The winter before
Published 4 October 2026
The war of 2026 did not arrive in a calm country. It arrived in one that had spent the winter in the street.
The BBC dates the start to Sunday, 28 December 2025, when shopkeepers in Tehran stopped work to protest another sharp fall in the rial against the dollar on the open market. The currency had sunk to a record low over the year and inflation had soared to 40 percent, which the BBC said had made cooking oil and meat ruinously expensive. Sanctions over the nuclear program squeezed an economy that the BBC also described as weakened by government mismanagement and corruption. The Associated Press, writing during the first week of January, put the rial at more than 1.4 million to the dollar, an economy under extra pressure since the UN reimposed sanctions in September, and an Iran still reeling from the June war.
University students joined the shopkeepers. Demonstrations spread across cities and the slogans grew bolder, with crowds heard chanting against the supreme leader and, by the first week of January, expressions of support for Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah. HRANA, the U.S.-based Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency, said, in figures the BBC carried on 12 January, that protests had been confirmed in 187 cities and towns in all 31 provinces. It also said more than 18,000 protesters had been arrested. Al Jazeera dated the beginning of the movement to the closing days of 2025 and reported that the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets were by 16 January reported to be staying at home after the deaths and detentions.
A blackout and a body count
On Thursday, 8 January the government cut off the internet, which AP reported alongside a deadly crackdown. At that point AP's account, quoting activists, spoke of protests in more than 220 locations across 26 provinces, at least 20 people killed and more than 990 arrested. Those numbers are a snapshot of one afternoon, and they were overtaken within days.
The death count is the part of this chapter that has to be handled with the most care, because the available figures come from different counters, on different days, using different rules. The file does not add them together.
- On 13 January an Iranian official told Reuters that 2,000 people had been killed, and blamed "terrorists" for the deaths of protesters, as the BBC reported.
- On 14 January HRANA reported 2,417 protesters, 12 children, 147 people affiliated with the security forces and government, and 10 uninvolved civilians confirmed killed, with 829 more reports of deaths still under review.
- Al Jazeera, on 16 January, said HRANA had put its toll at 2,615 on the Wednesday of that week, and that Iran's government had released no official total and claimed that numbers were vastly exaggerated.
- Britannica's later timeline says that by some estimates the government killed more than 30,000 of those protesters. It is an estimate that the sources above do not corroborate, and this file reports it as a claim about the scale of the repression, not as a count.
The BBC added a piece of evidence that does not depend on any list: on 11 January it counted at least 180 shrouded bodies and body bags in video from the Kahrizak Forensic Centre in Tehran, where people were searching for relatives, and about 50 more bodies in a second video from the next day.
Washington watches
Donald Trump had been watching. AP reported his warning that if Tehran "violently kills peaceful protesters" the United States "will come to their rescue," a threat AP said had taken on new meaning after American troops captured Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro. On 12 January the BBC reported that Trump had repeatedly threatened military intervention, and had vowed "very strong action" if detained protesters were executed. By 16 January, Al Jazeera said, Trump had appeared to back down on Wednesday night when he said he had received assurances from Tehran that the killings would stop and executions of detainees would not go ahead.
The economic misery that had started it all had not moved. Hassan Hakimian of SOAS told Al Jazeera the unrest was "undoubtedly rooted in economic distress," the product of chronic corruption and mismanagement made worse by sanctions. A regime that has survived the street has not necessarily solved the street's complaint. That is a useful sentence to keep for the war's later chapters, where the same complaint turns up at petrol pumps.
Geneva, last call
Then came diplomacy, with a very large fleet parked nearby. On Thursday, 26 February, Reuters reported, American and Iranian negotiators met indirectly in Geneva with Oman as mediator. Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi met U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in two sessions, morning and afternoon. Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi said the two sides had made "significant progress," and that technical talks would take place in Vienna the following week. Araqchi called them some of the most serious talks Iran had had with the United States, and said there was agreement on some issues and differences on others. Reuters noted that analysts saw them as the last chance to avoid war, with an American military buildup in nearby waters and Trump having repeatedly threatened action absent a deal.
The two positions were already visible. A senior Iranian official told Reuters that a framework was possible if Washington separated "nuclear and non-nuclear issues." The Trump administration, per the same report, insisted that Iran's ballistic missile program and its support for armed groups had to be on the table. Iran wanted sanctions lifted. Washington said relief would come only after deep concessions.
Two days later, on Saturday, 28 February, the strikes began. The next chapter starts there.
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