Ahwazi Arab activists have released this footage uploaded to social media by Iranian regime troops which shows Iranian security forces physically and verbally assaulting Ahwazi civilians who have been forced to face a wall, punching, slapping and kicking the unarmed civilians while using abusive and racist language against them.
Such racist abuse at the hands of regime officials is routine for Ahwazi Arabs and other minorities in Iran. Ahwazi activists reported that clashes broke out on Saturday between Ahwazis and Iranian ‘Lor’ settlers in the ‘Hamza’ neighbourhood of the town of Dezful to the north of the eponymously named regional capital, Ahwaz. The ‘Lor’ settlers, traditionally a nomadic Iranian people, are being transferred to the Ahwaz region by the regime in an effort to change the demographic composition of the Arab region, which contains over 95 percent of the oil and gas claimed by Iran.
The clashes on Saturday came after some of the ‘Lor’ settlers chanted demeaning and abusive racist, anti-Arab slogans at Ahwazis who had been evicted from their homes and farmlands only days before to make way for the settlers. As Ahwazis, the displaced people are powerless and have no legal right to challenge the authorities’ eviction orders. The offensive racist abuse, in addition to the regime’s systemic injustice, proved intolerable for the displaced people, with fighting breaking out, leaving over 30 people injured, after the settlers attempted to confiscate the farmlands which were the only source of income or sustenance for the Ahwazis, who are subjected to an effective apartheid racist system by the regime and denied employment. Local people reported that the forces of Iran’s “resistance” regime rushed to the scene to defend the racist ‘Lor’ settlers, raiding the homes of some of the remaining Ahwazi people and brutally assaulting them while subjecting them to vicious racist abuse.
Iranian authorities have constructed large and well-provided settlements to attract ethnically Iranian settlers to the region, providing them with amenities withheld from the local Ahwazi people, as well as offering financial incentives and excellent job opportunities in the oil and gas industry which are withheld from the Arab locals, whose natural resources the regime is plundering to fund this grotesque injustice. In these settlements, local Ahwazi people are forbidden from living in them, which are ‘Iranian-only’.
C: Rahim Hamid,
S: aLiBz
