[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/17/intv.sadjadpour.art.jpg caption="Karim Sadjadpour tells CNN's John Roberts that Iran's supreme leader may be faced with a dilemma to sacrifice himself or President Ahmadinejad."]

Pressured by a fourth day of street protests, Iran is clamping down. Reporters have been confined to their rooms and they're jamming phones and radio transmissions in Iran.

Karim Sadjadpour is an Iranian expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He joined John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Wednesday.

John Roberts: Where do you see this ending?

Karim Sadjadpour: It’s difficult to say, John. A lot of it depends on what the opposition leaders decide they want to do. Certainly there's a tremendous sense of outrage in Tehran. Not only in Tehran, throughout the country there’s a tremendous sense of injustice that these young people have. At the same time, it’s a country which endured an eight-year war with Iraq. People are allergic to the prospect of further carnage and bloodshed and violence. But at the moment, I think there's truly a sense of outrage and I see these protests continuing.

Roberts: The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the government have told people to stay inside. The IRGC is saying if you put up certain materials on blog sites you could face legal charges. How big of a role is the Revolutionary Guard Corps and this paramilitary organization, the Basij, playing in trying to tamp down these protests?

Sadjadpour: They're playing a definitive role. But what’s been amazing is they haven't dissuaded people from going in to the streets. Historically, when the regime has announced that the Basij and the Revolutionary Guard are authorized to use force to shoot people, that will quell the protests. But so far, we haven’t seen the protests really quelled. The other day there were several hundred thousand people in Tehran. And it just gives you an idea of how outraged people feel that they're willing to go out in to the streets and risk their lives.

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From CNN's Carol Costello and Bob Ruff

[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/17/rahnavard.getty.art.jpg caption="Zahra Rahnavard, wife of Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, waves to supporters during a pro-reform campaign rally at Haydarniya Stadium in Tehran on June 9, 2009."]

Her name is Zahra Rahnavard. There are Iranian women who say she is their nation’s Michelle Obama.

Rahnavard is smart (2 Ph.D’s), well-written (15 books), and a trend setter (the first Iranian woman to head a university since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

In a nation that separates and carefully monitors women, Rahnavard has been an inspiration to women seeking to modernize Iran, end discrimination, and give women many of the rights taken for granted in the West.

It’s not an easy task.

Under President Mahmoud Ahmedinjad's regime, activists say dozens of women have been jailed for participating in a grass-roots women’s rights campaign called, One Million Signatures.

Rahnavard also is the wife of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who is seeking to overturn the June 12 presidential election that he and his supporters say was rigged to re-elect President Ahmedinejad to a second term.

During the campaign, Rahnavard did some very un-Iranian things that seem commonplace in the West.

She held her husband’s hand in public. And she campaigned for him. Alone. Rahnavard drew huge crowds at rallies in which she urged voters to vote for change and vote for her husband.

Iranian women looking for inspiration to change their world loved it.

Azar Nafisi, author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran”, a best selling book about the erosion of women’s rights in Iran, says that Rahnavard has given women there a voice to protest their second class citizenship. Nafisi says Iranian women “see in her the potential of what they want.”

Perhaps most revealing of Rahnavard’s influence, during one of the televised presidential debates, Ahmedinejad turned her into a campaign issue by (falsely) accused her of not being qualified to teach. The President said “...she got PhD without attending the university entrance exam and now she is an assistant professor without having qualifications...this is lawlessness.”

Rahnavard shot right back the next day, holding a news conference to accuse Ahmadinejad of humiliating women, betraying the Iranian revolution, and seeking “to destroy his rival through lies.”

Ahmedinejad may never have heard the lyrics to Helen Reddy’s 1972 song, “I am woman, hear me roar,” but with Zahra Rahnavard on the scene he pretty much gets the gist of it.