(TheLibertyRevolution.com)- On Thursday, Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi traveled to the province of Kurdistan, home to Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman fatally beaten by Iranian “morality police” for allegedly wearing a scarf improperly. Raisi dismissed months of nationwide demonstrations and asserted that the country’s ethnic Kurds supported the Islamic regime.
The Iranian Islamist administration forced women to wear the hijab, or Islamic headscarf, ostensibly as a requirement for practicing Islam, even though the Quran does not mention hijabs. As a result, Amini was violently killed. Iranian Kurdistan has frequently served as a focal point for regime opposition since the Persian-led dictatorship regularly used excessive brutality to suppress ethnic minorities, mainly Kurds.
With territory spanning Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, Kurds are the biggest ethnic group in the Middle East that does not have a state. Even though Kurdish militias played a vital role in the fall of the Islamic State’s Mideast “caliphate,” the governments of all four countries have vehemently opposed any attempt by Kurdish groups to establish independent nations for years and viewed Kurdish organizations as a national security threat.
Before taking office as president of Iran, Raisi gained notoriety for orchestrating the 1988 mass murder of 5,000–30,000 members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) and Mujahedin-e-Khalq, two anti-regime leftist organizations (MEK).
Raisi was supposed to open a new drinking water project in the Kurdistan region, but instead, he met with clerics and made speeches denouncing regime opponents and their claimed Western allies while he was there.
According to the Iranian state-run PressTV, Raisi stated in a speech in the regional capital of Sanandaj that “in the recent events, counterrevolution elements made a scandalous miscalculation as usual as part of their continued acts of betrayal, and other crimes were added to their record of betrayals.”
Without explicitly naming the alleged “counterrevolution elements” in question, Raisi declared, “They thought that they could achieve their malicious goals by causing chaos, insecurity, and terrorist acts, but they were dismissive of the fact that the noble people of Kurdistan have had… thousands of martyrs in the Revolution.”
Raisi also cited the 1980s Iran-Iraq war to assert that Kurds, despite their prominence in the present protest movement, overwhelmingly favor Islamist rule.
Iranian hard-line cleric Ebrahim Raisi has been quoted as saying that the protests in Iran are the work of foreign agents, most likely the United States and Israel.
The Iranian regime has refuted claims that its repressive agents are to blame for the hundreds of fatalities during protests in Amini’s honor. As of this week, at least 448 individuals have been killed by police, according to Iran Human Rights, a Norwegian NGO, reports France 24.
