The Iranian regime is at war with its own children

Twenty-two-year-old Hadis Najafi does not look like a foot soldier in a revolution. In the last film of Najafi alive, it is night and she’s walking down a road in Karaj, her home town, smiling and scrunching up her hair into a ponytail. She is young, blonde and on her way to a demonstration. Najafi reminds me of my own daughter, tying up her hair in the same casual, no-nonsense way. Thirty minutes later, she was dead, shot six times in the face, hand, neck and heart. Her crime? To go to a protest and not to wear a hijab.

Iran is locked in a clash between its medieval Islamic theocracy and the TikTok generation. The killing of young women like Najafi and Mahsa Amini in late summer has brought the students out on the streets and now there have been thousands of arrests: rappers, actresses, writers, musicians and sport personalities – even the producer of a football podcast..

In late September, 16-year-old Nika Shakarami vanished, and ten days after that, her body was found in a detention centre morgue. Outraged by Nika’s death, more high-school girls have begun to join the protests. They film themselves with their hair loose, often making obscene gestures at the photo of the Supreme Leader that hangs in every classroom.

Unlike past challenges to Iran’s elderly theocratic leaders, this is a protest movement begun, led and driven by women – and very young women at that. Sixty per cent of the population is under 30. One Iranian explained that the reason these girls are so defiant is in part because of Covid. Because schools were shut, it meant that pupils missed out on two years of crucial indoctrination. ‘They have no fear. They spit at anyone trying to arrest them.’ Their lack of fear could be the reason that last week the Iranian parliament called for the execution of the 15,000 protestors now held in Iran’s notorious jails. It would be a horrific thing to do, especially as Ali Fadavi, deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), says the average age of those arrested is just 15.

This is a regime at war with its own children. No wonder that on Monday the Iranian football team refused to sing their own national anthem and Iranian fans chanted ‘be sharaf’: ‘no honour’.

That same chant filled Trafalgar Square last Saturday, when a group of Iranians gathered around a tall Iranian woman called Lily Moo, whose coat matched her hair which was dyed emerald green. One told me: ‘Lily is here every week with her microphone, even if it’s raining. She is here shouting at the world.’

‘The world needs to wake up,’ said Lily. ‘This is the 21st century. It is not OK for a government to kill children or teenagers or students for dancing, for singing, for shaking loose their hair or wanting to have a normal life.’ She lifted her megaphone and yelled out to the crowds below the movement’s battle cry: ‘Women, Life, Liberty!’

Above our heads waved different flags representing Persia under the shah, Baluchistan and Kurdistan. Even in Iran, the protest movement has united the disparate groups. Two elegantly dressed older ladies, who had left Iran when the shah was deposed, exchanged gossip, one caressing the Pomeranian on her lap. They come every week to demonstrate. They nodded at the crowd: ‘We all do. Safety in numbers. These young people must not be forgotten.’

One Kurdish girl with a mass of wavy hair explained she had arrived in the UK only two weeks ago. Back in Iran she was a teacher, and her students had started writing slogans on the classroom walls. Some staff had handed over CCTV footage to the judiciary so the students could be identified and arrested. ‘I switched off the cameras, then put them back on when the chants were over,’ she told me. She joined her students on the demos because, as she explained: ‘Our fathers and mothers were imprisoned, tortured and executed in the 1980s by the same authorities who are killing our 16-year-olds in the streets today.’ She was, of course, spotted by the regime. The authorities visited her mother and then arrested her brother. Was he all right? I asked. Her face crumpled. She shook her head and turned away. ‘The last thing he said to me was: “Run!”’

Two women and a man in their thirties said they also came to protest every week. One of the women had a teenage sister back in Iran and was sick with worry about her. ‘Iranian prisons are cesspits.’ Men and women are regularly raped. The authorities even sanction the rape of young women, she said. ‘Virgins go to heaven so they must be raped before execution.’

The family sometimes find their child’s body tossed out like garbage on the street. ‘Sometimes they are only given the body on condition they don’t talk about the death. Often relatives are attacked to silence them even at the burial itself.’ The aunt of Nika Shakarami was detained after telling the media that the family had searched for ten days before finding her body in a police detention centre.

All of the Iranian women I met were scathing about the BBC coverage, and the way in which the left ignored their plight. ‘They are very picky with their stories. Where are the #MeToo marches for the dead teenage girls in Iran? Do brown girls count for nothing then?’ They glanced over at the main stage, where a white middle-class girl was shouting about climate change and the patriarchy, not seeming much to care about that prime example of evil patriarchy in Iran. But then Islamic patriarchy is not a concept the left feels comfortable confronting.

I met another group of Iranian protestors wearing balaclavas, who explained that they had to disguise themselves because the Iranian authorities kept tabs on demonstrators in the UK. ‘They get at us through intimidating family members back in Iran,’ said one man. Just this week the MI5 director-general Ken McCallum warned that Iran poses a major security threat to the UK. He said the UK had discovered at least ten attempts to kidnap or even kill British or UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime. Iran uses ‘coercion, intimidation, and violence to pursue its interests’. Lily Moo shrugged: ‘I have received death threats. But I am not going to stop until this regime is finished.’

Lily is so far despondent about the attitude of the West. When the Iranian parliament essentially called for the execution of the imprisoned protestors, the response by some here was to equivocate and suggest that it was not a call for mass execution but merely for tough sentencing of demonstrators, including potential use of the death penalty. Lily Moo snapped: ‘So everyone killed one by one rather than all at once? That’s some reassurance!’

She went on: ‘Iran has a history of massacres. Telling us not to exaggerate is very disrespectful to the Iranian people. My parents described to me the mass killings in the 1980s, people hanged one after the other. To those who say that is all in the past, I say the man responsible is now President of Iran.’

She wondered why anyone would downplay the possibility of a massacre. ‘The only hope for those kids is if the international community engages and treats the situation with urgency.’

It is also to ignore the disquieting implications of the key word used by the MPs to describe the protestors – ‘moharebin’, as in people who have committed ‘moharebeh’, a crime against God. Lily points out: ‘This word would have sent a chill down the spine of every Iranian, especially those 15,000 prisoners and their loved ones.’ To punish a ‘mohareb’, according to article 282 of the Islamic code, a judge has four options: death by hanging; crucifixion; amputating the right hand and left foot; exile. This adds up to more than tough sentencing. ‘At the very least they are likely to receive harsh sentences in some of the worst prisons on this Earth.’

On a table in front of us, in Trafalgar Square, a woman was laying out photographs of smiling young people taken from their social media posts. All of them are now dead, said Lily – murdered by the security forces. She sighed and picked up her megaphone.