Message from Amir Hossein Moradi and Ali Younesi from Evin Prison on the Anniversary of the 2023 Nationwide Uprising and on the Eve of the New Academic Year in Iran

Coinciding with the second anniversary of Mahsa (Jina) Amini’s death while in the custody of the Morality Police and the beginning of the 2022 nationwide protests in Iran, Amir Hossein Moradi and Ali Younesi, two imprisoned students, highlighted that “from universities and schools to the streets,” the ultimate goal of the “bloody pledge” is the “overthrow of Khamenei.”

Two elite students from Sharif University of Technology to “all those who turned the streets into a university of resistance” and “to all comrades behind prison bars”:

Our generation is the generation of uprisings—the same generation that fought wholeheartedly in Mahsa’s uprising. We were arrested, we became martyrs, but we did not and will not surrender.

Those who fought in the last uprising while in school are now entering universities, and those still in school carry the experience of the 2022 uprising. This is the regime’s nightmare as the new academic year begins. From now on, the regime must expect a response from schools and universities for every crime it commits.

The powder keg of anger and hatred, built up from executions, massacres, and oppression, only needs a spark to explode—a spark that could be ignited in a school or university, setting off a nationwide uprising until the regime is overthrown.

From universities and schools to the streets, a bloody pledge remains until the end and the dawn of freedom.

Amir Hossein Moradi is a physics student and a winner of the Astronomy Olympiad, while Ali Younesi is a computer science student who won the gold medal in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad in 2017.

Mahsa (Jina) Amini died on September 15, 2022, a few days after being arrested by the Morality Police at Kasra Hospital in Tehran. Her death sparked a widespread wave of protests across Iran that continued for months in the streets, universities, and schools.

During the violent suppression of the 2022 nationwide protests by government forces, at least 750 civilians were killed, and thousands were injured and arrested.