This is popular front, a podcast focus on the very niche and kind of geeky details of modern warfare with me Jake Hanrahan.

For this episode we're speaking to journalist Nilo Tabrizi.

She's going to be speaking about the protests that erupted recently all across Iran.

Now they started when the government put the fuel prices up massively but

that wasn't really why everybody was so angry and why they were protesting.

There was kind of the straw that broke the camels back.

Over 200 people have been killed and the protests so far have been

crushed. The internet was caught for 10 days as well so Nilo is going to

explain to us what happened in that time and tell us what she's seen since the internet came back on

and a lot of evidence came flooding out to journalists. Please do consider

supporting us on the Patreon for bonus episodes at

Patreon.com slash popular front.

All right, so I guess maybe let's let's go back to the start. How did these protests kind of break out across the run? I know it's not spontaneous as some people think and

oh it's because of the fuel thing. I know it's been mounting but what was the

straw that you know broke the camel's back I guess? It really was the fuel announcement and it was because the government

announced it so abruptly. So on midnight on Friday, so after a Thursday parliament session

after most Iranians had gone to bed,

Rouhani's government announced an abrupt decision to cut fuel subsidies.

And what it was supposed to do was to increase cash handouts to the poor,

but this move also just sent gasoline prices

skyrocketing by 50%. And so this protest really was a response from poor

Iranians who've already been impacted by inflation and shrinking budgets for the past year.

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