One fascinating aspect of the segment is a discussion of the role of women in the summer election protests. Echoing the words of an anonymous Iranian journalist who wrote for The New Yorker in September, another journalist identified as Faranak says she at first assumed that women could protest more freely because the police would be reluctant to harm them. Neda's death proved her wrong. In fact, Neda's sister tells Frontline that one woman warned Neda the basiji would target her because she was "a really pretty girl."

The segment also includes footage of Neda attending the demonstration that took her life. The clip below shows her walking on the street with her music teacher, who would later be forced to appear on television reinforcing the government's official version of events. Warning: the clip also includes disturbing, unblurred footage of Neda's death.

Dr. Arash Hejazi, who speaks of his attempts to save Neda, had to flee to England because he was outspoken about her death. He can't return to Iran and receives death threats even in exile. Neda's family was not allowed to have a memorial for her — no mosque or restaurant would let them in to commemorate her death. Protesters keep painting the word "martyr" at the site where she died; the government keeps painting over the words. Her boyfriend, Caspian Makan, was imprisoned and accused of being involved in Neda's death. He was later released on house arrest and escaped Iran. Now living in an apartment in a Middle Eastern city (Frontline says he's in Turkey), he gave an interview to The Guardian. There he spoke persuasively of Neda's commitment to protesting, contradicting early reports that she was simply a bystander. He says,

She said, 'You support me in everything I do, why not this?' I said, 'You don't understand these people. What happens if they catch you?' She said, 'It's not important, Caspian. It's my duty.' She said: 'Caspian, let me tell you the truth. I think that under the circumstances we now have, we're all responsible. Even if we'd had a child, I'd carry my child to these demos on my back.' That's when I realised I couldn't prevent her from going.

According to Frontline, neither Neda nor her boyfriend were politically involved before the elections. But the protests and their effects have awakened political awareness in many Iranians, and Neda's death has been a major part of this. Dr. Hejazi, still the main witness who is willing to speak out about what really happened to Neda, says he has been shocked by the response to his testimony. "I always talked about and preached about the power of words," he tells Frontline, "but i never realized how powerful words can be." As the impact of Neda's death and its chilling video record has shown, images can be powerful too.

A Death In Tehran [PBS]
Piecing Together Neda Agha-Soltan's Death [NYT: Lede Blog]
Caspian Makan: 'I Cannot Believe It Yet. I Still Think I Will See Neda Again' [Guardian]

The journalist writes that for the first time in Iranian history, women had a large and visible presence in this year's public demonstrations. Like men, they have been victims of violence. The author mentions the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, and also interviews a less famous victim — a woman named Negin who was beaten so badly while protesting the results of the recent election that she walked with a limp and her legs were swollen and blue. She tells the author that she stood still when the policed approached her, hoping they would pass her by. Then, she says,

They ran past, but not without hitting me as they did — every single one of them, on my legs, on my back, everywhere. One stopped and hit me in the face and shouted at me, and he was a young man, and I remember thinking, This young man is hitting and insulting a woman he doesn't know, who is old enough to be his mother! He must be crazy or something!

Her words highlight the fact that although women now protest and commit violence themselves — the author recounts a story of a group of women pulling Basijis off their motorcycles and nearly lynching them — they also retain a special role in Iranian society. One female protester, Shahrzad, told the author about a woman she knew who saved young men from police beatings by pretending to be their mother. The author writes,

It appealed to Shahrzad that the woman in question had mischievously exploited the maternal role that society allotted her in order to save young men from a beating. Inside this movement of oppressed freedom-seekers, Shahrzad seemed to be saying, there was a second, less obtrusive movement, of women playing with their status.

Shahrzad tells the author another story, about being insulted by a female Ahmadinejad supporter who happened to be wearing a body-hugging coat and makeup. Shahrzad asked her, "Why are you wearing so much eyeliner? Weren't you ever told you should only wear makeup for your husband?" The crowd then turned against the woman, mocking her style of dress until she was forced into "slinking away." It's a surprising tactic for a woman who is angry about the Islamic Republic's discrimination against women — and Negin points out that many women who initially supported the 1979 revolution were distressed by the new Republic's modesty laws and makeup prohibitions. Shahrzad says her son "doesn't like that I humiliated this woman using arguments I don't believe in," but she smiles as she tells her story. She and other Iranian women clearly find themselves uniquely placed to use deception and social pressure, tactics sometimes more effective than the beatings of the Basiji.

That said, the real story of women's involvement in the 2009 protests may be one of equality, not exceptionalism. The author writes, "For the first time in Iran's history, men and women in large numbers marched as equals. When, at Friday prayers on July 17th, thousands of men and women scandalized traditionalists by praying side by side, in the streets around Tehran University, Iran's culture of separation gave way to one of solidarity." Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Republic have not been toppled this time around. But, says the author, "the middle tier of Iranian society has become urgently politicized — activists whose goal, an end to tyranny, is now clear. Half of that tier is women." For a generation of well-educated women whose "social and professional avenues [...] are often disappointingly narrow," this may mean an opportunity for a new and more public life. For the government of Iran, it may mean a choice between liberalization (Iran's "gender laws are among the harshest in the world") or facing the wrath of half its population, oppressed for thirty years and now beginning to flex its power.

Veiled Threat [The New Yorker]

The 40th day after a death is significant in Islamic tradition, and 40-day cycles of mourning for martyrs were a key part of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Today protesters are gathering at Neda's grave and several other locations in Tehran. "At least 2,000" people have come together at a prayer location called the Grand Mosala, despite being denied permission to hold a rally there. Witnesses report that Iranian police are using tear gas, arresting Moussavi supporters, and smashing car windows in an effort to quell the protests. Reportedly among the protesters is Neda's mother, Hajar Rostami Motlagh, who spoke with the BBC in an interview published today.

Of her daughter's motivation for joining the gathering at which she was shot, Motlagh says,

It was all about being young and feeling passionate about freedom. She wasn't political. She didn't belong to any party or group. She didn't support any faction. Every other young Iranian was there - and she was one of them. [...] You can't blame young people for going out and wanting to feel free.

Throughout the interview, she seems to take care not to ascribe political motivations to Neda, or to reveal them herself. When asked if her daughter's death politicized her, she says,

No, not really. No. I can't tell you if her death has turned me into a political person. I am still in shock. In pain. I can't think about anything except her.

And when the interviewer asks if it's important to her that Neda's death be investigated, she answers, "Yes, because Mr Ahmadinejad has ordered an investigation." She does mention that while she has not spoken to opposition candidate Mir Husein Moussavi, "Mr Karroubi - the other opposition figure" has visited her. She says, "he was very supportive and I found that comforting." Despite her general avoidance of political statements, Motlagh does say,

knowing that the world cried for [Neda] … that has comforted me. I am proud of her. The world sees her as a symbol, and that makes me happy.

Today, Neda is a symbol of Iranians' outrage at an unfair election, and at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will be officially approved as president in a ceremony Monday. But for Motlagh, today's mourning will obviously be personal as well as political. The most heart-wrenching part of her interview is when she talks about meeting with the mothers of other young people slain at postelection gatherings. She says,

Emotionally we are all broken. What can we say to each other? Our loved ones were too young to die… what can three mothers in the same situation say to each other? All we can do is just sit there and cry.

Interview: Mother's Tribute To Neda [BBC]
Iran Election Protests: The Dead, Jailed And Missing [Guardian]
Updates On Post-Election Protests In Iran [NYT]
Iran Protests To Honour The Dead [Guardian]
Iranians Gather In Tehran To Commemorate Unrest Victims [Reuters]
Iran Police Clash With Mourners [BBC]
Ahmadinejad To Be Approved As President August 3 [Press TV]

The video, which was taken right after Neda was gunned down - she was reportedly shot in the heart - is below. It is extremely graphic and very upsetting — a more graphic version is on Facebook - providing a snapshot of life, and death, that is quickly becoming an iconic image for some Iranians, and, our headline attests (the phrase is popping up on posts all over Twitter), a rallying cry for people around the world.

The Iranian election was considered especially important to the country's female population and women have been some of the more visible protesters, even as the the situation has become increasingly violent and dangerous. From pictures on Flickr to images on blogs to citizen reporters on Demotix, images of women of all shapes, sizes, ages and styles are becoming the more-friendly face of the movement for government change. Instead of just men hurling rocks and being beaten (and killed) and standing, congested with tear gas, in front of burning cars, we are viewing the violence perpetrated by the state and its agents against women, some of whom are shown with rocks in their hands... and others, like Neda, innocent of anything other than a desire to make themselves heard.

The stories emerging from the chaos (despite the ban on Western journalists reporting on the protests) include tales of female leadership and courage. From Roger Cohen in today's New York Times:

I also know that Iran's women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I've seen them urging less courageous men on. I've seen them get beaten and return to the fray. "Why are you sitting there?" one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. "Get up! Get up!"

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of "Death to the dictator!" and "We want liberty!" accompanied her.

From eyewitnesses in Iran, reporting to the BBC:

There were lots of female protestors - I saw a guard attack one women and then she went back up to him and grabbed him by the collar and said 'why are you doing this? Are you not an Iranian?' - he was totally disarmed and didn't know what to do but her actions stopped him.

From another eyewitness:

In Sattar Khan I saw with my own eyes two ordinary 40-year-old women being beaten severely with electric batons, for nothing but raising their voice in protest.

From an Iranian student to a professor, as printed in the Jerusalem Post:

Girls are extremely active in all these rallies (a little less in night riots where patches of young men are more visible). They courageously charge anti-riot police, chant slogans in front of them, lead the crowd, etc., but they are equally beaten too.

From Nico Pitney's Iran Live Blog yesterday on the Huffington Post, there were a number of accounts of women's actions in the protests. At 3:20:

I witnessed peoples fear of the Basij dissapear, an 80 year old chadori woman with rocks in her hands calling for the exacution of khamenei and all Basij

At 3:25:

they were hitting the women as hard if it didn't seem harder.

And at 3:31:

I saw a girl injured by gon shot (in Amir abad St.)! and there weren't enough ambulances .

A young woman provided a first person account to The Guardian Weekly:

Yesterday evening I joined a demonstration at Hatim Nizar street, responding to the call given by our leader Mousavi to hold peaceful protests and march in memory of eight people killed. Most people wore black as we marched the streets silently, the majority of them were young boys and girls.

CNN talked to a woman it calls "Parisa."

"This regime is against all humanity, more specifically against all women," said Parisa, whom CNN is not fully identifying for security reasons.

"I see lots of girls and women in these demonstrations," she said. "They are all angry, ready to explode, scream out and let the world hear their voice. I want the world to know that as a woman in this country, I have no freedom."

The Wall Street Journal also carries a number of first-hand reports of the role women are playing in the protests, like this from "Negin".

At the beginning I thought this was going to be a fight between the lower class and the middle class. What I saw on Monday changed my mind completely. I saw many women, young and old, covered head-to-toe in black chadors shouting and chanting among the demonstrators and joining the young girls who were sitting on the ground in the middle of the street to stop the Basij militia from walking inside the crowd.

That image will never be wiped away from my mind. The women on the front line with their loose colorful scarves had opened their arms, ready to be killed, while others were beaten by the Basij on the side of the road.

Women in have become more than just a symbol for the kinds of reforms people were seeking with the election of Mir Hossein Mousavi: they're leading protests; they're encouraging others; they're allowing themselves to be visible symbols of the oppression of any opposition to the regime; and they're rapidly becoming the face of that opposition. (Faezeh Hashemi, the daughter of a prominent cleric - and herself an opposition leader - has reportedly been arrested.) The thing is, the more a paternalistic regime with laws designed to "protect" women from men allows its (male) forces to brutally impose its will on those women, the more it shows the world that its laws are designed for the benefit of men — and only some men at that.

Update: Time magazine has just posted a piece on Neda's murder, what it may mean for the opposition movement, and the country as a whole.

Videos Posted by Shekoo Sab [Facebook via BreakforNews]
Removing The Veil That Covers The Truth [CBS News]
Etehraz's Photostream [Flickr]
Minute To Minute With Revolution [Revolutionary Road]
Running Battles As Iran Battle Reaches Climax [Demotix via The Guardian]
A Supreme Leader Loses His Aura As Iranians Flock To The Streets [NY Times]
'Ten Killed' In Iran Clashes - State TV [BBC]
'Movement By The People, For The People' [Jerusalem Post]
Iran Updates (VIDEO): Live-Blogging The Uprising [Huffington Post]
Iran Protests: 'I Ran For My Life' [The Guardian Weekly]
Women In Iran March Against Discrimination [CNN]
'The Fear Is Gone' [Wall Street Journal via Ianyan Mag]
In Iran, One Woman's Death May Have Many Consequences [Time]

Related: Everything by Andrew Sullivan [Andrew Sullivan]

Earlier: In Iran, "Pretty" Is Sometimes The Protest
10 Reasons Why You Should Be Following The Iranian Elections

Riot police are also reportedly using water cannons to disperse groups of protesters, and two Iranian news agencies are currently reporting that a suicide bomber blew himself up inside of a shrine dedicated to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, killing himself and injuring eight others, though as Reuters reports, "foreign media are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran," so the reports can not be confirmed, and, as BBC's Jon Leyne, who is currently reporting from Tehran, notes, "There was no evidence to support the report."

Interestingly enough, CNN, the network lambasted by Twitter users, who came up with the hashtag #CNNFail to criticize the network for their failure to cover the election fallout in Iran last week, has been covering today's protests all morning, desperately trying to get any information they can—most of it coming from Twitter and Facebook. The restrictions on foreign media are quite evident in CNN's coverage- the network is also showing the current coverage by Iran's state-run media, which is currently showing very little (if anything) about the riots in the streets.

The restrictions on foreign media have made it quite difficult to confirm what, exactly, is happening in Iran, yet social networking sources have provided a small window into a situation that is essentially being hidden from the world through a media lock down. There is one thing that all sources seem to agree on: the chants in the streets—"Death to the Dictator" and "Death to the Dictatorship."

Witnesses Report Fierce Clashes On Tehran Streets [AP]
Iran Police Beat Protestors, Fire Tear Gas [MSNBC]
Iran Security Forces Use Tear Gas, Clubs On Protesters, Witnesses Say [CNN]
Iran Police Disperse Protesters [BBC]
Suicide Bomber Attacks Khomeini Shrine In Iran [Reuters]

[Tehran, June 13. Image via Getty.]

An Iranian woman cries near the headquarters of presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi in Tehran on June 13, 2009. Hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was set for a landslide victory in Iran's presidential race, crushing his moderate rival and Western hopes of change in the Islamic republic. But supporters of his main challenger, ex-premier Mousavi, cried foul and some were beaten by police as they gathered in Tehran to await the final results, an AFP correspondent said. (OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images)

"I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin," Moussavi says, "It is our duty to defend people's votes. There is no turning back." 46 million people turned out to vote, with 62.6% of those votes going to Ahmadinejad and 33.7 going to Moussavi, who believes the results are a fraud and says that he "won't surrender to this manipulation." [NYTimes]