UNARMED young men and women are beaten with iron bars, sprayed with tear gas, maimed with birdshot and killed by gunfire.

As the nationwide insurrection heads toward its seventh, bloody week, this is the unremitting reaction of the Iranian regime’s security forces. Teetering on the brink of total downfall, the theocratic regime is thrashing out in the only way it knows ... violent repression.

It has had plenty of practice. Brutal coercion, arbitrary arrest, torture and execution, have been the core tools of the mullahs since they hijacked the revolution that overthrew the Shah in 1979. Women have been treated as second-class citizens in a system of misogynistic, female apartheid.

The brutal murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the so-called morality police, for not wearing her hijab properly, was the spark that ignited the uprising. Led by brave women, the protests have escalated day by day and have now enveloped all 31 Iranian provinces and 213 cities. More than 480 people have been killed so far and 25,000 have been arrested.

JFK famously said that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” The truth of his statement can be seen on the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities, where protesters have lost their fear; where they throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at heavily-armed members of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and torch posters of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his criminal president Ebrahim Raisi, dubbed "The Butcher of Tehran" for his central role in the massacre of more than 30,000 political prisoners in 1988.

Streets have been blocked with barricades and burning trash cans and Basij offices and vehicles have been set on fire. Already there are signs of IRGC men and their Basij paramilitary colleagues refusing to turn up for duty and even refusing to open fire on their fellow countrymen and women.

The turning point in the uprising is near. The people, in particular the younger generation, have had enough. Students at 45 of Iran’s leading universities have joined the insurrection. Secondary and even primary school children have boycotted classes and marched through towns and cities chanting “Women, life, freedom” and “Death to the dictator. Death to Khamenei.”

At long last, western media and politicians have been jolted awake by the unfolding revolution. Years of protests in Iran, that always ended in bloody reprisals by the state, were repeatedly swept under the carpet of western appeasement, as spineless political leaders and journalists tried to build a case for lifting sanctions and reviving Barack Obama’s deeply-flawed nuclear deal, in order to throw a lifeline to the clerical dictatorship. Escalating evidence of the torture and execution of political prisoners occasioned nothing more than infrequent, mild complaints.

The shooting dead of more than 1,500 demonstrators during peaceful protests in late 2019, elicited a sharp rebuke from the UN, but no independent inquiry and no attempt to hold the perpetrators to account. Once again, western politicians clamoured to persuade the Iranian regime to sign up to a re-hashed and entirely delusional nuclear agreement, despite fundamental evidence that the mullahs were accelerating their plans to build a nuclear weapon.

Instead of supporting the repressed people of Iran and backing their main, democratic opposition movement, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the West tried to invent a tenuous narrative of hardliners versus reformists inside the regime, as if somehow peace, justice, freedom and democracy could be restored by replacing one set of turbaned tyrants with another. It was a dangerous fantasy. Even now, apologists for the mullahs are arguing that the rebellion is spontaneous and leaderless and therefore lacks cohesion and is doomed to fail. This is a purposefully misleading depiction of the situation.

For many years, MEK Resistance Units have been established in towns and cities throughout Iran. In the past five years they have grown exponentially, backed and coordinated by their remarkable leader, Mrs Maryam Rajavi. These courageous Resistance Units have played a vital role in initiating and managing the on-going protests, as well as guiding the direction of the uprising by focusing on the core demand of the Iranian people for regime change.

On Friday, October 28, the mullahs called for pro-regime demonstrations following the official Friday Prayer ceremony. This was a total failure, as people continued their protests well after midnight on the Friday. Then the IRGC Chief, Hossein Salami, warned protesters that Saturday would be their last day of taking to the streets.

His statement was a clear acknowledgement of the regime’s failure to quell the Iranian people’s nationwide uprising. It was also an indication of the regime’s intention to further intensify its brutal suppression of the protests. In particular, Khamenei’s representatives have been instructed to focus their attacks on the MEK and its role in the uprising. The regime is seriously concerned about the MEK’s network activities inside Iran.

Now that evidence has emerged of Iranian military advisors on the ground in Ukraine, instructing the Russians on the use of their kamikaze drones, it is clear that the mullahs have, for the first time, become involved in a major war on the European continent. They have supplied Vladimir Putin with thousands of these lethal drones, which his forces have used extensively to kill and maim innocent Ukrainian civilians and to destroy their power plants and vital infrastructure.

There are reports that the Iranian regime is even supplying Russia with missiles. Surely this must be the last straw for the West? Surely the time has come to close our embassies in Tehran and withdraw our ambassadors, while simultaneously expelling all Iranian diplomatic staff and their agents from western nations?

The focus of the West must now be on regime change in Iran and supporting the Iranian people.

Struan Stevenson is the Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change (CiC). He was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament's Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14) and chairman of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is also Chair of the In Search of Justice (ISJ) committee on the protection of political freedoms in Iran. He is an international lecturer on the Middle East and is also president of the European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA).

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