By Tamara Qiblawi, Nima Elbagir, Barbara Arvanitidis, Alex Platt, Gianluca Mezzofiore, Céline Alkhaldi and Muhammad Jambaz, CNN
A teenage dissident was hanging out at a smugglers’ organization in Iran’s western border regions. For 3 days, Rezan roamed a variety of rocky mountains and traversed minefields along a winding road forged by experienced smugglers to make an excursion to the country’s heavily armed Revolutionary Guards. It was too damaging. an adventure for a respite of much more than a few stolen moments at a time.
“I knew that if an officer saw us, we would die immediately,” said the 19-year-old Iranian-Kurdish activist, whom CNN identifies under her pseudonym Rezan for security reasons. She was on her way to the border with Iraq, one of Iran’s most militarized borders, where, according to human rights groups, many have been shot dead by Iranian security forces for illegally crossing or smuggling illicit goods.
He had fled his hometown of Sanandaj in western Iran, where security forces were wreaking death and destruction at protest sites. Protesters were arbitrarily arrested, some were shot dead in front of her, she said. Many were beaten in the street. During the week of protests, security forces pulled Rezan out of exposed hair, he said. As he crawled down the street, screaming in pain, he watched his friends being forcibly detained and children beaten.
“They pulled my hair. They beat me. They dragged me out,” he said, recalling the brutal crackdown in the Kurdish-majority city. . “
Sanandaj has noticed some of the largest protests in Iran, the largest outdoors in Tehran, since the uprising began in mid-September.
Rezan said he still had no choice but to embark on the long and dangerous adventure with the smugglers to Iraq. Leaving Iran through the nearest official border crossing, just a three-hour drive away, could have led to his arrest. They have just resulted in his death at the hands of the security forces.
“(Here) I can have my rights to live as a woman. I need to fight for women’s rights. I need to fight for human rights,” he told CNN from northern Iraq. After arriving here earlier this month, she replaced the tack. Ceased to be a nonviolent protester, Rezan took up arms and enlisted in an Iranian-Kurdish militant organization that has positions in the arid valleys of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Rezan is one of several Iranian dissidents who fled the country last month, fleeing the regime’s violent attempt to quell protests that erupted after the death of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa “Zhina” Amini while in the custody of Iranian moral police for allegedly wearing a hijab inappropriately.
The number of dissidents who have left Iran since the protests began is unknown. In the Kurdish-administered northern region of Iraq (KRG), which borders Iran’s predominantly Kurdish west, many exiled militants keep a low profile, hiding in shelters. They said they feared reprisals against their families in their home countries, where mass arrests have become common in Kurdish-majority areas.
According to eyewitnesses and videos on social media, the citizens of those spaces have endured some of the maximum brutalities used by Iranian security forces in their brutal crusade to quell the protest movement.
In Kurdish-majority spaces, there is ample evidence that security forces are firing indiscriminately into crowds of protesters. The Iranian government also appears to have deployed members of its elite fighting force, the Revolutionary Guards, to those spaces to confront protesters, according to eyewitnesses. and videos of protest sites.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards take the regime’s battles further, especially in Iraq and Syria, supporting brutal dictatorships and fighting extremist outfits like ISIS.
For the Kurds, the intensification of repression in the west of the country highlights decades of well-documented ethnic marginalization through Iran’s central government. These are grievances shared by Iranian ethnic minorities and predating clerical rule in Iran.
The Kurdish population of about 10 million is Iran’s third-largest ethnic organization. Tehran’s governments — adding the pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime he overthrew in 1979 — have viewed the organization with suspicion because of its longstanding aspirations to secede from the state and identify a republic along Kurdish communities in neighboring countries.
Squatting in the shade of a tree in a dusty valley alongside her sisters-in-arms in northern Iraq, Rezan grabs her AK-47 rifle, her wavering voice revealing a lingering concern about Iranian retaliation. After fleeing Iran, the government called his circle of relatives and threatened to arrest his brothers, he said.
But his circle of family supports his activism, he said, and his mother promised to bury each of her children rather than hand them over to authorities. “I’m using a gun because we need to show the Iranian Kurds that they have someone. “Rezan said from one of the bases of his militant group, the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK). “I need to protect the Kurds there because the Kurds protect themselves with stones. “
Protesters across Iran are largely unarmed. However, Iran accuses Kurdish-Iranian armed teams in Iraqi Kurdistan of fomenting riots in spaces with a Kurdish majority. It has attacked Kurdish-Iranian targets in Iraq with drones and missiles since the protests. It began, killing dozens.
Last Saturday, the head of Iran’s armed forces accused the Kurdistan Region of Iraq — which has a semi-autonomous region — of harboring 3,000 Kurdish-Iranian militants and vowed to keep attacking their bases unless it disarmed the fighters.
“Iran’s terrorist operations will continue. No matter how long it takes, we will continue with this operation and with a larger one,” said Maj. Gen. Mohammad Hossein Bagheri, chief of staff of Iran’s Armed Forces.
The PAK and other Iraqi-based Kurdish-Iranian armed teams say they did not participate in the protests in any concrete way. But they called on the United States to interfere on behalf of the protesters and said they were in a position to help Iran’s Kurds take up arms amid a further escalation of the Iranian crisis.
“What happens on the streets with the protesters is not designed in my base,” PAK leader Gen. Hussein Yazdanpanah told CNN. He was speaking from one of the headquarters of the group he destroyed with Iranian missiles and drones on September 28, killing 8 militants.
“(Iran) is us as a scapegoat for the protests in Iran and to divert media attention from Iran,” said Yazdanpanah, who believes he was the target of the attack.
“I will not hide the fact that I am a supporter of the army for my people,” he said, amid the destruction of his base near the town of Altun Kupri. The stench of two militants killed in the attack, but whose bodies have yet to be found, rises from the rubble.
“For a revolution to succeed, there will have to be an army for the others,” he added. “(Iran) sought out other people to question this principle. No army to protect you.
Across the country, protesters with various grievances, adding to those similar to the dire state of Iran’s economy and the marginalization of ethnic teams, have rallied around a motion against the regime sparked by Amini’s death. Women have been at the forefront of the protests. , saying that Amini’s disappearance at the hands of the infamous morality police highlights the plight of women under Islamic Republic legislation that limits their dress and behaviour.
Iran’s Kurds also saw their grievances reflected in Amini’s death. The Kurdish call of the young woman, Zhina, has been banned through a clerical status quo that bans calls from ethnic minorities, to avoid sowing ethnic divisions in the country. Amini was also screaming for help in her Kurdish mother tongue when police officers violently forced her into a van, according to activists.
The first primary protests of Iran’s existing uprising erupted in Amini’s Kurdish-majority hometown in western Iran, Saqqez, which has also been the target of violent repression. “When we were in Iran, I joined the protests with friends. Two days later, two of my friends were kidnapped and one of them wounded,” said a man who fled Saqqez to Iraqi Kurdistan, whom CNN does not call for security reasons.
Sitting on a carpet under a tree to whatever identity his shelter, the man and his circle of relatives said they were involved in the long arms of the Iranian regime. The circle of relatives covers their faces with medical masks, the man wears long sleeves to cover himself. identity tattoos, and a sheet of plastic hangs to hide them from the widespread concern of incoming Iranian drones.
He and his circle of relatives left Iran when he saw security forces kill his friend near a mosque in the early days of the uprising, the guy said: “How can they claim to be an Islamic Republic when I saw them murder my friend?”In front of a mosque?” he asked incredulously.
He said the network was unable to retrieve his friend’s frame before nightfall, after which they secretly buried their dead. His testimony is similar to several accounts CNN has heard since the beginning of the Iranian uprising. Many citizens of Iran’s Kurdish regions say they have opted not to get medical care for injured protesters in hospitals for fear of being arrested by authorities. Eyewitnesses also say some have even avoided sending their dead to morgues for fear of reprisals against family members.
Since fleeing, dissidents in Iraqi Kurdistan say they have kept in touch with loved ones they have left behind. Every phone call to their families is accompanied by reports of intensified repression, as well as reports from others defying the security forces and proceeding. to take to the streets.
“As far as I know, my circle of relatives is part of the revolution and the revolution continues to this day,” Rezan said. “They are willing to die to get our rights. “
El-CNN-Wire™
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