A month after the biggest wave of protests began in Iran in years, motivated by the death of a young woman detained for disobeying strict Islamic dress rules, the theocratic regime at the head of the country seeks to blame “external forces” for its instability, thus framing the demonstrations not as a threat to the country’s religious establishment, but to its territorial unity.
In his first statement on the case, for example, the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the protests were not masterminded by “ordinary Iranians” but by the country’s arch-enemies, the United States and Israel.
Increasingly, however, the focus of repression has been on the Kurdish community in Iran — the ethnicity to which the dead girl belonged and within which the protests first erupted.
Mahsa Amini, 22, died in the custody of Iran’s so-called moral police after being arrested for allegedly failing to properly wear the hijab, the Islamic headscarf. The young woman’s family claims that she was the victim of aggression by the police, which the regime denies.
The demonstrations started in Amini’s hometown in the Kurdish province of Saqez and quickly spread across the country. Led by girls and women, who chant “women, life, freedom” and call for Khamenei’s downfall, the rallies have become the biggest show of opposition to the theocracy since the 2019 rallies against a gasoline price hike.
Despite the national dimension of the protests, the biggest crackdown on them took place in the northwest of the country, where most of Iran’s roughly 10 million Kurds live. Witnesses say security forces were transferred there from other provinces, and that tanks were sent to particularly tense Kurdish areas.
Iran has also attacked Kurdish Iranian dissident groups claiming they are involved in the demonstrations. The argument is that these groups use the Amini case as an excuse to separate Kurdistan from Iran, their decades-long goal. Missiles and drones fired by the Revolutionary Guard towards the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq killed 13 people.
It is true that other Kurdish communities in the Middle East used moments of internal instability in their respective countries to achieve different degrees of autonomy.
In Iraq, for example, groups that fought against Saddam Hussein gained significant military protection from the West after the 1991 Gulf War, something that was only strengthened when the United States invaded the country 12 years later. In Syria, representatives of the ethnic group took advantage of the uprisings against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011 to ally with the US and take control of the northeastern part of the country. Both expressed solidarity with the protests in Iran.
Many of the Iranian Kurds say they do not want to separate, however, but rather a regime change – which, according to international organizations, persecutes ethnicity with a special force despite the country’s constitution guaranteeing protection to the different minorities that make up.
Analysts further say that Iran’s strategy of holding Kurds accountable for the protests could backfire. This is because it was the disregard for the grievances of minorities that led other countries in the region, such as Syria and Yemen, to endless civil wars. Specialists also claim to observe great solidarity between the different ethnic groups in the country in the acts.
The regime’s repression of demonstrations has been brutal. According to data from the Oslo-based NGO Human Rights of Iran, at least 100 people have died in recent weeks. In reaction, European countries have established a series of sanctions on Iran – the most recent, announced on Monday (17), ban four institutions and 11 citizens of the country (including the head of the moral police) from traveling to their territories and order the paralysis of your goods.
Nations are still planning more such measures if the Middle East country is confirmed to have supplied kamikaze drones to Russia in the midst of the Ukraine War — and in this case, they would go beyond simple vetoes, warned Luxembourg Chancellor Jean Asselborn.
Another foreign concern is in relation to the fire at the Evin prison, one of the most important in Iran, over the weekend – the number of dead inmates rose from four to eight on Monday (17). There are detained, among others, activists considered enemies by the regime. Authorities deny that the incident is related to the wave of protests registered in the country.
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