A panel of experts on Iran urged the Iranian diaspora and Georgetown University community members to increase their support for Iranian pro-democracy protestors at a Feb. 11 event amid ongoing state violence and an internet blackout across Iran.
Protests in Iran began in December 2025 following high inflation and poor living conditions, prompting a widespread government crackdown that illustrated the country’s escalating political instability. Four experts — a journalist, two human rights lawyers and a researcher — chronicled the evolution of domestic opposition to the Iranian regime and called for more support for protesters at the event.
Gissou Nia — human rights lawyer and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank — said the high death toll estimates from the government crackdown distinguish the ongoing demonstrations from previous protests.
“Let’s just even say it’s at the low point — a 10,000 number, low double-digit-thousands,” Nia said at the event. “That was just in this period of two days, and it wasn’t through the use of explosives or bombs, where you would have deaths at scale all in one fell swoop. It’s really through individualized killing with guns or machete, and so that kind of scale is not only unprecedented for Iran’s contemporary history, that’s also historically significant globally.”
Khosro Isfahani — research director at the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI), an Iranian-American nonprofit — said the Iranian diaspora can help develop channels of communication that evade the internet blackout via satellites and virtual SIM cards.
“We are in positions of power. We can buy virtual SIM cards for people inside the country who can connect directly to satellite internet that would break the regime’s blockade on the internet,” Isfahani said at the event. “Almost every modern cell phone can turn into a device for breaking that blockade. It’s possible.”
The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security, an academic research center, held the event in partnership with Georgetown’s Iranian Cultural Society (ICS), a student affinity group.
Aarman Khayat (SOH ’27), an ICS member who attended the event, said the event made him optimistic about Iran’s democratic prospects.
“As someone who is Iranian, it makes me feel proud that we do have a community coming behind to cause this change, and I’m very optimistic about the future of what could happen,” Khayat told The Hoya.
Nazenin Ansari (GRD ’83), an Iranian journalist, said the Mesbah district in Karaj, the epicenter of the protests, illustrated the unanticipated level of discontent toward the regime.
“What made those days so unresting was not only the scale of the violence, but where the protests appeared,” Ansari said at the event.
“The Mesbah district was not considered to be a natural state for descent. Many of the residents came from deeply religious families,” Ansari added. “The neighborhood has government and security officials, including figures with longstanding ties to the state ideological apparatus, especially Qassem Soleimani. For years, people there believed that proximity to power would protect them from the unrest that flared elsewhere. They were wrong.”
Shahin Milani, a lawyer and the director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, said the regime’s internet blackout created an information void in Iran that makes judging the true death toll difficult.
“We still don’t have a lot of information from many smaller towns,” Milani said at the event. “There are other people who are missing, who might have been killed, and then their bodies might have been dumped in a mass grave.”
Gabby Streinger (CAS ’27), who attended the event, said she was glad the university community sought to understand the protests in Iran.
“It made me feel enthusiastic that Georgetown is facilitating rhetoric around the events in Iran, given a relative deficit in response from the global community,” Streinger told The Hoya. “And I’m very proud to be a part of the Persian studies program and be alongside wonderful Iranians in discourse around what a proper future for Iran looks like, given the bravery of their people protesting at this moment.”
Milani said human rights groups need to amplify stories of abuses imposed by the Iranian government.
“We are human rights organizations. We post their pictures on our websites. We try to amplify their names and their stories,” Milani said. “So help us so that their names and stories are not buried in the middle of a whole bunch of news about things that are really not that important.”
