70 years ago, on August 19, 1953, a US-MI6-orchestrated military coup ousted Iran's first democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
The coup reinstated the monarchist dictatorship led by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, securing the flow of cheap Iranian oil to the West. This violent coup claimed hundreds of lives and led to state autocratization, marking a 26-year reign of terror, only ended by the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.