Strikes, Protests Raging In Iran Over Death Of Hijab Victim
People in several Iranian cities are holding strikes while security forces have attacked protesters in a couple of cities as the country is enraged over the death of a young hijab victim.
People in several Iranian cities are holding strikes while security forces have attacked protesters in a couple of cities as the country is enraged over the death of a young hijab victim.
Mahsa Amini’s death in the custody of hijab enforcement patrols, has shaken the country, with reports saying police forces fired at protesters in Divandarreh, where at least 10 people were injured, and Saqqez in the Kurdistan province on Monday. People in the capital Tehran and the central city of Esfahan (Isfahan) are also holding on-and-off protests with bouts of clashes with security forces.
Business owners in the cities with large Kurdish populations such as Baneh, Marivan, her hometown Saqqez, and Kurdistan provincial capital have staged a general strike to protest the murder of Mahsa Amini, also known as Zhina, announcing that they will continue the strikes for several days despite warnings by the authorities.
Videos sent to Iran International show police using tear gas against people while many citizens have opened the doors of their houses to shelter the protesters.
In one video, a group of students stand outside the office of their university’s cleric, most probably the representative of the Supreme Leader at the university, chanting “Mullahs Must Get Lost” as the cleric is watching them through his window.
While authorities are lying about the circumstances of Mahsa Amini’s death and defending the Islamic religious patrols, Tehran’s “morality” police chief Colonel Mirzaei has been “suspended” until further investigation into Mahsa’s death.
The medical documents and dozens of exclusive images sent to Iran International by a hacktivist group vividly show a skull fracture on the right side of her head caused by a severe trauma to the skull, which corroborate earlier accounts by her family and doctors about her being hit several times on the head, proving that the Iranian police's claim that she suffered a heart attack was untrue.
Images of her chest show bilateral diffuse alveolar hemorrhage and damage due to aspiration pneumonia, secretion retention and superimposed infection. Doctors say the results are compatible with acute respiratory distress syndrome due to brain trauma.
The 22-year-old woman’s death in custody by the hijab police has led to indignation among Iranians and several anti-regime protests in different cities.
A source from the hospital where she died told Iran International on Saturday that her brain tissue was crushed after "multiple blows" to the head, adding that Amini was taken to Kasra Hospital in capital Tehran while she was not responsive and brain dead.
The source added that her lungs were filled with blood when she was transferred to the hospital and it was clear that she “could not be revived."
This source emphasized that Mahsa's condition "was such that she could not be saved nor was surgery possible because her brain tissue was seriously damaged and it was clear that the patient was not injured by a single punch and must have received many blows to her head."
The 22-year-old from Western Iran was visiting Tehran with her brother when she was stopped by a religious police patrol controlling hijab on September 13. She was taken into a van and then to a police station. Two hours later police delivered her to a hospital in coma with fatal head injuries. Her brain tissue was damaged beyond any hope, and she died three days later.
In an interview with BBC Persian on Saturday, Hatam Ghaderi an academic who was once trusted by the founder of the Islamic Republic Ruhollah Khomeini to vet the candidates for the first presidential election in Iran in 1979, has delivered a damning verdict: "By its nature, the Islamic Republic is destructive. It destroys the religion, the country and its women and youths."
Ghaderi warned in the interview that if the Islamic Republic survives, it will leave no Iran and no religion. Ghaderi emphasized that "the Islamic Republic views women's body as a battleground."
Referring to the regime’s religious propaganda, the former revolutionary compared government injustice in Iran to what Shiites believe happened to their venerable saint, Imam Hussain, who was killed by the reigning Muslim caliph in 680. That amounts perhaps to the harshest criticism anyone can throw at the clerical regime which desperately tries to cling to religious legitimacy.
Many observers have pointed out that this extent of openness in Ghaderi's anti-regime rhetoric is unprecedented. Nonetheless, Ghaderi, as an original believer in the Islamic Republic, has been highlighting the system's shortcomings for many years. He characteristically explains complicated concepts in plain Persian equally understandable by the man in the street. He says: "We should not look at Khamenei's powers. Instead, we should see how happy Iranians are and how well-fed they are."
Ghaderi at the end of his interview warned Iranians that that after 115 years since the Constitutional Revolution, Iranians have still not managed to harness their leaders' political power. He attributed part of that failure to the "religious ignorance among part of the population." However, he said that the Islamic Republic is moving toward a collapse.
Masih Mohajeri, another orthodox believer in Iran's Islamic Revolution, wrote in an editorial in the Jomhouri Eslami newspaper on Sunday that Mahsa Amini's death and the deliberate ambiguity surrounding it "have harmed the people's trust" in the government. He pointed out that Iranians "no longer believe what the officials of the Islamic government say. This is a big loss."
Like many supporters of the regime, Mohajeri also tried to portray the incident as wrongdoing by some policemen, rather than a systemic problem. Comments like this prompt many activists to say that the people no longer wish to reform the Islamic Republic. They want an end to it as it is hopelessly unreformable.
Mohajeri believes that the Islamic principle of "prohibiting vice and upholding virtues" is necessary, but it needs to be done differently. This is in sharp contradiction to the belief of many Iranian women who reject compulsory hijab and demand freedom of choice in lifestyle.
In another development, the daughter of late Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani a respected cleric who died under suspicious circumstances in the early years of the Islamic Republic, and an advocate of freedom of choice for women, has said in a tweet that if her father was alive today, he would have thrown his turban on the ground in protest to the Islamic Republic's oppression against women.
Several Twitter users reminded Taleghani that she could still object to the Islamic Republic's heavy-handed treatment of women by throwing her black head-to-toe veil on the ground.
