It remains to be seen if the latest round of unrest will eventually fizzle, but much could depend on how the Basij and other security forces respond to further protests.
They are members of what’s known as the Basij, paramilitary volunteers who are fiercely loyal to the Islamic Republic. The shock troops of the ayatollahs have taken on a leading role in quashing dissent for more than two decades.
During the ruinous Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Basij led notorious “human wave” attacks against Saddam Hussein’s army, with large numbers of poorly armed fighters, many of them teenagers, perishing as they raced across mine fields and into artillery fire. Saeid Golkar, an Iranian scholar at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga who has written a book about the Basij, estimates their total membership is around 1 million, with the security forces numbering in the tens of thousands.
In the eyes of the Basijis, the Islamic headscarf, or hijab, is a bulwark against gender mixing, adultery and corruption — its removal a sign of decadent Western culture. Iran’s leaders have cast the latest protests as part of a foreign conspiracy to foment unrest.
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