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Activists Fear Major Iran Crackdown In Kurdish-populated Town

by | Nov 20, 2022 | 5 comments

AFP – Nov 20, 2022

Activists on Sunday expressed alarm that Iran was implementing a major crackdown in a Kurdish-populated town that has seen intense anti-regime protests in the last few days.

Reinforcements of the security forces were sent to the city of Mahabad in western Iran, rights groups said, while images and audio files of heavy gunfire and screams were posted overnight.

Iran’s clerical leadership has been shaken by more than two months of protests sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old woman of Kurdish origin who had been arrested by the Tehran morality police.

The very first protests took place in Kurdish-populated areas of Iran including at Amini’s funeral in her home town of Saqez, before spreading nationwide.

Rights groups had earlier posted footage of defiant protests in Mahabad, including after the funerals of victims of the state’s crackdown on the protests, with people staging sit-ins in the streets and setting up barricades.

The Norway-based Hengaw rights group said “armed troops” had been despatched to Mahabad from Urmia, the main city of West Azerbaijan province.

“In Mahabad’s residential areas, there is a lot of gunfire,” it wrote on Twitter.

The Iran Human Rights (IHR) group, also Norway based, posted footage overnight Saturday-Sunday that it said showed gunfire echoing around the city.

Its director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam wrote that authorities “cut electricity and machine gun shooting is heard… Unconfirmed reports of protesters being killed or wounded.”

He posted an audio file in which screams are clearly heard amid continuous gunfire.

Kurds make up one of Iran’s most important non-Persian ethnic minority groups and generally adhere to Sunni Islam rather than the Shiism dominant in the country.

Hengaw had on Saturday warned the situation was “critical” in the town of Divandarreh in the western province of Kurdistan, where government forces had shot dead at least three civilians.

It also expressed concern on Sunday about the situation in other Kurdish-populated towns with explosions heard in Bukan and Saqez, as well as gunfire in Bukan.

Source

5 Comments

  1. antiJHWH on November 20, 2022 at 1:51 pm

    all protests in Iran were always CIA/Mossad
    steered + instigated since shahs times !
    nothing news

  2. Cui Bono - Who Benefits? on November 20, 2022 at 2:39 pm

    Iran has major justifiable security concerns.

    Siding with the enemy means supporting terrorist groups to include major governments that would have every reason to harm the Iranian nation, its people and the Islamic principles to which they have stood by since the overthrow of the Shah’s despotic rule in 1979. Nothing can shake the support of the Iranian people who have demonstrated their support en masse in the streets and note that only the terrorist factions posing as “victims” are ever reported in the Iranophobic, Islamophobic media, particularly in those countries that would have adverse political agendas to cover up factual news relating to Iran in particular.

    All terrorist factions – in liaison with corrupt politicians around the world that have very obvious anti-Iran, anti-Islam agendas – should be enough evidence in itself to view all negative news reports relating to Iran (amid the absence of a more balanced analysis) – with total suspicion (do we ever see robust challenges to negative reporting on Iran by inviting guests on tv news channels to represent the other side of the coin?).

    So in the absence of more balanced reporting in the anti-Iran West, all negative news reports concerning Iran need to be treated with the contempt they deserve.

  3. tresmegistus on November 20, 2022 at 8:08 pm

    i am not surprised. the Iranians cannot allow a small ethnic group, the kurds (being used) bought and paid for by the usa (cia) to cause havoc, death and destruction (over an incident that shows the state had NO hand in it) to a country and overthrow of an elected government. If I were the Imam i would instruct that all those caught in this destruction to have summarily have their right hands cut off.

  4. RAH on November 20, 2022 at 11:31 pm

    Quote:

    “….Iran’s clerical leadership has been shaken by more than two months of protests sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old woman of Kurdish origin who had been arrested by the Tehran morality police….”

    ==============

    COMMENT

    Amini was NOT killed by police..

    …..there is a video made public showing she was accessing health care..collapsed in a hospital waiting room…. and never recovered…..the implication is she died from the vaxx.

    What is concerning is how this “incident” is being flogged to create mass protest globally…..so methinks this whole incident stinks. and being leveraged by the various Deep States.