Lawmaker suggests Iran recruited children for crackdown

Iranian lawmaker Ahmad Alirezabeigi said the hard-line state militia known as the Basij is governed by regulations that allow it to recruit minors in the ongoing deadly crackdown on protests in the country.

In an interview published Oct. 20 by the Iran-based Rouydad 24 news site, Alirezabeigi was challenged about multiple recent pictures showing baton-wielding teenage boys in riot gear. The lawmaker said Basij authorities are treating the protests the same way they treated the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when children were deployed to the front line.

He raised the example of 12-year-old Hossein Fahmideh, who in the Iranian official narrative famously blew himself up to destroy an invading Iraqi tank in 1980. Fahmideh has been praised by Iranian officials as an exemplary martyr and the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, called the teenager “our leader.”

In the ongoing protests, according to the lawmaker, the Basij organization sees the country as “in jeopardy.” He suggested that that belief justifies the use of children to quell the unrest. It remains unclear whether their recruitment is due to a security staff shortage in the face of the growing protests.

The weeks-long unrest in Iran was sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested by the Iranian morality police for her alleged failure to properly observe the Islamic Republic’s hijab laws. The Oslo-based Iran Human Rights advocacy group has documented the deaths of at least 215 protesters in the hands of government forces since, 27 of them believed to be minors. Iranian authorities have denied responsibility and have brought victims’ family members before cameras to recount how they had died of underlying health conditions or suicide.

Alirezabeigi acknowledged “with regret” that a number of students have been arrested in the protests, complaining that even lawmakers are being kept in the dark by the judiciary about the detention conditions.

Since schoolgirls joined the protests by defiantly removing their hijabs and chanting against the Islamic Republic leadership, they have been relentlessly targeted by Iranian security forces in and outside their schoolyards.

The leading Iranian teachers syndicate, the Council for the Coordination of Iranian Teacher Unions, reported on Thursday that students arrested by intelligence forces have faced “severe” physical mistreatment. The union cited the case of a 17-year-old from the Kurdish city of Javanroud who told his family during a brief telephone conversation from a detention facility that he had been “brutally tortured.”

“A number of students have died in the most merciless fashion as a result of the systematic crackdown,” the union revealed, accusing the Education Ministry of serving “as a tool for repression.”

Despite the public and widespread nature of the protests that seem to go beyond class and ethnicity, Iranian officials have repeatedly downplayed their scale and have linked the unrest to the United States

“All the Americans could do was set ablaze a few trash bins,” said the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami, on Thursday. Salami described the protest movement as “sedition” in which “only a tiny number of women joined the call of the devil to remove their hijabs.”