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TEHRAN -- When office clerks, housewives, students and other urban Iranians took to the streets a year ago to protest what they said was massive election fraud by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they hailed the birth of a leaderless popular movement that embodied their aspirations for a more open society.

"We are all together" became a favorite slogan of the Green Movement, which sprang to life last year after Ahmadinejad was proclaimed the landslide winner of the June 12 presidential election. Defeated opposition candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who quickly turned into figureheads, said it was not they, but ordinary Iranians, who were leading the massive anti-government demonstrations that followed the vote. There was no agenda other than a demand for new elections; no goal other than the departure of Ahmadinejad.

Using word of mouth, social media and cellphone text messages, Iranians challenged the government in a way long unimaginable in the 30-year-old Islamic republic -- or, for that matter, during the centuries of monarchy that preceded it.