Neda

In their not-so-slow transition from a campaign of civil disobedience to potentially a nascent revolution, the street protests over the presidential election result in Tehran have found an icon. Neda Agha Soltani typified the youth of Tehran – she was only casually taking part in the demonstration when she was cut down by a single bullet to the heart as she spoke on her mobile phone.

The drama of her death on Saturday went around the world via YouTube and Facebook and she became the personification of a nation in torment. Her name means "voice" in Persian, making her even more of a symbol of youth cut down and brutalised in Tehran.

I count among the victims the lorry loads of what the people are calling "Joojeh Basij" – the baby Basij. Barely adolescent youths brought in by the regime from rural areas, handed clubs and set to work attacking the protesters. The flower of our youth is made into the brutal and the brutalised. The baby Basijis are reinforcing the older generation of Basijis, who are often too well fed to keep up with the svelte youth.

An Italian friend asked yesterday if I thought there were foreign forces at work in Iran. My friend, an old communist, was reflecting the idea aired by John Parisella and others that events unfolding in Iran were ripples created by Barack Obama's Cairo speech.

It's a miraculous application of the idea of American moral leadership and its use of so-called soft power to imagine causal links between US policy and the setback suffered by Hezbollah's coalition partners in the Lebanese elections or the million-plus crowds of protesters on the streets of Tehran. As if Obama, much like his YouTube hit, "the fly swat", has, with one well-judged speech, redrawn the map of the Middle East.

As much as I am a fan of the US president's many attributes ,including his fly-swatting technique, this is one miracle he should not be credited with. One can believe that the removal of external threats in the form of George W Bush and his wretched and failed confrontational policies has been a factor in the opening up of the atmosphere prior to the elections.

External pressure hemmed in the regime and the regime hemmed in the people: pressure led to pressure and pressure fed pressure. It was all very convenient for men of power to point to foreign bogeymen. The 1979 revolutionary government became more repressive as a result of internal divisions and external pressures to redirect or overthrow it. The war in Iraq and other intrigues created the perfect climate in which national survival and territorial integrity were privileged over openness and individual rights and the heterogeneity of the revolutionary forces were reduced to the monoculture of the Islamic republic.

On Sunday I woke up listening to the BBC world service interviewing my friend Maziar Bahari, the journalist and documentary film maker who had spent the past week on the streets of Tehran covering the events. Despite being physically attacked earlier, seemingly at random, he expressed a view that he said 90% of the protesters shared: "They want a reform of the state, not an overthrow of it."

Bahari said that the people of Iran were turned off by violence and revolution, they wanted their rights achieved through peaceful means. A few hours later came the news of his arrest, there is no information on who arrested him or why.

The power struggle with and within the regime is being driven to a point of no return. Today's announcement by the guardian council that it still holds the elections as valid is a further step towards a total confrontation. The regime is gambling that when faced with the choice between the regime as it is and its wholesale overthrow, the majority of the people will draw back. Yet again Khamenei and the stalwarts of the conservative establishment are a week or so behind the event on the streets.

Rapidly and overwhelmingly, Iranians are beginning to believe that given the choice between no reform and collapse of the regime they would opt for the latter. It isn't Barack from Cairo but Neda from Tehran who's been heard. The distraught and shocked music teacher who was accompanying Neda on her final walk was heard in the dreadful footage reassuring her as life drained from her fragile body. "Neda don't be scared, Neda stay with me."

How Neda Soltani became the face of Iran's struggle

Shortly after 5pm on Saturday afternoon, Hamed, an Iranian asylum seeker in the Netherlands, took a frantic call from a friend in Tehran.

"A girl has just been killed right next to me," the friend said. It had all happened quickly. A young woman, chatting on her mobile phone, had been shot in the chest. She faded before a doctor, who was on the scene, could do anything to help.

There was more. Hamed's friend, who does not want to be named, filmed the incident on his phone. Within moments the footage had landed in Hamed's inbox. Five minutes later it was on YouTube and Facebook.

Within hours it had become one of the most potent threats faced by the Iranian regime in 30 years.

"He asked me, is it possible to publish everything right now," Hamed said. "I published it on YouTube and Facebook and five minutes later it started to get many emails and messages and it published everywhere.

"It shocked me very, very much and I was sure at that time everyone in the world if they see this movie they'll be shocked, and I felt that I must broadcast it because I try to show to the world what is going on in my country."

The killing of Neda Soltani, the grisly images of blood spreading across her face, have become perhaps the defining sequence in the 10-day uprising against the regime in Tehran, a gruesome manifestation of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's threat to use force on the tens of thousands of people contesting the outcome of the presidential election.

Soltani is being mythologised as a martyr to the opposition's cause, a rallying call for a protest movement in need of a hero. Her image has been printed on placards brandished during clashes in Tehrantoday.

The footage is disturbing. Her eyes open, Soltani seems to radiate a calmness at odds with the panic surrounding her as she lies in the road after being struck by a bullet.

For the authorities, it was clearly unsettling. They quickly moved to ban the victim's family from holding an Islamic funeral, apparently for fear of creating a figure that could unite and revive the battered opposition.

The details surrounding Soltani's death are as sketchy as her own story. She was 26, a philosophy student and a part-time travel agent, according to those who knew her. She was no rock thrower at the vanguard of a movement for regime change , but, according to her fiance, Caspian Makan, a young woman who may have ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Makan said she had been in a car in central Tehran with her music teacher when they were caught in a traffic jam. He said the pair had left the car to escape the heat.

It was when she was walking down Karegar Street talking on her phone that the shot rang out.

"Neda's aim was not Mousavi or Ahmadinejad, her target was her country," Makan said, adding that although she hadn't planned on demonstrating, she was sympathetic to the protest movement.

In the footage she is wearing jeans, white trainers, a dark shirt and a headscarf, suggesting a middle class and relatively emancipated young woman.

Several men are shown frantically trying to save her life as blood from her wounds rapidly develops into a large pool beside her.

Reports vary on who fired the fatal shot. Some sources suggested it was a Basij volunteer on a motorcycle, while others have attributed it to a marksman on the roof of a nearby house.

Others said she may have been targeted because she was using a mobile phone, one of the opposition's most important tools.

Another video said to be of Soltani, taken just before she was shot, shows her standing among a crowd of protesters, some of whom are heard chanting "death to the dictator" and "Allahu Akbar".

Like much of the footage that has emerged from Tehran in recent days, the authenticity and circumstances behind the video could not be verified.

But Soltani was quickly lionised by an engaged online community inside and outside Iran. Some have even started writing songs in her memory to accompany the web footage.

One song, by a singer called Pourang Azad, contains the lyrics: "You left and thousands of flowers grew, you left and my patience finished … Your loving look is full of demand. Sleep, sweet lady of Iran."

The incident has taken on an added poignancy from the meaning of Soltani's first name. Neda, an Arabic word used more commonly in literary rather than spoken Farsi, conveys the spiritual meaning of "call" or "voice".

The authorities are acutely aware of the threat posed to them by her killing. They only agreed to release her body on condition that her family agreed to a quick burial on Sunday in the sprawling Behesht-e Zahra cemetery on the outskirts of Tehran.

A memorial service planned for the Nilufar mosque in the capital's Abbasabad neighbourhood was called off after officials expressly forbade it. All other mosques in the Tehran area have been warned against holding services in her memory.

But that may not be enough to stop Soltani becoming a martyr, a status revered in Shia Islam, the dominant sect in Iran. Under the creed, mourning ceremonies are held for the dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after their passing.

During the unrest that presaged that 1979 Islamic revolution, processions on the 40th day of mourning for fallen protesters became landmarks that created the momentum to topple the shah's regime.

There's a nice profile in the LA times today of Neda Agha-Soltan, whom you surely know by now.

She went downtown in Tehran last Saturday to protest the vote count, yes, but also to watch and be a part of it. She wasn't a terribly political person at all. From the piece:

Like many in her neighborhood, Agha-Soltan was loyal to the country's Islamic roots and traditional values, friends say, but also curious about the outside world, which was easily accessed through satellite TV, the Internet and occasional trips abroad.

The second of three children, she studied Islamic philosophy at a branch of Tehran's Azad University until deciding to pursue a career in tourism. She took private classes to become a tour guide, including Turkish-language courses, friends said, hoping to someday lead groups of Iranians on trips abroad.

Travel was her passion, and with her friends she saved up enough money for package tours to Dubai, Turkey and Thailand. Two months ago, on a trip to Turkey, she relaxed along the beaches of Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast.

She also loved music, especially Persian pop, and was taking piano lessons, according to Panahi and other friends. She was also an accomplished singer, they said.

But she was never an activist, they added, and she began attending the mass protests only because she was outraged by the election results.

Very sad indeed. So this is one of the people the regime calls thugs and provocateurs and terrorists.

Neda, the image of Iran

How Neda Soltani became the face of Iran's struggle

Neda's story

Film

Neda Soltani becomes the face of Iran's struggle