Why Iran’s ethnic minorities are bearing the brunt of regime’s violent crackdown on protests

Protesters taking to the streets of Sanandaj, the capital of Iran's Kurdistan province, as demonstrations continue to spread weeks after the death of Mahsa Amini in custody, despite growing calls for restraint. (AFP)
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Updated 18 October 2022
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Why Iran’s ethnic minorities are bearing the brunt of regime’s violent crackdown on protests

  • Despite constitutional protections, non-Persian ethnicities in far-flung enclaves have long faced discrimination
  • Majority of those executed by the regime in early 2022 were ethnic Arabs, Kurds and Balochs

RAQQA, SYRIA: Mahsa Amini, or Jina Amini, the name of a Kurdish woman killed by the Iranian morality police on Sept. 16, has echoed across social media in support of the protest movement that is posing the biggest challenge to the clerical rulers in years.

To Iranian law enforcement, Amini was just a nameless member of an ethnic minority that has been oppressed for decades. Little did they know that her death at the hands of one of its units would spark a massive uprising with the potential to topple the regime itself.

On Sept. 13, the 22-year-old Amini was arrested in Tehran — allegedly for failing to wear a veil properly, which is mandatory in Iran. Her brother, whom she had visited, was told she would be taken to a detention center and released after an hour. Two hours later, she was in a coma.

Three days later, she was dead.

Though the Iranian regime reported that she died from pre-existing medical conditions, leaked testimonies from her co-detainees and CT scans show that she was severely beaten and suffered a skull fracture and brain hemorrhage.

The death of Amini immediately sparked a massive wave of protests across Iran. Civil unrest erupted throughout the country, from the western Kurdistan (or Kordestan) province, of which Amini was a native, to central Iran and Sistan and Balochistan province in the south.

According to an activist in Kurdistan, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, the protests began as Amini’s body was buried.

“People started chanting the Kurdish slogan of ‘Women, life, freedom,’ and many other nationalistic slogans during her burial ceremony. Later they took to the streets of the city and gathered in front of the governor’s office,” he told Arab News.

Within hours, protests spread to other cities in the province, and on Sept. 18, the entire region went on strike, closing their shops and taking to the streets in protest. Within days, the protests spread nationwide.

The ongoing crackdown on those who do not fall into line with the Iranian regime, while the bloodiest in decades, is widely seen as the culmination of decades of oppressive treatment of minority groups by Iranian authorities.

Chapter 2, Article 15 of the Iranian constitution allows for the teaching of regional and tribal languages in schools and their use in the media. Chapter 3, Article 19 states that “all people of Iran, whatever the ethnic group or tribe to which they belong, enjoy equal rights.”

Despite supposed constitutional protection and the fact that non-Persian ethnic and linguistic groups make up nearly 40 percent of Iran’s population, minorities have been subjected to mistreatment, from political discrimination to oppression, by means of arbitrary arrest and execution.

Kurds are the third-largest ethnic group in Iran, making up approximately 10 percent of the population. Various estimates place their numbers at around 40 million, spread across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.




The Iranian diaspora have supported protests against the Tehran regime in cities around the world. (AFP)

“The situation is so bad in Kurdistan that I don’t know where to start,” the activist said.

“Our people suffer the worst things that are beyond imagination for people from other countries. Kurds are considered third-class citizens in Iran. First, because we are Kurds; second, because we are non-Shiite Muslims or practice other Kurdish religions; and, third, because of our opposition to the central government.”

The activist continued: “We are deprived of our very basic rights as human beings. Kurdish language and Kurdish parties are banned from the system. Kurdish cities suffer from extreme poverty and unemployment which is the result of Iran’s discriminatory policies against Kurds.

“Kurdistan enjoys the least amount of development, and Kurdish society has paid a high price for the official marginalization.”

Iran’s Kurds have suffered since 1979; Kurdish parties in Iran boycotted the March 1979 referendum to create the Islamic Republic of Iran, and have been paying the price for it ever since.

Iranian intelligence has persecuted Kurds even outside its jurisdiction. In 1989, a Kurdish politician and leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan was assassinated in Germany.




Demonstrations have taken place across Iran, including in the Kurdistan capital Sanandaj. (AFP)

His successor and three other Kurdish opposition figures were also killed three years later, and no fewer than 10 Iranian Kurdish dissidents have been assassinated outside Iran since 1989.

Though the current wave of unrest began in Kurdistan with the death of a Kurdish woman, the Iranian regime’s persecution of minority groups has spread beyond the Kurdish minority.

In May 2022, a wave of protests against deteriorating economic conditions swept Iran, and a spike in executions came in its wake. However, minority groups were disproportionately targeted by security forces, according to the human rights organization Iran Human Rights, or IHRNGO.

The Baloch people, a primarily Sunni Muslim group that inhabits the southern region of Baluchistan in Iran, make up only two percent of the population.

It has long suffered from economic underdevelopment, having both the lowest Human Development Index and gross national income per capita of all of Iran’s provinces, according to 2019 statistics from Netherlands-based Global Data Lab. Despite this, they have been subjected to egregious human rights violations.

A June report by IHRNGO stated that executions reached their five-year peak in Iran this year. The number has jumped from 110 in all of 2021 to 168 in the first six months of 2022 alone. Arab, Kurdish, and Baloch minorities made up the majority of executions, with Baloch prisoners accounting for 22 percent of executed people.

Arabs, too, comprise around two percent of Iran’s people, and have faced oppression and discrimination. Most of them reside in the Khuzestan province, which is rich in oil resources and a major industrial hub.

FASTFACTS

* Ethnic Persians account for 60% of Iran’s 86.7 million inhabitants. 

* Ethnic Azeri, Kurd, Lur, Baloch, Arab, Turkmen and Turkic tribes make up the rest.

Despite this, the province suffers from widespread poverty and unemployment, according to Arab MP Mohammad Saeed Ansari, who claimed that around half of oil workers are brought in from outside the province and that Arabs are often denied employment opportunities there.

The UK-based Minority Rights Group International reported that nearly a quarter of a million Arabs in Khuzestan have been displaced by large government infrastructure projects.

The leader of an Arab separatist movement in Iran, Ahmed Molla Nissi, was assassinated in front of his home in The Hague in 2017, adding to the long list of foreign assassinations of minority dissidents by Iran.

In July 2021, at least nine people were killed in Khuzestan as they protested, demanding access to clean water, according to Human Rights Watch.

Amid the current unrest, protests have broken out in Khuzestan, with many oil and petrochemical facilities on strike and their workers taking to the streets. On Oct. 12, a video shared on Twitter reportedly showed a giant banner depicting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s picture being set ablaze in Ahvaz, the provincial capital.




Cities across Iran have seen protests since 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini died on September 16 after her arrest by the morality police in Tehran for allegedly failing to observe the Islamic republic's strict dress code for women. (AFP)

“Arab citizens live as the poorest people on the richest land — Khuzestan. This is the official name that it was given, but this place is Arabistan or Ahwaz,” Youssef Yaseen Azizi, an Arab Iranian former administrator at Tehran University and a member of the Iranian Writers’ Union, told Arab News.

“During the time of the Shah and the Islamic Republic, they brought non-Arabs to the region and settled them in the Arab cities and villages.”

Azizi believes the regime has deliberately forced Arabs and other minorities out of public life in Iran.

“Arabs only occupy around 5 percent of positions in public institutions,” he told Arab News. “The Arabic language is forbidden in schools. Many Arabs cannot find employment in the petrochemical factories simply because their name is Arabic. 

“It has reached the level that they can openly say, ‘I will not employ you because you are Arab.’ Ali Khameini’s oil company in Ahwaz has hired 4,000 workers in the last ten years, and only seven of them were Arabs.”

Such attitudes might suggest Arab lives in Iran are considered cheap. 

“Arabs have rebelled many times, and often ended up in prison, or were killed,” Azizi told Arab News. “We were always oppressed by the brutality of the authorities. Just 10 days ago, Emad Heydari was tortured to death in prison in Ahvaz.”

According to the website of the Ahwazi Democratic Popular Front, 31-year-old Heydari — a newly married activist from the Malashieh region — was arrested on Sept. 27 and died in prison on Oct. 6. Iranian authorities said he had suffered a stroke. Activists are unconvinced by the official narrative.

“During the 2019 protests against the increasing price of fuel, which started from the Ahwazi Arabs and spread from there, 200 Arabs were killed. They didn’t show Arabs any mercy,” Azizi told Arab News.

“The Arab press and civil society must know what is happening to us and cover it daily. They must speak on all channels and in all of their books and meetings, and support us, because we are alone. Until now, there is no channel which has covered our pain and showed it to everyone. But our resistance will continue.”

The disproportionate targeting of minority communities during the current civil unrest in Iran mirrors its past treatment of minorities. Kurdistan and Sistan and Balochistan have been subjected to the most outstanding amount of violence, according to the Critical Threats Project, an intelligence analysis project created by the American Enterprise Institute in 2009.

Two weeks after Amini’s death, a group of protestors gathered after Friday prayers in the Baloch-majority city of Zahedan to show their support for the nationwide protests and demand justice for the alleged sexual assault of a 15-year-old Baloch girl by an Iranian police commander.

Amnesty International reported that Iranian security forces opened fire on the crowd with tear gas and live ammunition, with footage showing shooters on roofs aiming at demonstrators. Between 66 and 96 people were killed and hundreds more injured in the course of just hours of what has come to be known as “Bloody Friday.”

The New York Times has since spoken with 10 residents from Zahedan, including witnesses and activists; family members of the victims; and a medic who helped treat more than 150 people for wounds.

All made the accusation that security forces fired indiscriminately on unarmed protesters and civilians with bullets and tear gas. Helicopters were also deployed, according to witnesses.

“According to residents, the violence on Sept. 30 was preceded by a smaller demonstration two days earlier, in another city in the same province, Chabahar,” the US newspaper said in a report on Oct. 14.

The Iranian regime’s heavy-handed treatment of ethnic-minority areas has only intensified as the protest movement has expanded to include broader calls for an end to conservative theocratic rule.

“I call on the international community to put more effort on recognizing our issues and help us solve them,” the Kurdistan-based activist told Arab News.

“Today the people of Kurdistan and Iran need full support to overthrow this regime.”

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The forgotten Arabs of Iran
A century ago, the autonomous sheikhdom of Arabistan was absorbed by force into the Persian state. Today the Arabs of Ahwaz are Iran's most persecuted minority

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Israel to ease domestic restrictions imposed due to Iran war: minister

Updated 3 sec ago
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Israel to ease domestic restrictions imposed due to Iran war: minister

Katz approved the changes for most of the country starting Wednesday evening

JERUSALEM: Israel will ease domestic restrictions imposed on its population due to the ongoing war with Iran and will “reopen its economy,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday.

“While we continue our intense fight against Iran until the threats are removed, we will also reopen the economy, ease restrictions, and restore Israel to paths of creativity, activity, and security,” Katz was quoted as saying in a statement after approving the changes for most of the country starting Wednesday evening.

At least 51 Palestinians killed while waiting for aid trucks in Gaza, health officials say

Updated 4 min 33 sec ago
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At least 51 Palestinians killed while waiting for aid trucks in Gaza, health officials say

  • OCHA said the people killed were waiting for food rations arriving in UN convoys
  • Yousef Nofal, an eyewitness, said he saw many people motionless and bleeding on the ground after Israeli forces opened fire

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip: At least 51 Palestinians were killed and more than 200 wounded in the Gaza Strip while waiting for UN and commercial trucks to enter the territory with desperately needed food, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry and a local hospital.

Palestinian witnesses told The Associated Press that Israeli forces carried out an airstrike on a nearby home before opening fire toward the crowd in the southern city of Khan Younis.

The Israeli military said soldiers had spotted a gathering near an aid truck that was stuck in Khan Younis, near where Israeli forces were operating. It acknowledged “several casualties” as Israelis opened fire on the approaching crowd and said authorities would investigate what happened.

The shooting did not appear to be related to a new Israeli- and US-supported aid delivery network that rolled out last month and has been marred by controversy and violence.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs, or OCHA, said the people killed were waiting for food rations arriving in UN convoys.

Also on Tuesday, the main Palestinian telecoms regulatory agency based in the West Bank city of Ramallah reported that Israeli strikes had cut off fixed-line phone service and Internet access in central and southern Gaza.

‘Aren’t we human beings?’

Yousef Nofal, an eyewitness, said he saw many people motionless and bleeding on the ground after Israeli forces opened fire. “It was a massacre,” he said, adding that the soldiers continued firing on people as they fled from the area.

Mohammed Abu Qeshfa reported hearing a loud explosion followed by heavy gunfire and tank shelling. “I survived by a miracle,” he said.

The dead and wounded were taken to the city’s Nasser Hospital, which confirmed 51 people had been killed. Later Tuesday, medical charity MSF raised the death toll to 59, saying that another 200 had been wounded while trying to receive flour rations in Khan Younis.

Samaher Meqdad was at the hospital looking for her two brothers and a nephew who had been in the crowd.

“We don’t want flour. We don’t want food. We don’t want anything,” she said. “Why did they fire at the young people? Why? Aren’t we human beings?”

Palestinians say Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire on crowds trying to reach food distribution points run by a separate US and Israeli-backed aid group since the centers opened last month. Local health officials say scores have been killed and hundreds wounded.

In those instances, the Israeli military has acknowledged firing warning shots at people it said had approached its forces in a suspicious manner.

Deadly Israeli airstrikes continued elsewhere in the enclave on Tuesday. Al-Awda Hospital, a major medical center in northern Gaza, reported that it has received the bodies of eight Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike on a house in the central Bureij refugee camp.

Desperation grows as rival aid systems can’t meet needs

Israel says the new system operated by a private contractor, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, is designed to prevent Hamas from siphoning off aid to fund its militant activities.

UN agencies and major aid groups deny there is any major diversion of aid and have rejected the new system, saying it can’t meet the mounting needs in Gaza and that it violates humanitarian principles by allowing Israel to control who has access to aid.

Experts have warned of famine in the territory that is home to some 2 million Palestinians.

The UN-run network has delivered aid across Gaza throughout the 20-month Israel-Hamas war, but has faced major obstacles since Israel loosened a total blockade it had imposed from early March until mid-May.

UN officials say Israeli military restrictions, a breakdown of law and order, and widespread looting make it difficult to deliver the aid that Israel has allowed in.

Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for OCHA, said on Tuesday that the aid Israeli authorities have allowed into Gaza since late May has been “woefully insufficient.”

Fuel has not entered Gaza for over 100 days, she said. “The only way to address it is by sufficient volumes and over sustained periods of time. A trickle of aid here, a trickle of aid there is not going to make a difference.”

Israel’s military campaign since October 2023 has killed over 55,300 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Its count doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Israel launched its campaign aiming to destroy Hamas after the group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, in which militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking another 251 hostage.

The militants still hold 53 hostages, fewer than half of them alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefire agreements or other deals.


Iran’s Khamenei rejects Trump’s call for unconditional surrender

Updated 18 June 2025
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Iran’s Khamenei rejects Trump’s call for unconditional surrender

  • ‘The Americans should know that any US military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage’

DUBAI/JERUSALEM: Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a statement read by a television presenter on Wednesday that his country will not accept US President Donald Trump’s call for an unconditional surrender.

In his first remarks since Friday, when he delivered a speech broadcast on state media after Israel began bombarding Iran, Khamenei said peace or war could not be imposed on the Islamic Republic.

“Intelligent people who know Iran, the Iranian nation, and its history will never speak to this nation in threatening language because the Iranian nation will not surrender,” he said.

“The Americans should know that any US military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage.”

Thousands of people were fleeing Tehran on Wednesday after Israeli warplanes bombed the city overnight, and a source said Trump was considering options that include joining Israel in attacking Iranian nuclear sites.

Israel’s military said 50 Israeli jets had struck around 20 targets in Tehran overnight, including sites producing raw materials, components and manufacturing systems for missiles.

A source familiar with internal discussions said Trump and his team were considering a number of options, which included joining Israel in strikes against Iranian nuclear sites.

Iran had conveyed to Washington that it would retaliate against the United States for any direct participation, its ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, said. He said he already saw the US as “complicit in what Israel is doing.”


Israeli army drone downed over Iran

Updated 18 June 2025
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Israeli army drone downed over Iran

  • Iranian state television broadcast pictures of the wreckage of what it said was an armed Israeli Air Force Hermes drone in the central city of Isfahan

JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said Wednesday that one of its drones had been downed while operating over Iran, the first such loss it has acknowledged since the start of hostilities last week.

An army statement said the drone had gone down in Iran after being hit by a surface-to-air missile.

“No injuries were reported and there is no risk of an information breach,” it added.

Iranian state television broadcast pictures of the wreckage of what it said was an armed Israeli Air Force Hermes drone in the central city of Isfahan.

The Israeli air force has been launching daily raids on Iran since last Friday, with the country targeting missile sites in particular along with other military and nuclear-related sites.

Military spokesman Effie Defrin insisted that Israel was “operating freely” over Iran with air strikes that have involved “dozens of aircraft of various types.”

“We will continue to strike anywhere within Iran that we choose. Yes, there is resistance, but we control the skies and will continue to maintain that control,” he told a televised press briefing on Wednesday.

The Israeli military said on Monday it had achieved “total air superiority in the skies over Tehran.”

More than 50 Israeli Air Force fighter jets carried out air strikes in the Tehran area on Wednesday morning, targeting a production facility for uranium enrichment centrifuges among other locations, according to an earlier statement from the military.


Iran will respond firmly if US becomes directly involved in Israeli strikes, says UN ambassador

Updated 18 June 2025
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Iran will respond firmly if US becomes directly involved in Israeli strikes, says UN ambassador

  • Iran’s envoy to UN in Geneva Ali Bahreini sees the US as ‘complicit in what Israel is doing’
  • Tehran would set a red line, and respond if the United States crosses it

GENEVA: Iran has conveyed to Washington that it will respond firmly to the United States if it becomes directly involved in Israel’s military campaign, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva said on Wednesday.

Ali Bahreini told reporters that he saw the US as “complicit in what Israel is doing.” Iran would set a red line, and respond if the United States crosses it, he said, without specifying what actions would provoke a response.

Israel launched an air war on Friday after saying it had concluded Iran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon. Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons. US President Donald Trump called on Tuesday for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”

Bahreini called Trump’s remarks “completely unwarranted and very hostile. We cannot ignore them. We are vigilant about what Trump is saying. We will put it in our calculations and assessments.”

The US has so far taken only indirect actions, including helping to shoot down missiles fired toward Israel. It is deploying more fighter aircraft to the Middle East and extending the deployment of other warplanes, three US officials said.

“I am confident that (Iran’s military) will react strongly, proportionally and appropriately. We are closely following the level of involvement in the US... We will react whenever it is needed,” he said.

Thousands of people were fleeing Tehran and other major cities on Wednesday, Iranian media reported, as Iran and Israel launched new missile strikes at each other.