The Dey 96 protests began in Mashhad on 28 December 2017 (7 Dey 1396) and spread through cities that had often stayed quiet since 1979. Wire services called them bread riots. The slogans did not. Crowds rejected both the principlist and reformist wings of the Islamic Republic with digeh tamoomeh majera: the story is over. This archive gathers "December 2017" and "January 2018 protests" labels here. They are not folded into later nationwide unrest.¹²

Course of the protests

The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center's Farsi timeline Aghaz-e asri jadid (Dawn of a New Era) follows ten days in which towns that had not seen a crowd since the revolution came out, and the state answered with live rounds, hidden detention, and death in custody. Of 41 deaths the Center confirmed, 29 fell between 9 and 12 Dey 1396, with named days in Dorud, Tehran, Gorgan, Isfahan, Kermanshah, Najafabad, Qahdarijan, Khomeini Shahr, and later Ahvaz, Sanandaj, Arak, and Karaj. Those 41 are a named minimum.²

BBC Persian's Farsi feature on the same wave records what the street said that official economics missed. Unlike 18 Tir or the Green Movement, Dey 96 did not ask a faction inside the system for patronage. Labor protests that had already been building tied privatization, water transfers from the Karun, and the closed political field into one grievance. The chant against both camps is the political fact of that week.¹

Hassan Rouhani first said people could criticize the government. Courts then called the gatherings illegal. Organizers were threatened with moharebeh. Internet access was cut in affected cities. This archive holds a January 2018 protests label from that wave.

This archive

"January 2018 protests" and "December 2017 - January 2018 protests" are gathered here. Isolated shopkeeper or labor titles that do not name this wave stay on their own pages.