police who beat a woman to death for wearing her hijab in a way that was not up to code (Mahsa Amini in 2022).

Police were attacking protestors before; now that there's been a call for regime change, they're killing them.

The regime is under heavy sanctions from the West, and it's never, ever the people at the top who go without.

People in an affordability crisis were striking because they felt they had no other choices to make their needs clearly known.

The government shut off access to the Internet on Thursday, 8 January.

Here are a couple of news pieces that may shed a little light on the underlying conditions leading to the protests and crackdown:

Hundreds of Iranian protesters feared killed; U.S. considers military strikes: https://wapo.st/4sB8Sxo

Most of Iran Shuts Down as Government Grapples With Protests and Economy: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/world/middleeast/iran-shutdown-protests.html