The US Soccer Federation was right to change Iran’s flag — and I know why it made the regime panic

As a teen in Iran, I sneaked out of the house at night to write ‘Death to the Dictator’ on our neighbors’ walls. About half of the students in my sister’s senior class were sent to prison for similar acts of defiance. One of them, our neighbor’s teenage daughter, was executed without a public trial

An Iran’s supporter with blood tears make up on her face holds a football jersey reading the name of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman who died at the hospital after been arrested by the morality police for violating Iran’s strict dress code (AFP via Getty Images)

On Saturday, the United States Soccer Federation displayed Iran’s flag without the emblem of the Islamic Republic across their official Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts to show their support for Iranian protesters. A now-deleted graphic of the Group B standings displayed the Iranian flag only bearing its green, white and red colors.

In response, representatives of the Islamic Republic demanded that Team USA be kicked out of the World Cup for distorting the image of the flag and violating FIFA rules. For many Iranians, this demand is tough to stomach from a child-killing regime that has been making its own tyrannical rules for the past four decades.

Flags are a potent symbol of national sovereignty — indeed, the Islamic extremists who took control of Iran in 1979 knew this and quickly changed the flag to include their seal of theocracy. At a time when millions of Iranians support the protests and the government is actively killing, arresting, and torturing anyone who dares to challenge its legitimacy, it is worth questioning who gets to decide how the country is represented.

The Iranian regime has reason to worry: Protests and acts of civil disobedience have been raging like wildfires throughout Iran following the killing of Mahsa (Jina) Amini this September. She died in police custody after she was arrested for her alleged defiance of the country’s strict Islamic dress code. No one has been charged for her death. Instead, government crackdowns have killed more than 400 unarmed civilians and have resulted in the arrest of more than 15,000 protesters. Given the regime’s oppressive measures, the numbers are likely to be much higher than reported. According to UNICEF, 63 children have been killed thus far.

Like millions of Iranians, my own life has been shaped by the Islamic Republic’s oppression of women and minorities’ rights and the regime’s crackdown on dissidents. I was six when Islamic fundamentalists took over Iran and women’s rights were cut in half. As part of their interpretation of Sharia law, singing, dancing, playing cards, and many of our other favorite pastimes became a crime.

I couldn’t run or ride a bicycle without drawing the ire of the morality police and, being a girl, I had to cover my hair and my body. Even as a child, I found these new laws unjust. To skirt the hijab mandates, I cut my hair and pretended to be a boy so I could enjoy the same freedoms as my male friends. As a teen, I sneaked out of the house at night to write "Death to the Dictator" on our neighbors’ walls. About half of the students in my sister’s senior class were sent to prison for similar acts of defiance. One of them, our neighbor’s teenage daughter, was executed without a public trial. The authorities didn’t even notify her parents. They just told them to come get her body.

In the past 43 years, hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children, have been jailed, disappeared, and killed.

What is new about the current situation in Iran, and why the movement is deemed a revolution, is that protests have spread to all demographics and in all 31 provinces, and they’re not dying down as past protests have done before. The regime has responded with unprecedented brutality, especially in ethnic minority regions such as Kurdistan, Sistan and Baluchistan, and Khuzestan, where there are reports of daily killings and arrests. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Chief, Volker Turk, has described the clampdown on anti-regime dissidents as a “full-fledged human rights crisis.”

My sources in Kurdistan, where Mahsa (Jina) Amini was from, tell me that the authorities have been raiding houses and arresting unarmed civilians and they’ll shoot anyone who is out past 11pm. I’m in touch with someone who told me they were arrested and tortured in Evin prison for posting a social media message of solidarity with the protesters, as well as a woman who was severely beaten with batons for walking in public without a headscarf.

Security forces have also arrested Voria Ghafouri, a popular Iranian-Kurdish footballer and a former member of the national team, on charges of “propaganda against the regime” for his support of protesters. He has since been released on bail.

The host of the World Cup, Qatar — a country also known for its human rights violations — has sided with the Islamic Republic during the games. Qatar’s World Cup Security officials arrested several people at the Iran-Wales match. Their apparent crime? Wearing T-shirts with the words “Woman Life Freedom,” the rallying cry for Iranian protesters.

The US Soccer Federation’s action to remove the Islamic emblem from the Iranian flag was the right move. This doesn’t diminish the fact that the United States itself has a troubling human rights record. A few recent examples include the invasion of Iraq, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, injuries, and refugees; and the mishandling of Afghanistan, resulting in a humanitarian crisis where millions of people are at risk of starvation. In addition to torturing people at Guantanamo and other secret prisons (many of who were finally released without charges), the land of the free also holds the record for the largest number of incarcerated people in the world.

The US isn’t exempt from being held accountable on the world stage. But as a representative of the most powerful country in the world with a large platform, the Soccer Federation’s action has been a welcome act of solidarity with those who are brutalized by the Islamic Republic. The world needs to continue to shine a light on Iran to decrease the regime’s ability to commit atrocities in the comfort of darkness.