I was an undergraduate political science student in my twenties, and a staff writer for my university newspaper, when I traveled to Nicaragua after the Sandinistas came to power. What struck me most was not ideology or slogans, but the women. They fought alongside men, led battalions, organized communities, and buried their children without breaking. Decades later, watching women lead protests in the streets of Mashhad and Tehran, I recognize the same fire. History has taught me that when women take the lead in a revolution, the old order rarely survives.

Iran has reached that moment.

I came to the United States as a teenager to attend university shortly before the 1979 revolution, and I watched from abroad as that uprising was hijacked and transformed into a theocratic state. Like many young Iranians who had dreamed of democracy, I built a new life in exile while never forgetting the one I had lost. My academic path later took me to Duke University, then to George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, and eventually to Geneva, where I earned a Ph.D. in International Relations.

But it was Nicaragua in the 1980s that became my most formative classroom.

As a young student and journalist, I traveled there to witness a society in transformation. The women I met—mothers who had lost sons, daughters who had taken up arms, and grandmothers who fed guerrillas and lied to soldiers—taught me lessons no university could offer. Because I spoke Spanish fluently, I heard their stories directly, without intermediaries. I returned to Latin America many times over the years, studying how authoritarian systems collapse and why some movements for freedom succeed while others fail.

The most important lesson was this: a revolution reaches the point of no return when women decide they have nothing left to lose.

Iran is there now.

Since December of last year, protests have swept across more than one hundred Iranian cities. The images tell the story better than any theory. Women stand at the front of marches. Women confront armed security forces. Women chant, “Death to the oppressor, be it Shah or Leader.” In Mashhad, women led demonstrations as security forces opened fire. In Tehran, mothers who had buried their children returned to the streets the very next day.

This is not desperation. It is resolve.

The regime appears to understand this, which is why its response has grown so ferocious. According to reports by Iranian human rights organizations and international monitors, at least 108 prisoners were executed between December 27 and January 5. December alone saw more than 400 executions, an unprecedented pace that reflects a system relying on terror to maintain control. Among the executed were young men in their twenties, women, fathers, and sons. Each name represents a life extinguished by a regime that believes fear can substitute for legitimacy.

It cannot.

I learned this while studying Nicaragua, and later confirmed it across Latin America. Terror works until it does not. When it stops working, it stops abruptly.

The regime’s desperation is visible on the ground. In Ilam Province, Revolutionary Guard units reportedly stormed a hospital, fired tear gas into medical wards, and dragged wounded protesters from their beds. Doctors and nurses barricaded doors to protect their patients. In Hafshajan, security forces shot and killed a fifteen-year-old boy. His mother buried him and returned to protest.

When mothers bury their children and go back to the streets, a regime has already lost, even if it has not yet admitted it.

For decades, I have studied Iran’s opposition movements closely, both academically and through direct engagement with organized resistance networks. I have taught courses on ethnic and cultural conflict and global politics, examining how societies fracture and how they rebuild. Across this work, one pattern is unmistakable. Movements that place women in real leadership roles—not symbolic ones—are more resilient, more disciplined, and more difficult to crush.

That reality matters today. Iran’s protesters are not asking for a return to monarchy, nor are they calling for cosmetic reform. Their chants reject both crown and clerical rule. Attempts to elevate nostalgic alternatives misunderstand the depth of this uprising. Iranians did not rise against one form of dictatorship to welcome another.

History suggests otherwise. Iran has a genuine democratic alternative that has taken shape over decades of organized resistance, distinguished by women holding leadership positions at every level, not symbolically but structurally. Unlike ad hoc protest movements, this organized resistance has articulated a clear ten-point platform for a transitional government grounded in pluralism, gender equality, the separation of religion and state, and free elections. It has also attracted sustained support from a broad range of international political figures who recognize the need for an orderly transition from dictatorship to democracy.

The international community has a responsibility—not to intervene militarily, but to stop enabling repression. That means recognizing the Iranian people’s right to resist tyranny, designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, ending ransom diplomacy, and supporting international accountability for officials responsible for mass executions and violent crackdowns.

In Nicaragua, the Somoza regime did not fall because of a single battle. It fell because the people refused to surrender. The women refused to surrender.

Iran’s women are doing the same. I see my younger self in them: the teenager who left Tehran to study abroad, who learned the grammar of revolution in Managua, and who later built an academic career studying how dictatorships end while waiting for Iran’s to fall.

That day is closer than it has ever been.

Iran’s women are leading. The world should follow.