[screaming and shouting]
[music playing]
The Iranian government started its reign with fear.
[gunfire]
The new generation does not have any fear.
[fire crackling]
You see young people flipping clerics’ turbans.
This is not a protest anymore.
It’s really a women-led revolutionary movement.
[music playing]
Men have been screwing up for centuries.
It’s time for trusting women, and it’s time for following women.
Newsreader: In cities across Iran,
women are showing displays of defiance
against the strict dress code,
burning their hijabs while large crowds cheer them on.
[gunfire]
Maziar: People want to change the government,
to change the regime.
Newsreader: The first death sentence for a protester.
Three more death sentences to protesters.
The Iranian government has made journalism a crime.
We rely on citizen journalists to contribute to us anonymously.
[man shouting]
People have had enough.
There are two main slogans in Iran right now:
“Death to the Dictator.”
And “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
[music playing]
[keyboard clicking]
My name is Maziar Bahari. I’m the founder of IranWire.com.
IranWire pairs citizen journalists inside the country
with professional Iranian journalists
in exile all over the world
so professional journalists can mentor citizen journalists
inside the country.
We have intentionally avoided
working with professional journalists
because working as a professional journalist in Iran
is a dangerous business.
They could be arrested at any point,
so we rely on citizen journalists.
Our mandate is really to make the government
accountable for its actions.
Newsreader: Iran’s rulers are cracking down hard.
Dozens of protesters have been killed,
hundreds arrested, and the internet choked off.
Iran has handed down its first death penalty sentence
to an anti-government protester.
Maziar: We started to count
the number of the people who’ve perished
or imprisoned by the regime,
and unfortunately, the number is increasing every day.
Newsreader: Anger sweeping across the country
following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.
Newsreader: Who died in police custody
after being arrested by Iran’s so-called morality police
for not wearing her headscarf properly.
She was a young woman from a small town
who came to Tehran for a couple of days
just to visit her family.
She was arrested by the morality police
because she was showing too much hair,
according to them.
She was beaten and taken to hospital.
She died on September 16.
They’ve expanded beyond just protesting the hijab.
Many are actually aimed at the Supreme Leader of Iran.
People are becoming poorer.
The government is becoming more corrupt and more dictatorial.
So what happened in September, the death of Mahsa Amini,
triggered this explosion in Iran.
[crowds chanting]
People have been trying to reform the Iranian government
for the past 25 years,
and they have failed.
[banging and glass smashing]
In the beginning of the protest,
99.99% of people thought that it would last maybe three or four days.
But young people of Iran,
people of Iran in general, have surprised us.
We turn now to Iran
and a new effort to bring freedom to all the jailed reporters there.
Newsreader: During a series of protests staged in Tehran,
the authorities clamped down and made many arrests.
Among them was Maziar Bahari.
Newsreader: Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari
was in Tehran covering the election.
I was arrested in 2009 because of my reporting.
I spent 118 days in prison,
107 days in solitary confinement.
[music playing]
There was no toilet or there was no bed.
They gave me two blankets.
I had to use one of them as my mattress.
When I was in prison,
my interrogator told me that
journalists gather information and sell information,
and spies gather information and sell information,
so journalists are spies.
The more I resisted not to call myself a spy,
the more beatings I had,
the more psychological torture I had to go through.
They are masters of psychological torture.
They know exactly what to do.
What I went through ...
is indicative of what many other journalists are going through.
There are more than 50 professional journalists in prison,
for example, Niloofar Hamedi,
who was a sports journalist.
And after Mahsa Amini went to hospital,
Niloofar went to the hospital
and reported for her newspaper in Iran,
and now she is being charged.
So people have to know about Niloofar.
She cannot just be a number or a name.
[music playing]
Security of our citizen journalists is the main priority for us.
Whenever they send us a video or an article,
we ask them to conceal their identities.
We have to get rid of the metadata of photos, videos.
We have to anonymize where they are
because the Iranian government is very good
in terms of adopting new technology and spy technology.
Our website is subjected to a DDoS attack
almost on an hourly basis.
We have to be always one step ahead of the Iranian government.
Newsreader: 2018, President Trump ...
pulling the US out of the Iran nuclear deal
and imposing tough new sanctions.
There are so many sanctions on Iran.
The Iranian government is supposed to be subjected to sanctions
by the United States and the European Community.
But for whatever reason,
it manages to buy weapons from different countries,
even members of NATO, for example, Turkey.
Newsreader: The army calling the protesters enemies
and threatening to confront them.
The Iranian regime had been using water cannons
to fight against the protest.
[people shouting]
Maziar: This is a water cannon
that was used in southern part of Iran.
We realized it was Chinese companies making these types of water cannon.
And then, we had to look at the database of that Chinese company
to find out that this is a type of water cannon
that imported from China in Iran.
[music playing]
[people screaming]
[music playing]
The Iranian regime has shut down the internet.
A near-total internet blackout.
The internet is completely down.
The Iranian regime has made information the enemy.
Newreader: Cutting many of its people off
from the outside world.
The Iranian regime is also very good in terms of adopting new technology
in order to infiltrate citizens’ phones,
phishing methods.
It’s very normal in Iran
for the police to stop you, search your phone.
As soon as a citizen journalist send us the report,
we ask them to delete it.
[people shouting]
People have asked me how many human rights violations
the Iranian government has committed,
and it’s very difficult for me
to count the violations that it has not committed.
Arbitrary arrests,
torture,
kidnapping,
illegal arrests,
extrajudicial executions,
illegal imprisonment,
forced confessions.
And right now, because the government
is really worried about its survival,
it is committing all those atrocities
at the same time.
[music playing]