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Iran: Security Forces use live Ammunition and birdshot to crush Khuzestan Protests
Iran’s security forces have deployed unlawful force, including by firing live ammunition and birdshot, to crush mostly peaceful protests taking place across the southern province of Khuzestan, Amnesty International said today. Video footage from the past week, coupled with consistent accounts from the ground, indicate security forces used deadly automatic weapons, shotguns with inherently indiscriminate ammunition, and tear gas to disperse protesters.
Since protests over severe water shortages erupted in Khuzestan on 15 July, security forces have killed at least eight protesters and bystanders, including a teenage boy, in seven different cities. According to official statements, one police official was also shot dead in Mahshahr. Scores of people, including children, have been injured, including by birdshot, and several are hospitalized in critical condition due to gunshot wounds. Security and intelligence forces have swept up dozens of protesters and activists, including many from the Ahwazi Arab minority, in mass arrests.
“Using live ammunition against unarmed protesters posing no imminent threat to life is a horrifying violation of the authorities’ obligation to protect human life. Protesters in Iran who take to the streets to voice legitimate economic and political grievances face a barrage of gunfire, tear gas, and arrests,” said Diana Eltahawy, Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
“Iran’s authorities have a harrowing track record of using unlawful lethal force. The events unfolding in Khuzestan have chilling echoes of November 2019, when security forces unlawfully killed hundreds of protesters and bystanders but were never held to account. Ending impunity is vital for preventing further bloodshed.”
Amnesty International calls on the Iranian authorities to immediately cease the use of automatic weapons and shotguns firing birdshot, which are indiscriminate, cause grievous and painful injuries and are completely inappropriate for use in all policing situations. They must also release all those detained solely for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression and assembly and protect all detainees from torture and other ill-treatment. The authorities must also ensure the injured can safely access medical care in hospital without facing arbitrary arrest. Iran’s authorities must also end deliberate ongoing internet disruptions and shutdowns across the province to clamp down on human rights.
Iran has experienced a worsening water crisis in recent years depriving people of their right to clean and safe water and leading to several protests including in Khuzestan. Environmental researchers say the authorities have failed to take adequate action to address the crisis.
Evidence of unlawful use of force
According to analysis by Amnesty International’s weapons expert, the sound of automatic weapons fire can be heard in multiple videos relating to protests in Khuzestan province that have circulated on social media since 15 July, including from the cities of Izeh, Ahvaz, Kut-e Abdollah, Susangerd and Shoushtar.
Video – automatic weapon fire
In other videos, including from Ahvaz, Khorramshahr, Mahshahr, Shavur, Shoush and Susangerd, the sounds of individual shots can be heard, which could be from discharging live ammunition, birdshot, or less-lethal munitions such as kinetic impact projectiles.
In one video, where single shots are audible, security forces wearing anti-riot gear are seen advancing, some of them on motorcycles, towards a gathering of unarmed protesters. As shots are heard, protesters are seen fleeing in the opposite direction. In another video, a member of the security forces is seen firing a shotgun at a target off camera. In one other video, a police official is seen running towards a crowd firing a shotgun as armed members of the security forces nearby shoot grenade launchers.
In at least one video, several armed men are seen chasing a fleeing protester into a quiet side street while a mixture of automatic gunfire and single shots can be heard in the background. The fleeing protester is seen slumping to the ground. According to information received by Amnesty International from an Ahwazi Arab human rights defender, the armed men were members of the security forces who then arrested the protester.
Although Amnesty International was not able to confirm the identities of the shooters in all videos, in some of the footage, protesters at the scene or those filming can be heard saying that security forces are firing toward protesters or into the air.
In all but two video clips reviewed by Amnesty International, protesters are unarmed and clearly pose no threat to life that would meet the threshold for the use of lethal force under international law. Extensive video evidence indicates the demonstrations were mostly peaceful though in some places, as the crackdown by security forces escalated, some protesters put up roadblocks with burning tyres, engaged in stone-throwing and arson and damaged state vehicles. In some videos, gunfire is heard while protesters are escaping and could not, therefore, represent any danger to the security forces.
The above-mentioned two video clips were published by Iran’s state-affiliated Fars News Agency, said to be from Ahvaz on 20 July. The first shows a single armed man shooting off camera standing beside a group of unarmed men; the other shows a man on the rear seat of a moving motorcycle shooting into air.
While the circumstances surrounding the incidents shown in these clips remain unclear to Amnesty International, in the course of extensive documentation of the crackdowns on nationwide protests in November 2019 and other protests in recent years, the organization has received numerous eyewitness accounts indicating the authorities’ use of plainclothes agents to pose as armed or violent protesters.
Identified victims
According to information obtained from informed sources, security forces have killed at least eight protesters and bystanders, including a teenage boy, since protests began.
They include Mostafa Asakereh (Naimavi) in Shadegan, Ghassem Naseri (Khozeiri) in Kut-e Abdollah, Isa Baledi and Meysam Achrash in Taleghani, Hamzeh (Farzad) Fereisat in Ahvaz, Mehdi Chanani in Shoush, Hamid Mojadam (Jokari) in Chamran, and a teenage boy, Hadi Bahmani, in Izeh. The deaths resulted from incidents on 16, 19, 20 and 21 July.
Human rights defenders on the ground have reported that in various cities across the province, many injured protesters are not seeking hospital treatment due to fear of arrests. A human rights defender told Amnesty International that on 21 July, security and intelligence agents arrested several injured protesters from a hospital in Susangerd.
State denial and cover up
Iranian government officials or state-affiliated media outlets have only recognized the death of four “members of the public” so far. They have blamed the deaths on unidentified armed “rioters” without presenting evidence, as they did in the aftermath of nation-wide protests in November 2019.
On 17 and 18 July, Fars News Agency published two video interviews with relatives of Mostafa Asakereh )Naimavi) and Ghassem Naseri (Khozeiri) who were killed in the protests. In the videos they describe their deceased loved ones as “not the type to get involved in riots” and deflect blame from the government.
A source with direct knowledge in Iran told Amnesty International that plain-clothes intelligence agents visited Ghassem Naseri (Khozeiri)’s family shortly after he died and coerced them into reciting a pre-prepared script on camera.
State media outlets in Iran, in co-operation with Iran’s intelligence and security bodies, have a longstanding record of producing and broadcasting propaganda videos featuring coerced statements from victims of human rights violations and their families.
“We have called time and time again for an end to the systematic impunity that continues to perpetuate cycles of bloodshed, as seen in the brutal crackdown on protests in Khuzestan. The UN Human Rights Council must urgently establish a mechanism to collect and analyse evidence of the most serious crimes under international law to facilitate fair and independent criminal proceedings,” said Diana Eltahawy.
Methodology
Amnesty International researchers and the organization’s Crisis Evidence Lab analysed dozens of videos relating to protest sites across Khuzestan province that have circulated on social media since 15 July.
The organization also examined several photographs and two videos showing classic spray patterns of birdshot wounds on the bodies of several protesters.
In addition, Amnesty International spoke to two primary sources on the ground with direct information about two of those killed as well as four human rights defenders and two journalists based outside Iran who had communicated with eyewitnesses, local activists and journalists, and victims’ relatives, neighbours and friends. The disruption of internet services in the province since the protests began has impeded Amnesty International’s ability to conduct more in-depth interviews with sources on the ground.
Amnesty International also monitored state-affiliated media outlets in Iran and independent media outlets based outside Iran.
Original source
The tragedy of the Ahwaz: Forgotten by history and the World
Rahim Hamid, Dur UNTASH, Studies Center
In order to understand the current tragic situation in Ahwaz, it’s important to understand its long-neglected and airbrushed history of colonialism and occupation. The water shortages protests rocking the Arab region, a narrow band running from the Iraqi border down the eastern Gulf coast, which have gained solidarity from other ethnic minority regions of Iran aren’t a new phenomenon, but the latest consequence of decades of Iranian ethnic repression and racism, dating back almost a century.
Many in the international media, who cite climate change or the Iranian regime’s customary murderous intolerance of dissent as the reason for the latest protests roiling Ahwaz have no understanding of the history and complex dynamics of this region, or its relationship to the central Iranian state, whether under the Islamic Republic, the Pahlavi dynasty before it, or the Qajars who preceded them.
The Mesopotamian region (modern-day Iraq and the south and southwestern Iran) has been a frontier between the two major empires that existed in some form or another for a least a thousand years – the Turkish or Arab Islamic Empire and the Persian Empire, forming the central frontier and buffer zone, politically and militarily, between these rival regional powers.
Amidst all of this history, there was an independent Arab emirate called Arabistan or ‘Land of the Arabs’, which was led by a series of tribal dynastic rulers from the 1400s up until 1925. Arabistan was not the only such Emirate, with much of modern-day Iran’s coastline consisting of a patchwork of Arab-majority emirates running from the Shatt Al-Arab waterway down to as far as Bandar Abbas at the edge of the Strait of Hormuz. In the first quarter of the 20th century, these emirates were stripped of their autonomy, conquered and annexed one by one as part of Greater Persia by Tehran’s increasingly expansionist rulers. Before the fall of the Emirate of Arabistan in 1925, the Emirate of al-Maraziq, which consisted of what are now the provinces of Hormozegan, Bushsher and Bander Abbas, was annexed by Persia in 1922.
The last Emirate holding out against annexation was Arabistan, which managed to maintain a degree of independence by playing Istanbul (Constantinople) and Tehran off one another for centuries.
As with so much else in the Middle East, the discovery of massive oil reserves in Arabistan in 1908 by British prospectors, whose masters in London were keen to build imperial ties with Persia, effectively sealed Arabistan’s fate. Although the then-ruler, Emir Khaz’al bin Jaber Al-Kaabi, signed a number of agreements with the British who vowed to recognise Ahwaz independence protect Ahwaz from Persian conquest in exchange for his support and access to these resources, the shared British and Persian.
The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 may have helped in changing British calculations; although most of the fighting took place in Europe, the Ottoman and Russian empires were also involved, with the Emirate of Ahwaz becoming one of the contested territories due to its strategic location.
The collapse of the Ghajari reign in Persia (Iran), and the beginning of the Pahlavi monarchy, which invaded and occupied Ahwaz in 1925.
The First World War saw the Ottoman pitted Empire against the British Empire, with the British government deploying troops to Abadan and to the capital of Arabistan, Mohammareh. This military mission was given the strategic objective of invading Ahwaz and seizing control of its oil reserves, which were to be destined for British consumption. Accordingly, Emir Khazaal allied with Britain in the hope of securing the Emirate’s independence.
Arabistan served as an important base for Britain’s operations during the war, with Sheikh Khazaal allied with Great Britain throughout the war in the region due to Ahwaz’ vulnerability and desperate need of support from a major foreign power, such as Britain, to defend it from invasion by both the Persian state and the Ottoman Empire.
Emir Khazaal was fully aware that Ahwaz stood between three imperial fires – Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and the Persian state – but probably felt he had no alternative but to ally with the first, because the other two presented immediate threats, as they geographically encroached upon Ahwaz territory. Thus, Khazaal cooperated with Great Britain hoping that it would support his rule over an independent Emirate of Ahwaz and in the erroneous belief that Britain was the most reliable and trustworthy of the three.
The diaries of Reza Khan, Iran’s rising would-be king, from that period make his animosity and intentions clear: “it is necessary to eliminate the prince of Ahwaz, whose rule has lasted for years independently within the boundaries of his emirate as a result of foreign support; Tehran’s government has no authority whatsoever over him.”
Reza Khan became the top commander of Iran’s armed forces in 1921 following a coup that saw Defence Minister Zia’eddin Tabatabaee overthrown. Within a few short years, Reza Khan became Prime Minister, assuming autocratic command, and in 1925 proclaiming himself King of Persia.
During this time, Reza Shah changed his policy toward Russia. As a result, political ties improved between Tehran and Moscow due to the new Soviet Union being pleasantly surprised by Reza Shah’s assumption of took power in Persia, in the belief that the Shah led a national and revolutionary movement and that his military coup offered a historic opportunity of new prospects for Russian interests in Iran. Moscow also believed that Reza Shah’s military dictatorship formed part of a transitional phase that would result in a republican system of rule paving the way for positive relations between Tehran and Moscow, launching negotiations that led to the Russo-Iranian Treaty of 1921.
The agreement resulted in full Russian recognition of Persia’s independence,cancelling all previous Persia financial debts to the Soviet Union. Russia’s interests in maintaining friendly political ties with Iran were clearly motivated by the need to have access to warm water ports in the Arabian Gulf and to counter Britain’s ambitions to control the region’s petroleum resources and commercial activity.
In light of these geopolitical changes, Britain astutely recognised that maintaining and preserving its existing regional political and economic interests would require closer political ties with Iran. As a means of achieving this, it sought to strengthen Reza Shah as a bulwark to prevent communist Russia from accessing the Arabian Gulf. Yet, at the same time, Britain wanted to dominate Persia to guarantee its own political and economic interests in Persia and the Arabian Gulf region.
Reza Shah seized the opportunity of these closer political ties with Britain to request that the latter abandon its protection of the Emirate of Ahwaz and Sheikh Khazaal, thus permitting Persia’s invasion, annexation and military occupation of Ahwaz. Britain acceded to the request, paving the way for the Shah to occupy the Emirate of Ahwaz, with Persian forces murdering Emir Khazaal on 20 April 1925.
Despite these changes in control over the region, the deep-rooted inter-Arab tribal and cultural links have persisted between the people of the Ahwazi region and their peers in modern-day Iraq, Kuwait and other Gulf countries.
Following the annexation and occupation of Ahwaz and the deposition and murder of Emir Khaz’al, the Arabistan emirate was stripped of any autonomy and officially incorporated into the Iranian state as a province under central government control. In 1936, Arabistan was divided between several Persian governorates, namely Khuzestan , two-third of Ilam, Bushshar and Hormozegan. The efforts to eliminate all traces of its Arab heritage and to deny the indigenous Arab people’s culture and identity, which have continued up to the present day, began in earnest in the 1930s, with Arabic place names and even the names of geographic features being replaced with Farsi equivalents. This pattern has been unchanging despite the advent of new Iranian rulers and regimes in the succeeding decades, with successive regimes also resettling large numbers of Ahwazis in other parts of Iran in an effort to change the region’s demographic composition and eradicate its Arab character in an attempt at historical revisionism, denying the Ahwazis’ heritage or sovereignty. As part of this profoundly racist policy, ethnically Persian settlers are transferred to the area from other areas of Iran to work in the oil and gas and petrochemical industries, with the previous and current regime boasting about the great incentives it offers to these incomers, including well-paid jobs and housing in specially built settlements provided with all the services and amenities denied to the local Ahwazi Arab population. It should also be noted that these settlements are routinely created through clearing and razing Ahwazi villages, whose peoples are usually given no warning and receive no compensation.
While the Middle East is replete with historic examples of territories and populations conquered and peoples forcibly assimilated into new or existing nation-states, the specific circumstances with regards to the Ahwazi Arab people in Iran are harrowing, given the way in which successive Iranian regimes have, regardless of ideology, attempted to erase and deny the very history and existence of the Ahwazi people and to pretend that they never had an autonomous nation of their own. This policy rests on a deep-rooted virulently anti-Arab prejudice promoted by successive regimes, which has normalised structural racism and prejudice against minority communities while propagating a revisionist history in which Persian ethnic supremacy is a core tenet. Denial of cultural, linguistic, political and economic rights to all of Iran’s minority communities assimilated forcibly into what is now known as Iran – has continued non-stop since the creation of modern Iran in the 1920s.
Few in the West are aware that the Iranian or Persian people account for, at most, 30 per cent of Iran’s population: the remaining 70 % of the population is made up of a patchwork of non-Persian minorities including, Kurds, Balochis, Azerbaijani Turks, Ahwazi Arabs, Turkmens, and Caspainis. Similarly, while Iran is majority Shi’a Muslim, other religions there, whose adherents the regime routinely persecutes for their beliefs, include Sunnis, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Mandeans, Bahai and Ka’kai.
It is also important to note that the population of almost every Iranian province bordering a neighbouring country is made up mostly of citizens of the same ethnicity as those countries, with families often living just across the border from one another with the Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Balochis and Ahwazis being the primary examples). These minorities are not represented in any way in the power structure of the Iranian state, with the levers of power and most of the economy firmly in the hands of ethnic Persians. Ethnic and religious minorities are actively persecuted and denied any political voice or access to political and economic power. While the Iranian state has employed different strategies in its dealing with these different communities – being heavy handed towards Kurds while attempting to co-opt the nomadic Lurs and assimilate them into the ethnic Persian population, for example – the attempt at the outright erasure of the Arab/Ahwazi people is unique even by the Iranian state’s standards.
For this reason and in the face of relentless racism, the bid for renewed autonomy and independence amongst the Ahwazi population continues to gain popularity, with a low-level conflict between the region’s Arab (Ahwazi) inhabitants and the central Iranian state ongoing up to the current day. Although the 1979 Islamic Revolution briefly brought hope that there might be a change for the Ahwazis, in reality, the situation for the eight million members of the Ahwazi population has only worsened since then.
The current Iranian regime has simply maintained Reza Shah’s Persian ethnonationalism and applied an additional veneer of religiosity in the form of Shi’a fundamentalism to further consolidate power in the hands of a specific authoritarian portion of the country’s population, to the exclusion of everyone else.
Various reasons lie behind successive Iranian regimes’ repression of minority communities and their omission from the national identity framework of modern Iran’s national identity framework. Primarily these are:
Most of the population in Iran’s border provinces with neighboring countries share the same ethnicity as the neighbouring countries.
Most of Iran’s resources, including oil, gas and water, are found in these provinces with predominantly ethnic minority populations.
Iran’s access to the Arab Gulf and major ports are located in these provinces with predominantly ethnic minority provinces.
Simply put, the Iranian State’s existence depends on maintaining control over its frontier provinces. When it comes to the Iranian regime’s disposition towards Ahwazi Arabs, all three of these motives come into play- the Ahwazi Arabs homelands also happen to contain most of Iran’s oil and gas deposits, much of the Iranian coastline and therefore access to the Arab Gulf. As a result, while regimes have come and gone since 1925, the rulers’ determination to maintain power at all costs has remained constant, resulting in the need to negate the existence of the Ahwazi Arab community and the other minority communities living in Iran. It is a sad irony that if Iran had charted a different course long ago, it could have become a multi-ethnic democracy offering a beacon of hope to the entire region. However, instead it has become the leading cause of massive pain and suffering to millions of people across the region, not least the millions of people forced to live under it’s current regime’s repressive and unrelenting rule.
The Ahwazi national movement is struggling not only to bring human rights recognition for the Ahwazi people but to their efforts to gain political recognition based on Ahwaz historic sovereignty, with Ahwazis’ experience over the last century leading to a certainty that attaining basic human rights alone will not ensure the long-denied freedom and dignity that the Ahwazi people need or end Iran’s ethnonationalist persecution. Therefore, Ahwazis are determined to gain recognition of their long-denied right to self-determination and can rule their own homeland in a fair and equitably applied form of ethnic federation or outright independence.
The demands for minority rights and federal autonomy have only increased in the ensuing decades since the 1979 revolution, with technology allowing minority communities -whose kinsmen live just across the border in a neighbouring country- to communicate in their own languages and explore their own identities in ways that defy Iranian State censorship. This has helped to boost individuals’ awareness and self-identification with their ethnic or religious group, strengthening resistance to the Iranian regime’s attempts to forcibly assimilate these communities through indoctrination into the dominant Persian ethnonational supremacism underpinning Iranian society that is sadly espoused not only by the regime itself, but by mainstream Persian opposition groups who fear that full inclusion or acknowledgement of the rights of the numerous minority communities in Iran could lead to Iran’s territorial dismemberment. In another cycle of irony, this fear and rejection of inclusion of these minorities creates a fractured and weakened opposition incapable of challenging the current regime in power and pushes these same minority communities to determine that, no matter who is in power in Tehran, they will never be given a seat at the table and should seek federal autonomy or even outright independence in order to guarantee full rights for their respective communities.
The waves of imprisonment and executions which disproportionately target minority community civil society activists and dissidents does nothing to dispel the idea that the structural racism and prejudice baked into Iran’s modern national identity could ever be fundamentally altered sufficiently to build a nation inclusive of all minority community identities.
As well as being related to severe water shortages, the current protests in the Ahwaz region are due in part to this feeling that, after decades of the Iranian regime attempting to forcibly assimilate the Ahwazi people through the suppression of language, cultural identity and the denial of access to the economy, the regime has opened a new phase in its war against the Ahwazi people, namely the denial of water.
Most Ahwazis now believe that the regime is deliberately damming and diverting the region’s rivers and transferring their waters to ethnically Persian areas of Iran to destroy the Ahwazi people’s ability to survive on their land. The only conclusion left to the people, who’ve seen thousands of acres of farmlands turned to barren desert and their vast marshlands reduced to a heavily polluted area with barely any marine life left is that the Iranian regime is embarking on a renewed strategy of demographic engineering in order to ensure its continued iron grip over a portion of territory vital to its own survival. This is ethnocide by any other name. Even those Western media who do mention the water shortages talk about climate change, but not about the regime’s very deliberate redirection of water resources.
As we’ve noted, this is not the first time that Iran’s central government has attempted to forcibly change the demographic character of the Ahwaz region. Both the former Pahlavi monarchy and its successor, the Islamic Republic regime, have consistently pursued negative and intensely damaging policies towards Ahwazi farmers. For example, in 1963, the Shah’s regime issued legislation entitled ‘Land Reform in Iran’, through which it confiscated more than half of Ahwazis’ agricultural lands, which were then ‘given’ to ethnically Persian settlers and regime military institutions. This led to the mass displacement of tens of thousands of Ahwazis from rural areas in Muhammarah, Abadan, Susa (Shush), Tester (Shushtar), Quneitra (Dezful), Salehiyeh, Ramez, Khalafiyeh, Abu Shaher and Jambron. Moreover, there is strong evidence that Iran’s regime is currently orchestrating a systematic and ultra-nationalist policy to confiscate agricultural lands to displace many of the remaining Ahwazi farmers. For example, a top-secret letter was written by the former Iranian Vice President, Seyed Mohammad-Ali Abtahi in 2005, laying out a plan to change the demographic composition of Ahwaz from predominantly Arab to mainly Persian, with the leaking of Abtahi’s letter leading to a popular uprising unprecedented in scope, which engulfed the entire Ahwaz region. The letter proposed a 10-year time frame for completing the ethnic restructuring programme in Ahwaz by displacing Ahwazis, including farmers, and replacing them with ethnic groups loyal to the regime, primarily Persians and Lors.
Iran has only two navigable rivers- one of which is the Karun River which runs through the length of the Ahwaz region, whose headwaters are located in neighbouring Chahar Mahall and Bakhtiari Province. This river is a major source of water for all of Iran, and comprises about 33% of Iran’s total water resources, with the Iranian regime damming the river upstream, diverting much of its water to ethnically Persian provinces in the country’s interior, such as Chahar Mahall va Bakhtiari and Esfahan. These dams also provide significant hydroelectric power to the country, although the supply can be fitful. With the Ahwazi people denied the right to employment in the region’s lucrative oil and petrochemical industry or any other part of the resources on their lands, farming and agricultural work are often the only options available to them. Despite more than 90 per cent of the major oil and gas deposits in Iran being located within the Ahwaz region, the Ahwazi Arabs continue to be one of the poorest, most resource-starved communities in Iran, with the Balochi community likely the only one poorer and more disenfranchised than the Ahwazis.
While the issue of water is merely the straw that may break the camel’s back, the issue of the Ahwazi community and its brutal oppression by the successive Iranian regimes has been an unresolved question for almost a century. However, the latest attempts by the central government in Tehran to destroy the social and communal fabric of the region now seems to herald a wholesale attempt to ethnically cleanse the area of its indigenous Ahwazi population due to the domestic importance for Tehran of the resources in the Ahwaz region. Ahwazi protesters summarised their demands in the slogans chanted at their recent demonstrations, such as ‘No no to forced displacement, no more Persian settlements end racism!”
As if these problems were not enough, the Iranian regime recently announced its ongoing construction of a new nuclear reactor – the Darkhovin Nuclear Power Plant- in the Ahwaz region on the Karun river, with some of the construction of the plant already built. Given the Ahwazi people’s existing suffering from poor health caused primarily by pollution and environmental degradation due to Iran’s unregulated petrochemical industry in the region, it is very concerning that the Ahwazi people could now be subjected to potential nuclear waste and other terrible environmental effects as a result of the operations of a nuclear power plant under a regime that cuts corners, does not value the lives of the Ahwazi people, and would not bother to alert the local populace, should an accident occur at the plant.
After almost a month of protests, the regime’s crackdown on the Ahwazi community is still continuing. Over 2.000 Ahwazi Arab protesters are reported arrested, 12 Ahwazi protesters have been confirmed shot to death so far. The regime has refused to hand over the bodies of the protesters to their families, burying them without notifying their loved ones or telling them where they’re buried. The regime also deployed vast numbers of heavily armed troops, IRGC personnel and Basiji militiamen and has even called up PMF units loyal to the IRGC from Iraq who crossed the border to enter the region and help put down the protest movement. Reports of tanks and armoured vehicles trickled in despite an attempt by the regime to create a communications and internet blackout in the Ahwaz region in an increasingly desperate effort to crush the protests that have attracted international attention and support. The use of a communications and internet blackout is a common tactic of the regime’s, and has been used more frequently with the proliferation of social media. NetBlocks—a website monitoring the telecommunications networks in different parts of the world—said that internet service in Iran has witnessed a significant disruption since the protests in Ahwaz began spreading across Iran on 15 July.
Widespread protests staged in solidarity with Ahwaz have also expanded in other areas of Iran, with demonstrators taking to the streets and chanting anti-regime slogans in Tabriz, Urmia, and Meshgin Shahr in the predominantly Azeribajani Turks northwest of the country. As a result, minority communities across Iran have developed a heightened sense of their own identity and of solidarity with other minorities which has only come into sharper relief as the Iranian regime’s repressive nature continues to target minority communities in an attempt to prevent these communities from actively engaging in their cultural traditions, speaking in their mother tongue or organising themselves on a societal or political level which would threaten the Persian-oriented ethnonationalism that is a core tenant of the current regime in power in Tehran.
As one of the most vulnerable minority communities in Iran, the risk to the Ahwazi community is very real. In addition to domestic suppression, the Iranian regime has embarked upon a campaign of political intimidation and extrajudicial killings of Ahwazi dissidents abroad, targeting and sometimes successfully assassinating those living in exile in Europe and in North America. Thus, even as the West attempts to renegotiate a return to the JCPOA, the question of the West’s commitment to human rights and democracy abroad will be sorely tested when it comes to the Ahwaz question.
Many have remarked on the West’s wilful blindness to Iran’s regime, pointing out that a regime that is ready to ethnically cleanse an entire minority community within its own borders shouldn’t be trusted with running a nuclear programme. If the US and the EU are truly serious about their commitment to these principles, a review of Tehran’s campaign against the Ahwazi community and the other minority communities in Iran needs to be addressed and to be part of the negotiations. As the last decade has shown, the Iranian regime’s conventional military means and use of proxy militias have been more dangerous and done more to destabilise the region than its nuclear programme. A democratic Iran is not about wanting “Regime Change” as some western supporters of the current Iranian regime would like to contend, but it’s about freedom and a guarantee of fundamental human rights for the communities like the Ahwaz that suffer disproportionately under the current system, which is riddled with structural racism, corruption and embedded with ethnic supremacy. Without a sustainable solution and consensus regarding how to provide human, political and economic rights to the Ahwaz community and the other minority communities in Iran, the country’s demographics will be a ticking timebomb, that will ultimately be the downfall of the current Regime in Tehran, long before any meaningful Western intervention can take place.
Original source | 
