From the Cell to the Street
Anarchist Front of Iran and Afghanistan
Iranian Women Never Surrender!
8 March.
On this International Women's Day, Iran is under bombardment, and Iranian women are, as they have always been, in the middle of the fire, not as victims, but as fighters.
From the first days of the Islamic Republic, women were the ones who refused. When Khomeini imposed the mandatory hijab in 1979, women took to the streets within days. For nearly five decades they paid the price of that refusal with imprisonment, with lashes, with death. The regime built its entire ideological architecture on the control of women's bodies, women's movement, women's voices. And for five decades, women dismantled that architecture brick by brick.
When Mahsa Jina Amini was murdered in September 2022, it was women who lit the flame that became the Woman-Life-Freedom uprising. Not because they were told to. Not because a party or a leader gave them permission. But because they had been burning for decades and finally the fire became visible to the world.
That flame did not die. In December 2025 and January 2026, women were again at the front of the uprisings, organizing, leading, inspiring. The regime responded with its full and brutal force. Women were beaten in the streets. Shot with live ammunition. Sexually abused in detention. Tortured in cells. Some were killed. Their names may not yet be known to the world but we know them. We carry them. We honor every woman who gave her life in those weeks demanding nothing more than the right to exist freely and with dignity.
The prisons filled again with women who had dared to stand up. Today, as bombs fall on Iranian cities, those same women remain in detention. Some have been transferred to Revolutionary Guard military bases, used as human shields. Their cases are being rushed through courts in silence and blackout. The risk of mass executions is real.
Now war has been added to oppression. Women in Tehran, in Minab, in cities across Iran are sheltering their children from missiles while their sisters rot in cells. They are nursing the wounded in damaged hospitals. They are documenting atrocities on phones connected to illegal VPNs. They are keeping the memory of the struggle alive in the darkest moment.
We say clearly: the liberation of Iranian women will not come from American bombs or Israeli missiles. It will not come from a monarchy that treated women as property before the Islamic Republic treated them as sinners. It will come, it is already coming, from the women themselves. From below.
On this 8th of March we honor every Iranian woman who refused. Every woman who burned her hijab. Every woman who went into the street. Every woman who was beaten, tortured, and abused for daring to demand freedom. Every woman who was killed and whose blood waters the seeds of the struggle. Every woman who is in a cell today. Every woman who is alive and still fighting.
They are not waiting to be liberated. They are the liberation.
No Mullah! No Shah!
Woman—Life—Freedom!
Anarchist Front
Source:
The Anarchist Library
