Artist: Ahmad Barakizadeh
By Kayhan Life Staff
Over the past week, Iran’s students have emerged as the standard bearers of the 2026 Sun-and-Lion Revolution.
In Jan. 2026, the Islamic Republic responded to nationwide protests with unprecedented and historic brute force. Universities were among the first targets. Closing classrooms and dorms was not about public safety, but about suffocating dissent. Rather than disappearing, the uprising went underground and waited.
Then, on the fortieth-day memorials for those killed, the movement surged back, like the Phoenix rising from its ashes. Mourning turned into opposition. Families sang and danced, and crowds responded with chants, revealing a society that not only refused to crumble but hardened in the face of loss.
When in-person classes resumed, students carried that momentum on campus. Dressed in black, they turned university campuses into spaces for protest. They chanted: “Death to the dictator,” “Political prisoners must be freed,” “Woman, Life, Freedom,” as well as “Long live the Shah” and “This is the final battle—Pahlavi will return.”
On Feb. 23, they burned the Islamic Republic’s flag and raised the Sun-and-Lion banner. Then came the clearest sign that things had changed.
They hung mouse dolls with turbans, dubbed “Moosh-Ali,” to mock the regime’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Security forces rushed to tear them down. The message was clear: a regime confident in its legitimacy does not tremble before a symbolic effigy.
Iran’s student movement has recast Iran’s campuses into the revolution’s beating heart.
