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Four years ago, the death of the Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini in the custody of the Islamic Republic’s morality police sparked an uprising that shook the regime to its foundations. Its slogan travelled far beyond Iran: Jin Jiyan Azadi, Woman Life Freedom.

The slogan comes from the Kurdish workers and freedom movement and it represents everything authoritarian systems fear: feminism, equality, emancipation, social justice, ethnic pluralism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-nationalism. That is precisely why the Islamic Republic has fought the movement with such brutality – and also why fascists and far-right nationalists throughout the world have sought to appropriate or discredit it. “Woman Life Freedom” is a demand for a fundamentally different society that many people in the world fight for.

For four years, however, the world’s leaders have largely failed the people who made that demand in Iran. Iran’s freedom movement was never........

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