Eye on Iran's Protests - October 26, 2023

The Islamic Republic has occupied Iran since 1979 and continues to brutally enforce its moral code in the country, a key pillar of which is the mandatory hijab. As part of this enforcement, Iranian regime authorities and agents acting on their behalf have murdered over 500 people in connection with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and actively torment, harass, and intimidate dissidents and their families and friends to prevent the anti-regime sentiment that drives the ongoing movement from again breaking into country-wide mass demonstrations.

Hunger striker and human rights activist calling on the UK government to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organization, Vahid Beheshti, was attacked by a mob of Hamas, Hezbollah, and IRGC supporters in the UK.

One week after the savage Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, the Iranian-American community took to the streets of Los Angeles and flew Israel’s flag alongside the Lion and Sun flag, which was Iran’s national flag before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Islamic Republic authorities pressured the parents of Armita Geravand, a teenage girl who was assaulted in early October by the Morality Police in a subway station for not wearing a hijab, against filing a lawsuit over the attack.

Footage of Armita Geravand walking into the metro prior to the Morality Police’s attack against her shows her without a hijab. The confrontation with the Morality Police left Armita in a coma, and Iranian state media declared her “brain dead” on October 22. As of today, she has not woken from the coma.

At a funeral procession in Tehran for slain Iranian filmmaker, Dariush Mehrjui, mourners chanted “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon, my life is only for Iran.” Mehrjui and his wife were both stabbed to death in their apartment days before. Mehrjui, a member of the Iranian Academy of the Arts, has openly flouted the regime’s media censorship. Although the killers’ motives remain unclear, his activism could have played a role in motivating the attack.

In a striking and unequivocal denial of economic rights, the Iranian government, through its Cinema Organization linked to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, is enforcing a punitive ban on actresses who have dared to appear in public without the state-mandated hijab.

Iran’s Revolutionary Court sentenced two journalists, Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammad, to 13 and 12 years in prison, respectively. Their “crimes”? Reporting on the death of Mahsa Amini and their alleged collaboration with the U.S. To read UANI’s detailed report on the regime’s use of brutality to silence journalists in Iran and around the world, click here.

The European Parliament awarded Mahsa Amini and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement which her September 2022 death spurred, the 2023 Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought.

Agents of the Islamic Republic inflicted head wounds on a young child while seeking to suppress anti-regime protests in Zahedan, which have recurred on a weekly basis in that city after Friday prayer since the start of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Throughout the movement, Zahedan has been the site of sustained, large-scale anti-regime street protests. The ethnic Baluch, a long-repressed minority group, constitute the majority in the western city of Zahedan.

Amnesty International has collected substantial evidence from speaking with eye-witnesses and from viewing video footage that indicates a new wave of brutality has been unleashed against the Baluchi protesters and worshippers, including against children as young as ten years old.

Fatemeh Sepehri, a prominent political prisoner, was serving an 18-year prison sentence for speaking out against the regime, when she underwent open heart surgery. After the surgery, she was instructed to rest, but regime authorities denied her furlough and forced her back into a prison cell, where she has limited contact with the outside world.