Anatomy of a massacre, and the mothers who refuse to let November end
Kambiz Hosseini
Host of nightly show The Program
Six years after Iran’s blackout and mass killings, two women keep alive the month the Islamic Republic tried to bury.
Host of nightly show The Program
Six years after Iran’s blackout and mass killings, two women keep alive the month the Islamic Republic tried to bury.
Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei delivered the directive on Friday in the religious city of Qom, warning that foreign adversaries sought to exploit issues such as unveiled women and online activity.
“One manifestation of the enemy’s efforts is in the matter of nudity and lack of hijab, and another is the virtual space,” he said.
He urged officials to avoid amplifying internal disputes. “We must be alert to the enemy’s mischief and not inadvertently play on its field,” he said. “A small domestic issue should not be framed in a way that gives the enemy an opportunity.”
Senior officials call for tougher enforcement
Ejei’s comments align with a series of recent directives by senior Iranian officials favoring stricter enforcement of the mandatory hijab, a policy advanced in recent months with judiciary backing and active support from security institutions and state-aligned media.
Kayhan, a newspaper overseen by a representative of Iran’s supreme leader, wrote on Wednesday that hijab was “the first defensive shield of Islamic identity,” warning that its erosion would open the way for broader cultural decline.
Prosecutors were also obliged to act with seriousness against women who do not observe the compulsory dress code, Prosecutor General Mohammad Movahedi Azad said on Sunday.
Days earlier, Esfahan’s judiciary chief, Asadollah Jafari, called for action against what he described as “norm-breaking behavior.”
More than 80,000 so-called promoters of virtue had been organized to monitor women’s clothing in public spaces, Ruhollah Momen-Nasab, head of Tehran’s headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice said in October.
Clerics intensify pressure
In Mashhad, senior cleric Ahmad Alamolhoda renewed warnings on Friday, saying unveiled women posed a threat. “We must fight lack of hijab. Today, lack of hijab has reached nudity,” he said. He likened the situation to a house fire, urging officials to intervene directly.
Alamolhoda also criticized domestic streaming platforms, accusing them of exposing young viewers to inappropriate content at a vulnerable age.
Critics argue the state’s expanding enforcement apparatus shows that the priority is social control rather than easing economic hardship.
Despite mounting threats, civil resistance to the mandatory hijab persists, with many women appearing in the public without hijab to reject the policy.
Joe Bennett said his mother, Lindsay Foreman, told him in a brief phone call that “not eating was the only power she’s got.” The call, he said, ended without warning. Foreman and her husband, Craig, were arrested in January while travelling through Iran on a motorbike tour and deny the charges.
The family says the pair entered the country with valid visas, a licensed guide and a cleared itinerary, but were detained after Foreman asked locals routine questions for a personal project. Both were first held in Kerman, where they spent 30 days in solitary confinement, before being transferred to separate cells in Evin.
Bennett said his mother is isolated among inmates who do not speak English, while his stepfather is suffering from an untreated tooth abscess. He said the couple had been promised a visit with each other last Sunday, but it did not take place.
The couple were tried in October as tensions between Tehran and European capitals deepened following new nuclear-related sanctions. Rights groups say their case fits a wider pattern of detentions used to gain political leverage, an accusation Iran denies.
Bennett has urged officials to secure the pair’s release and said the charges against them are “completely bonkers.” He said the couple had praised Iran before their arrest, calling it “a beautiful country.”
Six years ago, on a cold, rainy November night, the price of gasoline in Iran tripled at midnight. By morning, the streets were burning. The state would later compress that nationwide protests into a bureaucratic phrase, “the gasoline protests,” yet inside Iran it endures as something far more elemental, a breaking point, the moment a long-strained relationship between rulers and ruled finally gave way.
An overnight decree, issued without warning, landed on a society already thinned by corruption, sanctions, and the slow corrosion of trust. Gasoline was not merely fuel; it was the last fragile order of an ordinary life.
By dawn on November 15, unrest had spread through more than a hundred cities. The slogans outgrew the price hike almost instantly. Within hours, the government offered not explanation but silence, plunging the country into a nationwide internet blackout that severed families, stifled communication, and obscured what would unfold in the dark.
Inside that manufactured quiet, the killing quickened. Snipers appeared on rooftops. Live rounds struck torsos and heads. Amnesty International confirmed at least 304 deaths; internal figures passed abroad placed the toll far higher, closer to fifteen hundred. Leaked hospital logs, morgue records, and satellite images of hurried burial sites supported the higher count. No official list of the dead has ever been released, but the names that remain are the ones families refused to let vanish.
The Program
On my Persian-language call-in show, “The Program,” broadcast from Iran International, a Persian-language satellite television channel, two mothers recently spoke to a worldwide audience. Their voices — steady, unadorned — carried the weight of those missing lists, two fragments of a record the state has never acknowledged.
One mother introduced herself not with biography but with loss: “I am the mother of Navid Behboudi. Twenty-three years old. Born in 1998. They killed my child.”
Another spoke with the same stripped-down clarity: “I am Mahboubeh Ramazani, the mother of Pejman Gholipour. My son was eighteen. Born in 1998. They killed him because of the price of gasoline.”
Neither woman had sought confrontation with the state. They wanted what any parent wants — a future for their children, a degree, a job, the possibility of a wedding. Instead, they entered a world of interrogations and quiet threats designed to smother even private grief. Cameras now watch over their children’s graves. Intelligence agents monitor who comes to mourn. In Iran, even grief carries a political charge.
The mothers speak with a precision that feels almost liturgical, as though exactness might preserve what the state has tried to erase.
One recounts the final hours of her son’s life: “At 7:30, I called him. My Pejman was still breathing. At 8:20, they shot my son.”
His clothes still hang untouched behind his bedroom door. “When I go out,” she said, “and my child comes home, he will look for his clothes.” She speaks in the present tense. Grief has its own grammar.
The other mother remembered the moment she saw her son’s body. She had once imagined seeing him in wedding clothes. Instead, she saw him prepared for burial. “I asked him, Navid, open your eyes and look at me,” she said. “He never opened his eyes.”
The machinery of silence
What followed the killings was a choreography of pressure and containment. Families were summoned to Kahrizak, a notorious detention center long synonymous in Iran with torture and coerced confessions. Officials demanded written pledges: no public grief, no interviews, no large funerals.
Even the burial was not theirs to decide. “They told us we had no right to choose where to bury him,” one mother said.
Another recalled being instructed: “Do not cry. Do not gather people. Go home.”
Many families discovered cameras mounted above the graves. “Not just my son’s,” a mother told me. “All of them.” She described visiting the cemetery on her son’s birthday, arriving at 10:30 a.m. and staying until nine at night. “They locked the doors,” she said. “No one was allowed in. We were not allowed to mourn.”
This system is built not only to punish dissent but to prevent solidarity. Silence becomes ritual. Mourning becomes a private burden, watched and circumscribed.
Inside Iran, no independent investigation has ever been allowed. The same institutions implicated in the killings oversee the judiciary. But abroad, a coalition of rights groups convened the Aban Tribunal in London, a people’s court modeled on historical international inquiries. After reviewing hundreds of pieces of evidence, the panel concluded that Islamic republic authorities had committed crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, and sexual violence.
The judgment has no legal force, but for families denied even the vocabulary of justice, the act of naming the crime offered its own narrow, necessary recognition.
The mothers of Aban
The mothers of Aban — Aban being the Iranian month that corresponds roughly to November — have never let November end. Each year, as the month approaches, they begin a ritual that resists the state’s enforced forgetting.
“Today my son was alive,” they tell one another. “Tomorrow he was still alive.” They measure the month not by dates but by the life still present before the gunshots.
One mother described the conversations she continues to hold with her son: “I tell him, Pejman, do you know what happened that day? Maybe we were not careful. Maybe we lost you by mistake.”
She knows precisely who fired the bullets, but maternal instinct searches for any version of the story in which the ending might be undone. “I still cannot accept that he is gone,” she said. “I still cannot accept that he will not walk through that door.”
Amid the devastation, a narrow line of resolve endures. Not hope for happiness — “I will never be happy again,” one mother told me — but hope for a future in which no parent is ordered not to cry at a grave.
“I hope our voice reaches the world,” she said. “We have not lived for five years. Our life is black. Full of tears.”
Their plea is disarmingly simple: that their children not disappear into the silence the state demands, that remembering become a form of resistance, that the world not look away.
The state tried to bury the victims of November 2019 twice — once in the ground and once in memory. The mothers refuse the second burial.
“This government is even afraid of our children’s graves,” one of them said. “If they fear the graves, imagine how afraid they are of the living.”
Holding a candle in the cold November rain
The internet can be shut down. Protests can be crushed. Cemeteries can be lined with cameras. But on a November night, a mother can speak her son’s name into a static-filled line on “The Program,” and a country can still hear its echo.
That night’s show was heavy for all of us on The Program. When I finally walked home through the rain, the city felt emptied out, as if carrying the weight of those two voices. By the time I reached my door, the rain had stopped. I took my dog outside for a walk, put on my headphones, and, almost without thinking, whispered into the dark:
“Nothing lasts forever, not even cold November rain.”
