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Iran's moment of truth. What will it take for the people to topple the regime by Christopher Debelaik?

For the past 12 weeks, revolutionary sentiment has been coursing through the cities and towns of the Persian Plateau.

The agitation was triggered by the death of Massar Amini, a young Kurdish woman on 16 September after she was arrested by the morality police in Tira.

From the outset, the movement had a feminist character, but it has also united citizens of different classes and ethnicities around a shared desire to see the back of the Islamic Republic.

Iran has known numerous protest movements over the past decade and a half, and the nation's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Hamini has comfortably suppressed each one with a combination of severity and deft exploitation of divisions within the opposition.

This time, however, the resilience and unity shown by the regime's opponents have consigned the old pattern of episodic unrest to the past. Iran has entered a period of rolling protest, in which the Islamic Republic must offend itself against wave upon wave of public anger.

In their retaliation against the protesters, the security forces have killed at least 448 people, including 60 children and 29 women, and made up to 17,000 arrests.

36 protesters have been charged with capital crimes, according to Hadith-Khemi of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, including several people accused of killing members of the security forces. Still, the authorities insist that they have aired on the side of restraint.

On the 9th of November, the commander of Iran's ground forces warned that Chimayni only needed to say the word and the opposition flies would, without question, have no place left in the country.

Every day there are fresh demonstrations, whether in universities, in the streets, or in cemeteries where the victims of police bullets and trunctions are buried. And whenever a protester is killed, you can be sure that in another 40 days, when the sheer morning period climaxes, there will be a grave side protest and the possibility of more deaths, extending the cycle of savagery and reaction.

It was this cycle of deaths leading to funerals, protests and further deaths that sacked the Shah's regime over the course of 1978 and culminated in his flight from Iran in January 1979.

This movement, without a name, without a leader, is diverse and adaptable. It has harnessed a vast and hitherto under-exploited resource, the latent dissatisfaction of women at their second class status, and turned it into a mighty asset.

And it has already scored a success, albeit a reversible one. For the first time since the early days of the revolution, significant numbers of women in cities across the country are going about their business without any form of hijab at all.

On the 4th of December, Iran's public prosecutor announced that the morality police had been suspended, suggesting that the authorities' policy, discernible since the beginning of the protests of turning a blind eye to women not wearing the hijab, has been made permanent.

Skeptics on social media accounted that the announcement is a government ploy to divide and weaken the opposition.

Besides the social radicalism that female protesters bring to the movement, its other novelty is its youthfulness.

From older Iranians, the ones who stay at home worrying about their protesting children, or who reluctantly accompany them, hoping to steer them out of harm's way, one often hears the phrase, the fear has evaporated.

Fear and caution are usually to be found among people who have something to lose, which cannot be said for Iran's young people, most of them in their late teens or 20s who make up the bulk of the protesters.

They have spent much of their lives watching, inflation rise, the real tank, and their prospects of marriage, a flat and a car, Iranian society's trinity of success, recede.

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