The Iranian regime has been bashing in the heads of protesters, and just now has even beaten to death a 12-year-old middle-schooler, as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) hopes to crush the spirit of the indomitable disaffected Iranians who now cry “Death to the Dictator!” more than they do “Woman, Life, Freedom!” The regime thinks it can murder its way out of the nationwide protests that are now in its seventh week, having spread to more than 100 Iranian cities. So far, the show of murderous force hasn’t worked. If anything, after every death of an innocent, the anger grows and the protests swell. The regime feels it must increase its violence, and that in turn leads to still more implacable hatred from below.
One of the latest victims, Parvis Hamnava, was a middle-school girl – meaning she was only 12 or 13. She was beaten to death by Iranian police in her classroom, in front of her classmates. Her crime? Possessing a torn-up photo of the Supreme Leader. Her death has been given much attention by the protest movement in Iran. It was the subject of a preliminary report on at Jihad Watch here. The full story is here: “Iranian teen girl beaten to death by police for tearing Khomeini’s photo – report,” by Tzvi Joffre, Jerusalem Post, October 31, 2022:
An Iranian girl in middle school was beaten to death after police officers found a torn-up photo of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini in one of her schoolbooks, a local news outlet in the Sistan and Baluchestan Province, Haalvsh, reported on Sunday night.The girl, identified as Parvis Hamnava, was at her school in Iranshahr in the Sistan and Baluchestan Province, when security forces entered the school in order to search the books of the students, discovering the torn-up photo in Hamnava’s textbook. According to Haalvsh, security forces severely beat Hamnava in front of the other students and she later died of her wounds in the hospital. The incident reportedly took place last week.The security forces reportedly forced Hamnava’s family and teachers to promise that they would not speak to the press about the incident before handing over her body to them to bury.
This is nothing new for the Iranian security forces, well-versed in every sort of atrocity. In every case when they have murdered a young person, they turn the screws on family members, threatening them if they do not remain silent or, in the alternative, if they refuse to repeat the made-up story about the victim having died of a “heart attack” (lots of perfectly healthy 18-to-22-year-olds, including Mahsa Amini herself, have suddenly had these fatal heart attacks) or from the effects of a pre-existing condition that no one in the family had an inkling of, or in several cases, were said to have committed suicide, just after having defiantly torn off their hijabs.
The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency rejected the report, claiming that there was no such student in the Iranian education system and that no students were killed in Iranshahr.
This is a new twist. Instead of attributing a victim’s death to a heart attack, or a long-hidden brain condition, now the IRGC has begun to deny the very existence of the victim in question. But in this case, the girl was beaten almost to death in front of her entire class, and died soon after in the hospital; now all the members of that class will also have to be threatened to keep quiet. So will Hamnava’s teachers, the school principal, everyone she knew in town, everyone in her family, in an ever-expanding network, a widening gyre, of forced silence and lies. They will have to go along with the story just concocted by her killers: she doesn’t exist. Parvis Hamnava disappears into non-existence, and becomes The Girl Who Never Was. News of this girl’s killing has spread across the province of Sistan-Baluchestan, where she was from. The Baluchi protests have taken on a separatist cast, with “Death to the Dictator!” now including cries for Baluch independence, which is the very last thing they want to hear in Tehran. Ethnic separatism is the soft underbelly of the regime. Half the population of Iran consists of non-Persian minorities, including Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, and Baluchis. If any or some or all of them were to rise in revolt against their Persian overlords, the very country of Iran could deliquesce in a fissiparous frenzy.
Amid the large scale protests that have swept Iran in the past six weeks, Iranian forces have violently cracked down on protesters in Sistan and Baluchestan, especially in Zahedan, located north of Iranshahr. Dozens of protesters have reportedly been killed by Iranian forces in recent weeks in Zahedan.
It was not “dozens of protesters” who were killed in the Baluchi city of Zahedan, but many more. At least eighty-two were mowed down in the first massacre, on September 30, known now as “Bloody Friday,” and another eight protesters were murdered a few weeks later, for a total of ninety.
A number of teenagers have been killed amid the protests, with multiple cases of teenage protesters beaten severely or even to death by security forces reported throughout Iran.Students across Iran continued protesting on Monday, as Iran indicted over a thousand protesters, with many already receiving prison sentences or even the death sentence. The charges placed against the arrested protesters included assaulting security forces and setting fire to public property.Many students also received text messages informing them that they were expelled or suspended from their universities due to their participation in protests and banning them from entering university property. Slogans and signs against the suspensions were seen at a number of student protests on Monday.“If students are suspended, the university will be closed,” chanted students at the Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran in footage shared on social media.
Amirkabir is one of Iran’s best universities for training in the sciences. Protests that have been put down with clubs and live fire at many other universities, including the Iranian equivalent of MIT, Shafir Technological University. What will it mean for the development of science and technology in Iran if the very best students in those fields have their educations interrupted in such a violent fashion, or for those student protesters who are sent to prison and may not be allowed to ever resume their university studies? Has the regime thought through what its wholesale assault on the universities – dozens of them are now in an uproar of protest — for Iran’s economy, not to speak of the catastrophic effects on Iranian culture? Think of the effect on Iran it it puts its best students behind bars, or prevents them from enrolling in classes. Think of how many will now manage to flee their unhappy land, and to join the swelling ranks of Iranian exiles in Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, depriving Iran of some of its best brains.
Students at Beheshti University were seen in footage shared online chanting “Freedom, freedom, freedom.”On Sunday, at Al-Zahra University in Tehran, female students chanted “I will kill, I will kill, whoever killed my sister.”
The protest chants are becoming more violent in their threats against the regime. “Woman, life, freedom” was the first defiant cry, but has ever more frequently been replaced by “Death to the Dictator!” and, still more worrisome for the regime, by the threatening “I will kill, I will kill, whoever killed my sister.”
Family and friends also marked the funerals and the 40th day of mourning for a number of protesters, including one named Irfan Khazai and a 16-year-old named Sarina Saedi. At Khazai’s grave, protesters chanted “death to the dictator,” according to footage shared by the 1500tasvir account.At Saedi’s grave, protesters chanted “Kurdistan, Kurdistan, the graveyard of fascists,” according to footage shared by the Hengaw Human Rights Organization.
Now we have Kurds in Iranian Kurdistan chanting explicitly nationalist sentiments about “Kurdistan, Kurdistan, the graveyard of fascists.” This is correctly understood by the rulers in Tehran as a Kurdish separatist slogan. Those uttering it don’t just want to change the regime; they want out of the state of Iran altogether, so as to eventually be joined by other Kurds in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, in an independent Kurdistan. There are more than 40 million Kurds, after all. They are the largest people in the world without a state of their own. They are suppressed in ways little and big, from the suppression of the Kurdish language and culture in Turkey to outright genocide in Iraq where, in Operation Anfal, Saddam Hussein murdered 182,000 Kurds. The Kurdish people are spread among four countries – Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria – where they now live in various states of unhappiness.
In the same way that they worry about the Kurds, the Iranians have to worry about the ethnic Baluchis, whose protests in Sistan-Baluchistan, in southeastern Iran, have started to include a separatist message. Such calls for Baluchi autonomy, or even for an independent Baluchistan that could unite the three million Baluchis in Iran with the 7.5 million Baluchis just across the border in Pakistan, the rulers in Tehran know, constitute a real threat to the nation-state of Iran, just as the Kurdish protesters do, who so far have borne the brunt of Iran’s crackdown. The Iranian army can suppress tens of thousands of nonviolent unarmed protesters, but would find it much harder to put down armed separatists – Kurds, Baluchis, Arabs, Azeris — especially if several of those ethnic groups, and ideally all four, coordinated their uprisings. Each group should be able to count on outside support: the Iranian Kurds can count on help from the well-armed Kurds in Iraq; the Baluchis in Iran can count on their Baluchi brothers, across the border in Pakistan, the Azeris should be able to rely n the Azerbaijani military next door, and the Arabs of Khuzestan will be helped by their fellow Arabs in the Sunni states of the Gulf, with plenty of weapons and money. What an opportunity, those Sunni Arabs must be thinking, to smite the hated Iranians. Surely this prospect keeps Iranian military planners up at night.
On Saturday, IRGC commander-in-chief Hossein Salami warned that “today is the end of the riots” and told students not to go out to the streets anymore.Salami blamed the US and Israel for the riots and claimed that protesting students were being influenced by them.
Oh dear. He said “today is the end of the riots” on October 30, and nobody cared; they kept protesting. And when the IRGC’s Commander-in-Chief, Hossein Salami, blamed the US and Israel for the protests that he called “riots,” nobody believed him. The Iranians have gone to that well too often. Such a claim merely made him even more of a laughingstock. Everyone in Iran knows that no Americans or Israelis were needed to encourage Iranian women, fed up with the morality police, to tear off their hijabs and burn them; no foreign agents were whispering in Iranian ears to call for “women, life, freedom” or “death to the dictator!” Blaming the Great Satan and the Little Satan, a staple of the regime’s rhetoric, has become a cause for ridicule.
The beating of a middle-school student to the point of death – she died a little later, in a hospital — in front of her classmates, has made a deep impression on Iranians. And so has the preposterous, hopeless, frantic denial of her very existence.
The regime is now searching for some way to divert the Iranian public’s attention away from the protests. What can they be planning? Here’s what might be in the works: an attack, directly from Iran, instead of from the Houthis it has used in the past, on Saudi oil installations and airbases. Or perhaps they are mulling over another attack on the American base at Erbil. After all, the last time Iran attacked that base, with twelve ballistic missiles, on January 8, 2020, the Americans placed more sanctions on Iranian companies and individuals, but did not strike back militarily. Salami may be thinking that the Iranians can get away with such an attack again, without enduring an attack in response. I hope he’s wrong.
