Jin, Jiyân, Azadî is the Kurdish original behind the Persian zan-zendegi-âzâdi. Coined inside the Kurdish women’s movement (PJAK, PKK, the Rojava revolution) in the 2000s, drawing on Abdullah Öcalan’s writings on women’s liberation as the precondition for any other freedom.
Woman, Life, Freedom is the Persian translation of the Kurdish slogan jin, jiyân, âzâdî, chanted at Mahsa Amini’s funeral in Saqqez on 17 September 2022 and instantly across Iran. The defining slogan of the 2022-23 uprising. The order matters: woman first.
Mahsa Jina Amini, born 21 September 1999 in Saqqez, was killed in custody on 16 September 2022 after gasht-e ershâd detained her for improper hijab at Tehran’s Haghani metro station. She was 22. Her death triggered the largest sustained Iranian protest movement since 1979.
Iranian Hezbollah is not the Lebanese organization. Inside Iran, hezbollâhi describes regime-loyal vigilante groups, the men in plainclothes with motorbikes and chains who appear to break up student protests, smash bookstore windows, and beat women whose hijab is improper. The non-state non-state actors.
The Foundation of the Oppressed is one of three giant parastatals controlled by the Supreme Leader’s office. Built on Pahlavi-era assets seized in 1979. Holdings in tourism, food, transport, cement, construction. The word “oppressed” in Persian became a euphemism for a holding company.
Setâd, formally the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order, is the Supreme Leader’s economic empire. Founded 1989 to manage property expropriated from people who fled the revolution and from religious minorities, especially Bahá’ís. Reuters in 2013 estimated assets at 95 billion dollars.
The Quds Force is the IRGC’s overseas operations arm, founded around 1990, the part of the Iranian state that runs the regional proxy network: Hezbollah Lebanon, Iraqi militias, Houthi support, Hamas funding. Soleimani commanded until the US drone strike in Baghdad on 3 January 2020.
Qarchak is a women’s prison in Varamin, south of Tehran, repurposed in 2010 from a poultry farm. Conditions documented as cruel, contaminated water, denial of medical care, deliberate mixing of political prisoners with violent offenders as punishment. US Treasury sanctioned it in 2018.
Evin is the prison Iranian families do not want to receive a phone call from. Built in 1972 under the Shah, expanded after 1979, it holds Iran’s most prominent political prisoners and is the address every dissident, journalist, and dual national learns in advance.
The Revolutionary Court is a closed-door tribunal Khomeini set up in February 1979 as an emergency body to try Pahlavi officials. Forty-six years later it is still emergency. It tries political prisoners, journalists, protesters, and the post-Mahsa execution wave.
