Three days later, she was dead. The police announced that she had died of a heart attack; her family was quick to say that Amini was in perfect health. At once protests prompted by her death began in Tehran and in the Kurdish cities, led by women who pulled off, and then ripped up or burned, their hated hijabs, and symbolically cut off their hair. And the protests that began with fury over the Morality Police have spread, and new grievances have been added.

Those protests quickly spread to more than two dozen other cities, including Mashhad and Isfahan, in twenty provinces across the country. The police have tried to quell them, deploying at first tear gas and water cannon, and then birdshot and metal pellets, but for several days now they have been using live fire. Nearly 80 people, among the protesters, have now been killed by the police.

And there are reports that dozens of police, too, have been killed or wounded. The protesters have become increasingly violent, burning cars, busses, and fire engines, and destroying billboards showing the Supreme Leader. They have set fire to a base of the feared Basij militia on Ferdowsi Street in downtown Tehran. A police commander has been killed by the protesters, and dozens of other police wounded by them.

The government has ended Internet service in parts in Tehran, and ended access to WhatsApp and Telegram. Despite this, the protesters still manage somehow to meet up and come out in force, and in ever larger numbers, across the country.

On Friday, September 23, groups of government-sponsored counter-protesters turned out in several cities, shouting “Death to Israel” and “Death to Israel and America,” as if somehow “foreign enemies” were behind these entire home-grown protests. The counter-protesters, following the script the government supplied, chillingly called for the execution of protesters.

If this was intended to scare the protesters into silence, it hasn’t worked, but appears only to have energized them. In fact, soon after those government-sponsored counter-protests, full of women in black chadors, ended, late on Friday the protesters appeared again on the streets to chant their slogans.

As of Saturday, September 24, there have been reports of close to 60 dead, and many wounded, among the protesters. No one can know for certain, as the government now controls the flow of information. There is reason to believe the actual figure is many times more, but it is being kept secret by the government. And hundreds are believed to have been wounded.