On September 28, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) attacked the headquarters of the Iranian Kurdish Party based in the Kurdish Autonomous Region of northern Iraq with missiles and drones. Kurdish political parties from ‘Rojhilat (East Kurdistan)’ are in exile in northern Iraq, branded as illegal groups or terrorists in Iran.
A total of 18 people, including a pregnant woman, were killed in the attack, and at least 58 people were injured. According to the Henggo Human Rights Organization, which has been tracking the Iranian Kurdish issue, the Iranian Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDPI) and the Kurdistan Liberal Party (PAK) each lost eight members. Iran’s attacks on exiled Kurdish parties have already continued along the Iran-Iraq border since September 23. However, on September 28, missiles and drones flew to major cities in northern Iraq, including Erbil and Sulaimania, which became a serious issue that could lead to a violation of sovereignty.
The seriousness of this attack is also reflected in the fact that it responded militarily to the United States. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the U.S. Central Command destroyed an Iranian drone with an F15 jet. “If you expected Iran to be able to distract its citizens from the justified anger, protests and internal affairs of their own citizens as Iran attacks across its borders, you are mistaken,” Sullivan said. The US accusation against Iran did not stop there. He said, “The whole world deserves to be condemned not only by Russia, which is fighting the war to invade Ukraine, but also by Iran for providing drones to proxy forces in the Middle East.”
Two dynamics of the Iranian protests
As suggested by Sullivan’s remarks, Iran’s justification for the attack was the assertion that ‘Iranian Kurdish parties are behind the Iranian protests’. The Iranian protests began on September 13, when an incident took place on the streets of the capital, Tehran. Gina Mahsa Amini, from Kurdistan in western Iran, was caught by the ‘moral police’ for wearing a hijab while visiting Tehran with her brother on the same day. Although it was customary for her to be released after an hour or so of ‘retraining’, Gina was taken to the hospital unconscious and died on September 16. The sudden death of a woman in her 20s, who was healthy without any medical conditions, suggests that he may have been beaten and tortured to death during her detention. Gina’s death was a typical questionable death suspected of being murdered by state violence.
The moral police that drove Gina to her death were introduced in 1983 as a product of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. They crack down on women’s hair exposure and crack down on whether to wear the ‘correct’ hijab, and they are the keeper of the ‘national patriarchy’ and the result of ‘the tyranny of the Islamic theocracy’. It is only natural that Gina’s death leads to anger against the very system. Meanwhile, the long-standing oppression and discrimination against ethnic minorities such as the Kurds, which had piled up one after another, became a catalyst that exploded anger to the level of an uprising. The fact that the first protest against his death was announced in Sakej, Kurdistan Province, the hometown of Gina, shows the importance of the protest. Then, ethnic minority regions in Iran rose up without exception. They include the Ahwaji Arabs of the Fujistan state in the southwest, the Turkic tribes of the northwest Azerbaijan state, and the Baluch tribes of the ‘Sistan and Balochistan’ regions in the southeast. Together with the capital Tehran and Isfahan, the center of Persian culture, these ethnic groups are all participating in the protests.
It is necessary to understand two dynamics in this protest situation. First, Iranian women are opposed to wearing the hijab. This is not the first time Iran has protested against hijab. According to the Associated Press on September 28, after the Iranian revolution, on March 7, 1979, supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini announced the hijab law, tens of thousands of Iranian women marched without a hijab on Women’s Day the next day. . It was a collective disobedience to the orders of Khomeini, the supreme leader of the new regime that was launched immediately after the revolution. Closer is the ‘My Stealthy Freedom’ campaign launched in 2014 by VOA’s Persian correspondent and Iranian-American Masi Ali Nejad. Marsh opened a Facebook page to encourage Iranian women to post unhijab selfies. This campaign led to a similar campaign called ‘White Wednesday’ in 2017. It is a performance of putting on and taking off a white scarf every Wednesday.
The anti-hijab protests in the 2010s were eventful, somewhat symbolic and passive. On the other hand, the anti-hijab protests triggered by Gina’s death took a different dimension. It is more aggressive and active, rough and straightforward, such as a ‘short fight’ in which you cut your own hair and burn a hijab. Above all, if the anti-hijab activists in the past failed to lead to a mass movement by becoming ‘celebs’, this anti-hijab protest is moving towards a wildly angry mass movement instead of celebrities and petty heroism. A large number of women wearing hijabs are also taking part in the street, appearing to have joined the cause of the state’s rejection of the system that controls and punishes individuals’ bodies and means of expression.
In the process, some political parties also emerged arguing that “we should prepare for a legal review to abolish the law that mandated the wearing of the hijab” or “the activities of the moral police should be officially stopped.” The coalition of the Islamic Iranian People’s Party (UIIPP), known as the reform party, is one of them. UIIPP is a political party founded in August 2015 by members of former President Mohammad Hatami’s camp with the slogan of ‘Islamic democracy’. The first female secretary general in Iranian history was elected Hazard Mansuri. Hazard Mansuri has been consistently speaking out on social media about the current state of the protests.
Another dynamic is the Kurdish regional protests at the level of ‘uprising’ and the solidarity of multinational Kurds. When it became known that the Kurdish woman Gina was virtually murdered by state violence, the Kurdish region, which had long been suppressed by oppression and discrimination, exploded in anger. Women and the Kurds, both of which are the driving force behind one of the central slogans of the protest scene: ‘Women, Life, and Freedom (Women Jin, Life Jiyan, Freedom Azadi)’. This is a long-standing slogan of the Kurdish movement, which set women’s liberation as the central agenda of the movement, and contains their traditions and present. This is a cry that is applied precisely in this protest, where women have become the subject of resistance.
The ‘Kurdish variable’ played a major role in the process of publicizing and sharing the protests. The active social media activities and solidarity statements of multinational Kurdish groups such as Turkiye and Syria in solidarity with the Kurds of Iran are also a driving force for the Iranian protests, playing a significant role in promoting the protests to the outside world. For example, Ebru Gouney, spokesman for the Turkiye Kurdish party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), sent the message, “Comrades Iranian women, your resistance is our resistance.” Konggra Star, a women’s organization in Rojava, a Kurdish autonomous region in northwestern Syria, also issued a statement on September 26, saying, “The ongoing protests in East Kurdistan (Kurdish region of Iran) and Iran have brutally murdered Gina Amini. It is being expressed as a struggle against a misogyny system and the oppressive Iranian regime.” In addition, Rojava’s musician group ‘Hunergeha Welat’ released a song ‘Serheldan’ supporting the struggle of Iranian women.
“We want to overthrow the system beyond reform”
Currently, the overwhelming majority of media reporting on the Iranian protests writes Gina’s name as ‘Mahsa Amini’. The fact that he is written with the Persian name ‘Mahsa’ rather than the Kurdish name ‘Gina’ reflects the reality that Gina’s native Kurdish language is not accepted as an official or educational language. There are good examples related to this.
On May 23, 2019, Iranian authorities arrested Zahra Mohammadi, who was active in a Kurdish social and cultural organization called the Nozhin Socio-Cultural Association, for teaching Kurdish language and Kurdish literature to Kurdish children. In February of the following year, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison at the Kurdistan-capital Sanandaji Islamic Revolutionary Court, which was later commuted to 5 years. Zahra’s lawyer applied for a retrial to the Court of Appeal, but on January 3, this year, the request for retrial was dismissed, and the Court of Appeal confirmed a five-year sentence.
Henggo Human Rights Organization volunteer Narin Alsachs, who lives in Germany, appeared on the Podcast of Mediya News hosted by Frederique Geedink, a Kurdish journalist from the Netherlands. said. “Iranians are not just protesting about the hijab,” he said. “Different forms of discrimination against women, worsening economic conditions, social inequality and injustice are all behind the protests,” he said. She also emphasized that “the slogan on the streets of Iran goes beyond just calling for ‘reform’ and wants to overthrow the system.” The statement issued on September 29 in the name of ‘Voice of the Feminist Revolution in Iran’ is also an argument of the same tone. “The protests across Iran are not just about the brutal killing of Mahsa Amini. (Iran) resistance to the essence of the Islamic regime.”
The sentiment of the overthrow of the Islamic Republic system is flowing from all over the protest sites with slogans such as ‘Death to the dictator (referring to the supreme leader of the Iranian theocracy)’, as Narin Al-Sax hinted at. On October 1st, a commemorative statue of ‘Basij’ was burned in the Degolan district of Kurdistan, Iran. Basiz is also a product of the Islamic Revolution. If the Islamic Revolutionary Guard is an elite unit that protects the regime, the Bashiz are militia members that protect the regime. During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, their suicide attack tactics are famous, when they threw themselves to clear a minefield to clear a ground attack route for Iranian forces. The scene where their statues were engulfed in flames evoked an association with the Islamic Republic system on fire.
© EPN