Protests in the Gulf region increase pressure on Iran

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Fahima Silwan was 19 when she was out in public with her boyfriend in her home country of Iran – a gamble for unmarried couples – when undercover agents arrested her.

Calling her by name, they put her in a car, and she begged not to take her to a special institution. Later, after telling her current husband about this, he asked if she had been kidnapped.

“This is normal in Iran,” said Sylvan, a Mountain View resident. “I didn’t think about it that way at the time. You have no idea where they are going to take you and do to you. When you’re 19, it breaks you.”

The death of Gina “Mahs” Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman, at the hands of the same forces known as the vice police, in September brought back those traumatic memories for Silvan, who left Iran a few years later. Since then, large-scale protests and demonstrations of resistance have held the country firmly — at the cost of 500 people killed in the protests and more than 19,000 arrested.

It was recent demonstrations of brutality against protesters and long-standing treatment of Iranians that led local Bay Area residents to march in downtown San Francisco on Saturday. The protesters are calling on the US government to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a special branch of the military that supports the government, as a terrorist group.

Organized by Bay Area 4 Iran, the protest was expected to run from Powell and Market Streets to Embarcadero Square.

The Trump administration already considered the IRGC terrorists in 2019, along with ISIS and Boko Haram, who were backed by the Biden administration. The European Union will consider the issue again on February 20 in Brussels, where a protest action with the same demands as in San Francisco is expected.

Silvan and other protesters want the United States to also pressure the European Union to back off new sanctions and add the IRGC to its list of terrorist organizations. They also commemorate the executions of Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini, a karate champion and volunteer children’s trainer, respectively, summarily executed.

Iran has executed four youths linked to the mass protests, with CNN reporting that at least 43 people had been executed as of January, with activists expecting more.

“Any money that goes to the IRGC goes to quell even more brutality,” said Silvan, an organizer of Bay Area 4 Iran. “People do not want this regime. Every morning I wake up, I’m afraid to look at my phone and see that they have killed someone else.”

Freedom march and rally for Iran

Market and Powell Streets
February 18, 11:30 am
Bay Area for Iran

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texasstandard.news contributed to this report.

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