A nine-year-old boy among 50 children dead: There is no limit to what Iran’s bloody regime will do

The regime appears to be actively provoking violence and willing to plunge the country into civil war to retain power, writes Borzou Daragahi

Days earlier, the regime allegedly killed Kian Pirfalak, a nine-year-old in the southwestern city of Izeh (EPA)

Each day in Iran, the regime resorts to graver and more shocking tactics as it seeks to stamp out an unprecedented protest movement that is challenging the entire Islamic Republic.

On Saturday and into Sunday, the regime launched a major security operation against the western city of Mahabad, an ethnic Kurdish city that has been especially fervent in its embrace of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement triggered by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

Days earlier, the regime allegedly killed Kian Pirfalak, a nine-year-old in the southwestern city of Izeh who was shot dead when gunmen opened fire at the vehicle in which he was a passenger.

In both cases, the regime has shown a ruthlessness and recklessness that is hardening the resolve of its opponents and pushing the country into even more danger. The violence shows the bankruptcy of the regime’s responses to any popular demands for change, and ultimately prove that the Islamic Republic has far outlived any mandate it ever had.

Mahabad, a city of at least 168,000 in the mountainous region near Iran’s borders with Iraq and Turkey, has long been a hotbed of political opposition to the regime, and armed separatist guerilla groups have long had a presence. It was the capital of a short-lived ethnic Kurdish self-rule experiment that was brutally crushed in 1946. It remains among the restive ethnic enclaves that have long challenged the Islamic Republic’s denial of Kurdish political, language and cultural rights.

Following raucous street gatherings and funeral marches for protesters killed in earlier days, security forces stormed the city on Saturday, cutting off electricity and internet, and dispatching helicopters overhead. Fragmentary reports from inside the city suggest the regime’s foot soldiers were opening fire indiscriminately at residential neighbourhoods and going door to door, allegedly even snatching the corpses of the dead from previous protests to prevent politically charged burial ceremonies.

“Inform everyone that the Islamic Republic of Iran is committing a massacre in Mahabad tonight,” one German-based activist wrote on Twitter. “Please inform, please.”

The regime’s aggression against Kurds risks triggering an all-out armed uprising. The main Kurdish opposition parties, most of them with a presence across the border in Iraq, are now seeking to cool the hotheads among their ranks and urge them not to take up arms for fear of being tarnished as separatists and damaging the unity of a protest movement that crisscrosses ethnic and sectarian dividing lines.

But that the regime appears to be actively provoking such violence shows how little regard it holds for Iran’s unity and integrity, and would be willing to plunge the country into civil war to retain power.

The story of Kian Pirfalak further underscores the regime’s disastrous course. The good-humoured boy fancied himself as an inventor, and had shown a precocious interest in mechanics and engineering, as depicted by videos on the internet of him joyfully showing off his homemade devices.

He was with his father in a car on Wednesday, apparently watching the historic protests that were unfolding in his town of Izeh, a mostly ethnic Arab city in southwest Iran, when he told his dad he felt unsafe and asked to go back home. His father complied. But gunmen on motorbikes sprayed the car with bullets. Kian was pronounced dead in hospital. He was the youngest of the 50 children and teens among the dead over the last nine weeks.

The Iranian regime says murky “terrorists” killed Kian. But a former member of parliament representing Izeh told state television that the same people who shot the boy dead were the ones who brought him to the hospital, suggesting that the regime’s own attack dogs shot up the car, and then rushed him to the hospital when they realised they had killed a child.

So far, at least 400 people have been killed in the violence, along with a few dozen members of the security forces. With each passing day, the regime proves to its own people and to the world that it has lost all credibility and legitimacy.

It might be presumptuous of self-described “revolutionaries” in the diaspora to declare that Iranians are seeking the end of the Islamic Republic. But how else to interpret the burning down of the childhood home of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, now a museum in his hometown of 80,000 people, as onlookers looked on and cheered?

The regime has set no boundaries for itself in violently fending off an uprising aimed at fundamental change. No act of violence is too extreme, no lie too egregious. The murders are meant to terrify people into staying off the streets. Yet each death prompts more protests, and if the night-time clashes with police and campus protests mostly draw young men and women, the funeral marches and commemorations for the dead are finally luring Gen X, grey-haired, middle-aged and even older Iranians into partaking in the uprising.

The society is being quickly politicised, mobilised and radicalised. Actors, scholars, film directors and athletes make gestures in support of the movement on social media or on football pitches. In one case a family barred from going to the cemetery to honour their son who was killed in a previous uprising, instead made meals for the protesters in the current unrest.

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It is not at all clear if the regime has any inkling of what it’s up against. It keeps saying that the fault for the protests lies with foreign television channels, or even more ridiculously, because students spent too much time online during the Covid crisis.

“The rioters are causing problems for the people, and they are committing crimes,” said supreme leader Ali Khamenei. “However, these rioters on the streets and those directing them from behind the scenes are too inferior to be able to damage the Islamic Republic.”

To find the real culprits behind the protests, the Iranian regime should take a look at itself and its actions over the past 44 years, especially the past 23 years, when it began shuttering a nascent reform movement and sidelining people’s demands for change.

All over Iran right now are posters celebrating the Iranian national football team’s presence at the World Cup, where they are scheduled to play against England on 21 November. “For Iran,” say the banners, which have been repeatedly burned down by protesters.

If the clerics and generals overseeing the country truly loved Iran, they would release political prisoners and cooperate with their opponents in organising a relatively bloodless dismantling of the Islamic Republic and handover of power to the people.