Iranian state media affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards are publishing forced video confessions from women who are arrested over their participation in an ongoing anti-hijab campaign.
Fars news website, with close links to the IRGC, published a video this week of a woman, identified as Elham Farshad, who confessed that she was angry, and insulted a clergyman who was admonishing her over her hijab. In the video she was remorseful and expressed regret.
According to information obtained by Iran International, agents of the Intelligence Ministry arrested Farshad at his home on July 13, and transferred her to the Ward 209 of Evin Prison, a detention center controlled by the ministry. After ten days, she was released from prison with a bail of 5 billion rials (about $17,000), after they filmed her confessing to wrongdoing under duress.
An informed source told Iran International that the woman who was forced to confess in the video was not Rashno and that the video is the confessions of another woman on the bus who got into a fight with the hijab enforcer and got her hand injured.
Iran’s security organs have also started arresting women who participated in a nationwide civil disobedience campaign against hijab on July 12 and sent videos to US-based women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad.
Following a call by women’s rights activists for civil disobedience with the hashtag of ‘No2Hijab’ social media exploded with dozens of videos and photos of women unveiling in public.
In the past few weeks, the government has increased harassment of women for their insufficient hijab and many have been detained by special police patrols.
Iran’s Supreme Leader claimed Wednesday that the anti-hijab movement is nothing but a Western plot, much like his depiction of all problems as plots by enemies.
According to local media the ground collapsed at 7:40 in Sepah Ave in central Tehran. Chief of Tehran police information center, Ali-Asghar Sharifi, told the media that police and other authorities were working at the scene to secure the area and redirect traffic. The incident had no casualties.
There have long been concerns about earthquakes in Tehran as it sits on tectonic fault lines. Ground subsidence, however, resulting from drought and excessive extraction of water which is likely to become more serious in the future adds a new concern and danger to the densest population center in Iran.
Ground subsidence in urban areas can result in power outages, bursting of gas pipes, deformation of rails, emergence of sinkholes, tilting of buildings, and appearance of cracks and ditches in roads and even loss of human life.
Mohammad Aghamiri, chairman of Tehran City Council’s development committee on Thursday described ground subsidence as a time bomb ticking under the city and criticized the authorities for only watching idly without taking any measures to prevent disaster from happening.
This is not the first instance of ground subsidence in Tehran where smaller fractures and cracks are quickly becoming common in some areas of the city, particularly south and southwest.
According to the latest official data by Iran’s Geological Organization, the rate of subsidence in the plains around Tehran was between 17 and 24 centimeters per year. The deputy chairman of the environment committee of Tehran City Council, Mehdi Babaei, said recently that ground has subsided by as much as 20 centimeters (8 inches) a year near Shahriyar in southern Tehran.
Ali Saberi, a geologist told local media in 2021 that one million hectares of land in the country is affected by subsidence and the main cause is unlimited extraction of ground water.
Intel Lab intelligence and imagery consulting firm in July 2021 said a brief study it had conducted based on a dataset of 14 pairs of satellite images showing various areas of Greater Tehran indicated a maximum average subsidence rate of 4 centimeters/year.
Huge cracks and hollows that resemble meteor craters have appeared in other parts of the country. In urban areas subsidence has caused cracks in walls and in roads.
One of the most affected areas is the historical city of Esfahan in central Iran where the damage to monuments and the international airport have been cause of much concern.There are photos on social media of huge cracks in the ground around the airport, and of hollows in and around Esfahan’s historical buildings.
Iran has been experiencing consecutive droughts for more than a decade in addition to what many lawmakers and journalists have called years of water mismanagement. Illegal deep wells drilled all over the country for irrigation of agricultural land have depleted underground water reserves in many areas.
Alireza Shahidi, head of Iran’s Geological Organization said in March that land subsidence is a “silent earthquake” that can lead to political and security crises.
