SOS Iran is a network created to help activists inside Iran connect and operate securely when communication is risky or disrupted. Participants are assigned an SOS number—an internal identifier used to protect identities while allowing organizers to verify a person’s role, route messages or footage through trusted channels, and track reports without exposing names or locations.
To reach me, the protesters used virtual private networks (VPNs) while disguising their locations, and the slow speed and instability of the internet connection made communication difficult at best, with audio cutting in and out.
That interview took place as Iran entered a seventh consecutive night of protests—an uprising that participants said had jumped from city to city and, in the span of a week, shifted from economic rage to direct political defiance.
Even the broken connections felt like part of the story. Foroutan (SOS-3390) described the regime’s familiar “playbook.” When demonstrations begin, authorities first weaken the internet, then cut it off entirely.
He insisted the most brutal crackdowns often follow during those blackout windows, when people can’t show the world what’s happening and can’t coordinate easily across neighborhoods.
Still, the speakers noted, the movement learned to operate inside those constraints. They described protests built around small groups, decentralized upload systems, and networks designed to survive arrests, infiltration, and disruption.
Hesam did not describe a slow roll of sporadic unrest. Instead, he listed city names as if he were tracking a live map, naming places where activity was happening “as we’re speaking right now during this interview.”
In those accounts, the size of each protest varied sharply by location, but the emphasis stayed on method over spectacle. Hesam explained that organizers trained people to begin in small groups in their local areas.
Activists dispute government death toll in Iran protests
As we went to press, 30 people were confirmed to have been killed in the protests, and there appeared to be many more; the 30 were identified by name and confirmed from multiple sources.
He also rejected reports that a person described publicly as a “volunteer of the Basij or IRGC,” had been killed, framing it as “a trick of the government,” and maintaining that the man had been a protester and that the regime wanted “one casualty on their own side.”
Hadis Najafi (SOS-3607), speaking from inside Iran, described the uprising’s first spark as bluntly economic. “When this thing started seven days ago from the bazaar, which is the big market in downtown,” she said, people were “really only protesting against the quality of life.” She described a currency collapse so destabilizing that ordinary selling felt wrong. Stores were closing down, she said, and even store owners refused to sell because “those prices are not right.”
At first, she insisted, the mood leaned toward restraint. People wanted “to just protest peacefully about the condition of life before things got to where they got.”
Then, the regime forced the situation into a different category.
Najafi said security forces beat protesters, trying to suppress them. “Yes, the security forces are beating people up,” she said, then added, “unfortunately, they’re also shooting at people.”
She described an incident she presented as emblematic of escalation. “Something sad happened yesterday in the city of Hom, that they actually blew up a man, a very loved and respected man, a local man, with a grenade, and he went into pieces.” According to her account, a government official carried out the act.
Despite the risk, she said she still went to the protests herself. She located herself only as “in the vicinity of Tehran,” avoiding specifics for safety, and described seeing water cannons and other measures aimed not merely at dispersal but at prevention. Security forces tried, she said, to stop people from gathering at all, using “anything and everything,” including water cannons and “the BB guns that we have seen before.”
Another protester, referred to only as Guard e Javidan 74 (SOS-968), described the same pivot others stressed. In his account, the protests started with “the prices,” “the economy,” and “inflation,” but “very soon” the chants changed into “what people really want,” described as “freedom and calling the name of their leaders.”
For Najafi, that shift demanded something stark from the people participating. “We have no choice but to succeed,” she said. She framed the street as a place where survival itself became leverage: “We have taken our life in our hands as our weapon, and we’re in the streets.”
She also described chants that, in her view, revealed where the movement aimed to go. In Mashhad and other cities that she referenced, she said people were chanting “the name of who they want, which is Reza Pahlavi.”
In her telling, fear no longer controlled the streets. “They have no fear,” she said. Then she offered a sweeping statement of unity: “It seems like the whole country is coming all together and united towards this finality that they have been all looking for.” Foroutan fought to hold back tears as he translated this for Najafi, clearly becoming emotional at her description.
Global attention, she suggested, felt like a morale boost that also offered a thin kind of protection. She claimed that at the beginning of the events, Iran was trending number 22 on Twitter/X, and after the world began paying attention, “now Iran is top five trending on Twitter.”
She interpreted the rise as evidence that “the world is looking at Iran,” and said that knowledge gave hope—proof that people outside were listening.
In that context, she spoke approvingly of President Donald Trump’s message. She said she supported President Trump, thanked him, and called it “fantastic” that his message gave her and others “the feeling that somebody outside, somebody powerful, is hearing their voice.”
She added that he “has eliminated all the middlemen and is directly talking to people that he should be talking to,” and she described the message from “yesterday” as “very good.”
Hesam’s reaction treated that message as an accelerant. Since “yesterday and Trump’s note,” he said, more small and local cities rose up. He described people feeling that someone could speak “straight directly to Khamenei” and tell him what he could or could not do against Iranians. Hesam called the reaction “extremely positive.”
Venezuela surfaced as a warning sign. Hesam described events there as “a lesson for Khamenei,” adding that “what’s happening in Venezuela could repeat itself very soon inside Iran.”
Again, Foroutan described the internet shutdown pattern as predictable: The government, he said, first weakens the internet and then cuts it off; during those cutoffs, he argued, the regime commits the worst brutality.
The instability in the conversation itself echoed that claim. Foroutan said Najafi’s audio sounded poor at first because of the VPN quality and then improved. Guard e Javidan 74—speaking from a central province—remained difficult to understand because of cutoffs and dropped out again entirely “because of the internet.”
Yet Hesam’s network planned for exactly that. They trained people to take short videos and quick reports, then pass them outward through designated individuals equipped with VPNs and prepared devices. Each small group had a person responsible for uploading.
Once a clip hit Instagram, Telegram, or similar channels, Foroutan said, information spread rapidly because “everybody around the world has access.”
The system aimed to solve a single problem: the regime’s effort to isolate each city and neighborhood from the next.
Najafi said the regime escalated arrests quickly. She described “a lot of people” taken, including “a lot of younger people,” even “a lot of people under 18 years old.” She mentioned a 14-year-old who had been killed, though the name does not appear in the transcript.
She also described violence outside Tehran—violence unfolding in smaller provinces where international attention might not naturally land. “As we speak right now, in the province of Elam, there is hell going on,” she said. She described forces shooting at people there and estimated “at least,” as she recalled, “10 injured, if not killed,” adding that activists had names.
The message behind her warning felt tactical: Visibility needed to extend beyond Tehran to the provinces as well.
In basic numbers, Najafi described an economy in free fall. She said she had never seen conditions this severe. A loaf of bread, she said—enough to feed “one, two, three people”—now costs “500,000 riyals, which is 50,000 tomans,” and she estimated that “in dollars, 500,000 tomans, it’s about 50 cents for one loaf of bread.”
Then she described the gap between wages and survival. She said the poverty threshold sat around “90 million,” while the average worker earned “12 million” per month. She described a missing “about 70 or so million,” and said a small family needed “90 million” just “to be able to live.”
In dollars, she estimated the poverty line at “$650 a month,” while workers earned “much less than $100.” In her telling, that disparity made desperation structural, not temporary.
Asked what drove the drought and deterioration, Najafi pointed to isolation—being “cut off from the rest of the world,” in trade and in outside scrutiny of life inside Iran. Foroutan added his own view, citing “the incompetency of the regime over the last few decades.”
On sanctions, she took a firm stance: “Absolutely, the sanctions have worked.” She argued sanctions—especially on oil—reduced the regime’s resources, leaving it with less money “to suppress people and beat them up.”
She also described a willingness to endure the consequences, saying she and others accepted sanctions because they believed the pressure ultimately weakened the regime and supported Iran’s path toward both economic improvement and “human rights and freedom.”
Najafi placed herself inside the story, not as a distant observer but as a participant with a profession. She said she is a university professor and described students asking whether they should protest and whether she would join them. She said she answered, “Yes, I’ll go with you.”
Across “all layers of the society,” she said, people kept joining, and she offered an image that conveyed both frailty and defiance: “this old lady with a walker chanting” in the streets. Men and women, she said, kept joining daily.
She described how the danger escalated. In her account, the regime moved from BB guns and water cannons to live fire. “Now they’re actually shooting at people,” she said. Protesters try to protect themselves, she said, but “you never know,” because regime forces attack unpredictably.
Najafi returned to the sentence that captured the protest’s logic as she saw it: “all we have is our life in their hands, is our weapon.”
