“Anger is rising” in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini, notes Najmeh Bozorgmehr, correspondent for the Financial Times in Tehran. Monday, “Clashes have pitted police against protesters in Iran’s biggest cities and across its Kurdish region”after the death of the young Kurdish-Iranian woman, arrested by the morality police, reports the journalist.
According to the Kurdish NGO Hengaw, the security forces opened fire on protesters, killing five people, reports the Times of Israel. Two people are said to have died in Saghez, the city from which Mahsa Amini originated, while the other protesters were killed in Divandarreh and Dehgolan, specifies the organization for the defense of human rights. However, the Iranian authorities have not communicated on these deaths and the death of these demonstrators has not been verified, specifies the Israeli site.
Videos posted on social media show otherwise “a crowd in the (Kurdish) town of Divandarreh (north-west) throwing stones and running after being shot at”reports the BBC. “Other images also show protests in the capital, where women take off their headscarves and shout ‘death to the dictator’ – a chant often used in reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.”underlines the British media.
“Youth is waking up”
According Timesome Iranian women have also “decided to cut their hair to show their outrage”. “This is the first time I’ve seen this”, explained political scientist and sociologist Mahnaz Shirali to the Swiss daily. “In Eastern societies, women with long hair are respectable, not those with short hair”says the researcher. “For once, violence against Iranian women has a face”, she remarks.
“Young people wake up having taken refuge in indifference, a mechanism of self-defense”note Mahnaz Shirali. But Mahsa Amini’s death was a huge shock, because it was innocence itself. She was not politicized. All the Iranian women who have come in contact with the morality police have said to themselves that they could have met the same fate.”
On September 13, Masha Amini was arrested in Tehran for “wearing inappropriate clothes” by the vice police, a unit tasked with enforcing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s strict dress code for women.
While authorities are accused by protesters of having caused his death while in custody, Tehran’s police chief, General Hossein Rahimi, again on Monday rejected the “unfair accusations against the police”. “We conducted surveys […] And all the evidence shows that there was no negligence, or inappropriate behavior on the part of the police.”he said. “This is a regrettable incident and we wish to never witness such incidents again”he added.
“The Islamic Republic has lost the trust” of the Iranians
Mahsa Amini’s father told the Kurdish channel on Monday Rudaw that her daughter had been “beaten inside a police vehicle while in custody, which resulted in her untimely death”. According to him, “the women who were in the ambulance said she had been hit on the head”. He added that the authorities had refused to release the results of the autopsy to him.
“With its murky investigations, convoluted narratives and relentless denials, the Islamic Republic […] has gradually lost the trust of the 83 million citizens who live in a state of moral disillusionment, religious apathy and financial despair”says Iranian-American journalist Tarla Kangarlou, in an op-ed published on the magazine’s website. Time. “Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has instructed the Interior Minister to oversee a thorough investigation into Amini’s death. But it was Raisi’s government that ordered heightened vigilance by the vice squad in recent months,” she recalls.