Lawyers, Filmmakers Call Chemical Attacks On Schoolgirls Crime Against Humanity
A group of influential Iranians have urged international bodies to probe chemical attacks on schoolgirls, describing them as a "crime against humanity."
A group of influential Iranians have urged international bodies to probe chemical attacks on schoolgirls, describing them as a "crime against humanity."
In a statement published Thursday, well-known lawyers and filmmakers said that the attacks since November had affected about 13,000 Iranian schoolgirls by March 21, adding that human rights activists should raise awareness about the issue so that international judicial institutions put it on their agenda.
Prominent lawyers Ramezan Hajimashhadi, Giti Pourfazel, Saeed Dehghan, Mehrangiz Kar and Nasrin Sotoudeh as well as award-winning director Jafar Panahi and actress Katayoun Riahi were among the signatories of the statement.
Pointing out that while government security forces were efficient in identifying and arresting protesters, they have shown negligence in pursuing the perpetrators of the chemical attacks, which indicates that they are in line with the regime’s agenda.
Attacking schools is "a kind of threat and revenge against young girls and teenagers who have been striving to end the compulsory hijab through the 'Women, Life, Freedom’ movement.”
Close to 300 schools were targeted in the past Iranian year ending on March 20 without any apparent effort by the government to seriously pursue the perpetrators or explain to terrified parents and students what was happening in so many schools.
Thousands of students have been affected, mostly girls, with hundreds more hospitalized with symptoms including respiratory distress, numbness in their limbs, heart palpitations, headaches, nausea, and vomiting.
While there was lull in attacks as schools closed for the Nowruz holidays, fresh incidents took place this week as students returned to classrooms.
The signatories also referred to the death of a Kurdish teenager who was hospitalized following one such attack, saying that despite the continuation of these chemical attacks, international institutions have not yet taken effective and deterrent actions.
Amid intensified measures to enforce hijab laws, Iran's regime is facing fresh protests over a renewed wave of chemical attacks on schoolgirls and economic woes.
The attacks coincided with the funeral of a Kurdish child from the city of Kamyaran who was laid to rest in Pashavah village in Kordestan province. The 16-year-old boy, Karo Pashabadi, had been taken to hospital for treatment on March 15 after inhaling poisonous gas after a chemical attack on a school in Tehran, where he was living. At least one other child, 11-year-old Fatemeh Razaei, has died in the attacks which began on November 30 and have taken place in hundreds of schools nationwide.
Ordinary Iranians have been suspicious of the involvement of the regime itself, or religious extremists protected by the regime, calling the attacks “state terrorism,” although the regime has denied responsibility and even staged arrests of suspects after widespread protests. Popular belief is that such large-scale and coordinated attacks cannot happen without the green light of regime authorities.
Moineddin Saeedi, a member of the Iranian Parliament from Chabahar in Sistan-Baluchistan Province, criticized a police move to use traffic cameras to identify women removing hijab. He said, "If these cameras can detect crimes to such an extent, why are we currently facing the poisoning of girls?"
Iranian state media is sounding the rallying cry for participation in the annual pro-Palestine event, held on the last Friday of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which is on April 14 this year.
In addition to several organizations affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, the country's traditional army, the Islamic Republic’s Assembly of Experts for Leadership, and government ministries as well as several Iranian Maraji -- supreme legal authorities for Twelver Shia Muslims – issued statements in the past few days, calling for participation.
Such state-sponsored events are usually shunned by the general public and the regime ends up transporting paramilitary Basij forces and its supporters from small towns to provincial capitals to form demonstrations with large crowds for the façade of mass support.
A large number of students and conscripts who are serving their mandatory military service as well as workers of government organizations are either forced or cajoled into partaking in the event in exchange for food, days off, and financial bonuses.
According to a letter obtained by "IranWire” website, the Physical Education Organization of Tehran province, has ordered directors of sports centers of the province to make sure national teams’ athletes participate in the "Quds Day march".
In the letter, Karamali Iraji, a deputy at the Ministry of Sport and Youth, also talked about a “directive by the Tehran’s governor’s office” about forcing the national teams' athletes to show up at 10:30 on Friday morning at Tehran’s Vali-Asr square, one of the main routes of the rallies.
The routes for the rallies are pre-determined by the regime and different recreational booths and gift shops are usually set up along the way. The regime also installed a huge mural at Enghelab (Revolution) square, which leads to Tehran’s main square Azadi. The colossal banner reads, “We will be in Quds in less than 17 years,” referring to remarks by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who keeps saying that the Israeli government will fall by then and Muslims will conquer the region.
Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has been announced as the official who will deliver the main speech on the day. The content of the speech is already obvious for Iranians who have been listening to the same statements for at least four decades. It will start with the promulgation of the Palestinian cause and their right to the “occupied territories” and will go on with highlighting “the atrocities by the Zionist regime” and will end with the latest political upheavals inside Israel. Reiterating Khamenei’s views, the speaker will probably predict that Israel will fall within a certain number of years.
In a post on his Twitter account on Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani posted pictures of a recent meeting between top leaders of the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements, Hamas and Hezbollah, both proscribed terror groups in the West. He said: “The balance of power has long shifted – to the detriment of the fake Israeli regime and to the benefit of the Palestinian nation.”
The event, which takes its name from the Arabic-language name for Jerusalem, is held to express support for Palestinians and oppose Israel and Zionism. Directed against Israel’s existence, Al-Quds Day was proclaimed by the founder of the Islamic Republic Ruhollah Khomeini on 7 August 1979. He called on Muslims worldwide to unite in solidarity against Israel and in support of the Palestinians, saying the "liberation" of Jerusalem was a religious duty to all Muslims.”
In Iran, Quds Day also features demonstrations against other countries that the regime deems as enemies, including the United States, the UK and Saudi Arabia. It has now become an international phenomena to perpetuate antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda among the Muslim world under the auspices of a collective cause propagated by Iran's dictator.
In an article in Israeli newspaper Maariv, four officials revealed the country’s focus on Iran’s internal divide, its economic woes, its nuclear program and its foreign policy implications.
The four experts from the Iran branch of the AMAN unit, the Israel Defence Forces’ intelligence division, spoke about the turning point of 2015’s nuclear deal, which emboldened the regime to expand its influence across the region, not least, in Syria.
However, by 2018, under the Trump administration, everything changed when a raft of sanctions came down hard on the regime, with support and pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Iran was made an international pariah state. Rather than stem the tide, this only hastened the race to arm, said the intel chiefs.
Aligning its proxy militia Hezbollah with President Assad's fight in Syria against opposition elements, an alliance to which the Russians also joined, Iran’s net has only grown wider. It has led to a tit for tat shadow war in Syria which has become a battleground between Iran and Israel, and even drawn in US forces.
This becomes more complex as was seen last week, when threats grow ever closer to Israel’s borders, with rockets raining down on Israel from Gaza, all with the guiding hand of Tehran.
But much more than only the nuclear threat, the Iran branch of the intelligence unit analyzes Iran’s internal affairs, from the protests to its economic crisis, all of which play a role in better understanding a country whose regime pledges to destroy the Jewish state but is more concerned with internal threats.
The unit claims that roughly 80 percent of the Iranian public does not support the regime, a figure which few could question in the light of mass protests since September, part of its bi-annual assessments on the domestic situation.
The internal strife facing Iran is a huge focus of the Iran unit, reaffirming the belief that the regime’s power is waning. "This protest expresses deep trends that exist in the Iranian public of moving away from the regime's values and a dramatic decrease in trust in it,” one officer said.
However while they say it is the most significant event in recent history, set to influence decision making in the years to come, the protest still lacks leadership and an alternative political system to the regime.
"It is impossible to separate the Iranian nuclear issue from the internal protest in the country", explained one of the officers. "There are very limited forums of people who make decisions in Iran, and they do so on many issues. When an Iranian decision-maker has to decide on a certain issue, he also has to think about many other things that are not necessarily related to each other."
Its research has found several elements that influence the decision-making of the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards. In order or priority, the first is the internal situation in the country and regime’s stability, then there is the economic situation, security, industrial strength and finally, its place on the world stage.
There is no doubt that its nuclear program has helped Iran leverage its international might, the focus of the foreign branch of the Iran unit, concentrated on the leverage Iran utilizes from its nuclear power.
Recent diplomatic rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates only compound the fear Iran is sending rippling through the region. This has in turn, alarmed the security establishment in Israel, admits the intelligence team.
“Iran's relations with significant countries have strengthened and its nuclear program is at its most advanced point ever. It manages to leverage it in the diplomatic arena as well," senior security officials explained with concern.
Iran knows the US has no plans to launch an attack of any kind and the diplomatic crisis under the Biden administration only plays into the Iranians’ hands, yet further emboldening the regime. In its softly-softly approach, hoping to revive the JCPOA nuclear deal, Biden has only given Iran the green light.
As is clear, Iran is nearing the upper end of enrichment to 90-percent and AMAN’s experts say even a return to the nuclear deal cannot change this.
"In our opinion, Iran does not seek to develop nuclear weapons in the immediate term," said a senior officer. "And even if they reach 90% enrichment now, then even once they decide to develop a bomb and assuming no one prevents them from doing so, it will take them between two and three years." Even from reaching fissile material, there is some way to go to turning that into an airworthy missile.
"Iran understands that the development of nuclear weapons is a very dangerous issue, and no one in Tehran wants to take a step that they will regret,” explained one official.
“We currently define Iran as a nuclear threshold country. They mainly conduct a policy of trial and error during their enrichment, every time we are taking another step in the plan and are waiting to see how the world reacts. Diplomatic ties with Europe, for example, are very important for the Iranians." Even Iran’s new bosom buddies Russia and China have no interest in Iran having nuclear weapons in their hands, AMAN’s team admits.
While much recent focus has looked at the Iranian presence in Syria, it does not pose as much of a threat as that of its role in Iraq, says AMAN’s analysts. "Iran wants to keep Iraq as close as possible," explains one Major in the team. "The Iranians are successful in the diplomatic arena vis-à-vis Iraq, they have a pro-Iranian government there and the goal in Tehran is to perpetuate the situation as it is. Iran still has dozens of affiliates in Iraq, which include thousands of people. This is a force that Iran has actively supported for several years and invests hundreds of millions of dollars in it annually."
From an intelligence point of view, the immediate danger from Iraq is the hundreds of armed UAVs that are already stationed there and could be sent to Israel in the event of a conflict, made all the more difficult for Israel as its hands are tied by complicated military limitations, mainly due to the caution being exerted in the area by the US.
Iran would relish the idea of a weakening relationship between Israel and the US, seen recently since Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms and proposals to bring in more orthodox religious laws across the country. Protests have rocked Israel since the right-wing coalition took hold in January and Iran loves to see this as the sign of the state’s imminent collapse, rather than its standing firm in its democratic values.
Israel makes no secret of the fact Iran is the Jewish state’s biggest threat, an honor once held by its proxy, Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. However, the team in AMAN is aware that before Iran, comes the threat much closer to home, Hezbollah, an entity which was born of the desire to exterminate Israel. Neither Israel nor Iran seems keen to take the conflict into the arena, but for Hezbollah, that is another question.
“Today we are preparing much more for a possible attack on Iran, and are making much more offensive and defensive military preparations in the Iranian context,” one official said, but this really is a last resort in a game which could have horrific ripple effects for the whole region.