US House Votes 420-1 To Support Iran's Protest Movement

An audio file emerged on social media last week in which a man identified as Firouzi or someone posing as him said he had only one wish, to be allowed to see his baby daughter one more time before being executed. He also said he was being tortured to make a scripted “confession” but that he knew he would be executed whether he complied or not. He said he was arrested during recent protests.

Several Iranian television channels abroad reported on the case, including Iran International, with available photos showing him badly tortured.

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Then on January 22 Iran’s Judiciary issued a statement and claimed that no one by the name of Hassan Firouzi had ever been arrested.

Its official Mizan News Agency made a further claim Wednesday that Hassan Firouzi, was arrested while fleeing the country.

Mizan also published several photos of the detained man in an empty plane with Qeshm Air logo visible in the cabin. Mizan claimed that Firouzi had faked his arrest and torture to escape from his creditors and carried out his plan with the help of “hostile foreign-based media” and provided them with his fake torture photos and stories.

Pro-regime media and social media are currently abuzz with claims that other cases of dead protester and torture are similarly fake.

The social media account of Iran Human Rights Society which is reportedly affiliated to the Mujahedeen Khalq Organization (MEK) last week claimed that Firouzi had gone into a coma resulting from further tortures because of sending out the recorded message. It was also claimed that his family had been taken to a hospital to see him for the last time.

Some journalists and social media activists such as Masoud Kazemian became suspicious of the case for several reasons including the leaking of unique and gruesome photos of a tortured Firouzi and his audio file but no records of his trial or sentencing, as social media reports were claiming. There was also no trace of his family and friends speaking about his case.

A human rights activist based in Europe who in December established a Twitter account, Political Sponsorship Iran (@PoSpoIr), as a centralized hub for sponsorship of political prisoners told Iran International that Firouzi case is being used by the regime’s propaganda machine to discredit the international effort by hundreds of European lawmakers and activists to prevent the torture and execution of Iranian protesters.

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“Hassan Firouzi has three French, one German, one Canadian and one Danish sponsor because his reported circumstances seemed to be exceptionally dire. Planning this and making his case look fabricated is psychological war,” the activist behind @PoSpoIr said.

“You don’t win all the time in a war. Firouzi’s case, if it is really a hoax, does not rule out the authenticity of hundreds of other cases or stop parliamentarians who are well-informed about the regime’s dirty tricks from volunteering to take political sponsorship of other prisoners or pursuing the cases they have already accepted,” she added.

There are also some people who think a Hassan Firouzi may have really been arrested for protesting, tortured and sentenced to death, and again tortured to say he had never been arrested and had only faked the whole story.

“We cannot confirm, based on the extant information, that whether this person’s life is in danger or not,” Seda-ye Shahrivar, a Twitter account dedicated to the news of recent protests, said about the case while pointing out that the situation could result in “lack of trust and confusion over the conditions of political prisoners” by creating doubt about their veracity.

The regime’s security forces use violence against protesters on streets, kicking them violently, beating them with batons and shooting at them, but the psychological and physical torture that they exert on detained protesters are harsher and unrelenting. 

The regime’s agents beat protesters so badly that in some cases when they appear in court the scars and bruises are so obvious that people can easily understand confessions were made under duress. 

The Center for Human Rights in Iran said December 6 that there have been many reports of detained university students being tortured and sexually abused while in state custody. Soha Mortezaei, a former Tehran University female student, who has been repeatedly arrested for engaging in peaceful activism, was physically and sexually assaulted while being transferred to Evin prison after her arrest. “Officers tied Soha’s right hand to the top of one seat and her right leg to the top of another seat while suspended, she was beaten and sexually abused by a female officer,” reported the University Students Trade Unions Council on November 27. 

Most of the protesters who are being kept in main prisons are mainly subjected to psychological torture but reports of physical torture get more attention from the public and rights groups. The detainees are constantly threatened to be killed or raped and some of them are victims of white torture, in which prisoners are kept in solitary confinement without any human contact for very long periods of time. 

Some protesters, who were usually injured during their arrests or became ill inside prisons, are deprived of medical care or treatment for their wounds as a form of torture. The protesters who are suffering from chronic conditions and need daily medication are put under pressure by not giving them their medicines. 

Faraz Haghighatjou, a resident of Shiraz and a member of the oppressed Baha’i religious group, who was arrested during protests in December, once called his family and asked for his medicines and warm clothes but his family could not even find out where he is being kept. 

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Imprisoned civil and human rights activist Narges Mohammadi last week recounted harrowing details of what is happening inside the women's ward of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. She said almost all 60 female prisoners there have experienced "terrible inhumane tortures". These women spent from several months to about two years in solitary confinement, some without any human contact.

Another report released by an activist group earlier in the week says 16 young people arrested in Urumieh in November, including several minors, have been tortured and threatened with rape to incriminate each other. The group said that IRGC’s intelligence organization in West Azarbaijan Province has been torturing these young people to ‘confess’ against each other and say they are in contact with foreign intelligence services.

The protesters who were executed by the regime on trumped up charges in December were also said to have confessed to crimes they did not commit under physical and mental torture in prison. 

A victim from the religious city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, said she and eleven others were stripped in front of male officers and then forced to squat jump while the officers “frenziedly laughed.” Others have also said officers had groped their backsides and squeezed their breasts during arrest and interrogations. Many say they were threatened with rape or even rape of their family members.

Armita Abbasi, a young woman of 20, was reportedly raped brutally after being arrested on October 10. She was taken to a hospital in Karaj on October 18 by security forces with multiple injuries including rectal bleeding and evidence of repeated rape. Reportedly, they tried to pressure the doctors to attribute the rape trauma evidence to a time prior to her arrest.

Influential Sunni cleric Mowlavi Abdolhamid in his Friday sermon December 23 referred to reports of rape and torture of detainees. In a tweet on December 5, Abdolhamid had said the accounts of sexual assault on female detainees to humiliate them or to force them to make false “confessions” against themselves corroborate the allegations made by the media.

In a report on December 21 entitled “Brutal Repression in Kurdistan Capital”, Human Rights Watch said it has documented serious abuses, including sexual harassment and assault against detainees.

Such incidents have been reported from detention centers, prisons, and sometimes in places outside the official system such as warehouses out of town in several major cities including Esfahan, Rasht, Tehran, Karaj, Bandar Abbas, Ahvaz, Tabriz, Sanandaj, Amol, and Mashhad.

The torture of prisoners is not limited to the protesters arrested in the current wave of nationwide rallies ignited by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. The regime is known for its inhumane methods regularly reported by human rights groups.

In a letter by Sepideh Kashani, one of the ecologists and environmentalists detained since 2018 based on accusations of spying for foreign governments, said her interrogators tortured and threatened her with sexual assault for over 1,200 hours during the eight months that she was held incommunicado. She said that her interrogators forced her to stand for hours and was not even allowed to lean his head against the wall. She added that she was being interrogated in a room whose walls were covered by the blood of other protesters.

The Committee said in a tweet Wednesday that “it is pleased to see the US, UK, and the EU impose these latest sanctions on Iran, including on IRGC officials responsible for brutal violence against protesters.”

Iran has been the scene of anti-regime protests since mid-September when 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini was killed in police custody. The Iranian authorities used deadly violence in dealing with protesters killing over 500 and detaining almost 20,000.

The clerical rulers have also executed four young protesters on charges of “War against God” and “corruption on earth” so far.

“Our message to the regime in Tehran is stronger when we speak with one voice,” the US Senate Foreign Relations added.

Meanwhile, Republican Senator Rick Scott told Iran International that "We should not be negotiating with Iran except to make sure they start giving liberty and freedom to their citizens and stop being a menace to the world.”

The brutal suppression of the popular protests by the Islamic Republic has been widely condemned in the world by governments, politicians and influential public figures.

The United States and its European allies say that they are not focused on nuclear talks with Iran because of Tehran’s human rights violations and its supply of military drones to Russia.

Speaking at a seminar about the protests and their socio-economic and political implications, Former Government Spokesman Ali Rabiei opined that the Iranian government can still prevent an upcoming crises by correcting its policies and reform its domestic politics.

Rabiei, who served under former President Hassan Rouhani, said that recent developments showed that what can save the country from further trouble is the ballot box. He added: "Ballot boxes can turn the outcry in the streets into systematic behavior.

Hardliners in Iran have controlled latest parliamentary and presidential elections tightly, disqualifying so-called reformist from running and establishing full control over the government. Those who were prevented from a share of power, including many from Rouhani administration, blame the current political and economic crisis on this monopoly of power by hardliners.

Rabiei added that reforms also need to be made in the economic, cultural and media policies, stressing that cultural values in Iran should be made consistent with the modern thinking of the young generation.

"Those involved in business have very well realized that the most important impact of recent protests is lack of confidence in the economy and lack of predictability of economic trends. Lack of investment in recent years is an outcome of insecurity. Now it is not only academic and scientific elites that leave the country for good; investors and entrepreneurs are also emigrating," Rabiei said.

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He pointed out that unlike what Iranian hardliners say, sanctions have left a badly hurt the economy and the poor working class in Iran. At the same time, if Iran does not send signals of reform to the outside world, further sanctions will be on their way to exert more pressure on the economy. He urged officials to avoid further tensions in Iran’s foreign policy by refraining from provocative and outlandish analyses."

Meanwhile, prominent sociologist Mohammad Fazeli said at the conference sponsored by Donya-ye Eqtesad daily that "Both sides in the Iranian protests need to make concessions. But this needs to start with the government, although both sides should come forward step by step."

Economist and former Central bank Governor Hossein Abdoh Tabrizi said: "By looking at the protests, one might think initially that they are not predominantly rooted in the economy. Nonetheless, there are massive economic grievances such as the problems of recession, inflation, unemployment, financial corruption, and lack of investment lingering for a long time. Undoubtedly, a majority of the people are concerned about these problems."

He said: "Iranian officials have never looked at economics as a science. So, everyone including officials tend to express opinions without having any expertise.

Meanwhile, Iranian journalist and political analyst Ahmad Zeidabadi, said that during the protests "If the government's instinct for survival gives way to changes, and protesters show some flexibility, then everything will look better. Previous government supporters have now turned into militant elements while former militants have become more violent. This is not in anyone's interest."

Zeidabadi is one of a few people who is not a hardliner but allowed to regularly express opinions in newspapers as long as he does not question Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the essence of the regime.

He then expressed concern about a revolution, echoing the regime’s alarmist propaganda to dissuade the people from pursuing a regime change. "My preference is not to choose confrontation and regime change as there is no chance for our victory in the short-run. If the situation becomes too unstable, then there will be a collapse. Then, the masses might follow a Fascist individual and totalitarianism might prevail. The only chance for the government is to show signs of change. We have only these two approaches ahead of us."

Several former foreigners and dual citizens held hostage in Iran as well as their families have launched an online campaign to demand release of Iranian political prisoners. 

British-Iranian businessman Anoosheh Ashoori and his daughter Elika, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian academic previously jailed in Iran for over two years, Ghazal Sharmand, the daughter of German-Iranian journalist and software engineer Jamshid Sharmahd – facing execution in Iran, and the daughter of Nahid Taghavi, another German-Iranian rights activist sentenced to 10 years in Iran since October 2020 are among the most prominent figures in the campaign. 

Sharmand’s daughter said the campaign is aimed at showing the world “that the Islamic Regime’s terror extends outside of Iran’s borders, and no one is safe until we all stand up.”

Ashoori’s daughter said in a tweet that “The Islamic Republic continues its cruel practice of hostage taking, rape, torture and murder to rule by fear.” 

“We’re merely a handful of families affected by this barbarity. We come together to raise awareness on the issue and appeal to the public to stand up against this regime,” she added. 

Earlier in the week, Siamak Namazi, who has been kept in jail since October 2015 on trumped-up espionage charges, finished a one-week hunger strike. He released a statement saying that the seven-day hunger strike has left his body a bit weaker, but also, thanks to strong support, his spirit is greatly invigorated.