This is CBS I on the World. I'm John Batchel with Nilo Tabrizi, the co-author with her colleague and friend Fatima Jammapur.

For the Sun after Long Nights, the story of Iran's women-led uprising.

You've read around the edges of the suspect nuclear weapons program and the war in the Middle East that young women,

especially Gen Z, but the millennials joined in as well, have been protesting the regime's

brutality at least in September of 2022 and the murder of a young Azeri woman, Kurdish woman, Jena, on the streets of Tehran for no reason whatsoever.

However, what I learned from the telling by Nilu and Fatima is that the rising has been going on for a long time.

Lots of protests all around Iran, not just in Tehran.

And the police, the authorities, the besiege, the IRGC, always meet it with sadism,

brutality and murder.

Who are those people, Nilu?

Where do they come from to use batons on young women in the streets and beat them

to death or to open fire on a funeral procession? Where do they get them?

So it's interesting. In Iran, there's a few different competing policing systems. You have

the national police and then, you know, you also have

Iran has its own military, the Artaj. And then you also have this other kind of, this other

unit that Fatima writes really beautifully about, called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

And this group, and you can see it in its name, read it in its name, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

What is its purpose?

It is there to guard the revolution, the Islamic Revolution, and it's ideal.

So you can tell, in essence, it's really working for the system in that moment.

And this, it almost is helpful to visualize this as an octopus. So it's not just,

it has many arms. It's not just a policing unit or a military unit, but the BASIGC is everywhere.

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