‘They killed all our youth’: Cries for help from besieged Kurdish city in Iran

Fazel Hawramy

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iranian authorities on Monday night deployed thousands of security forces in armored vehicles, including riot police, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and its paramilitary wing Basij into the streets of the Kurdish city of Sanandaj in western Iran, launching a violent assault. 

Hengaw Organization for Human Rights provided exclusive footage to Rudaw English which showed security firing heavy machine guns into civilian houses and shot at protesters who were burning tires and blocking roads. With the internet heavily restricted, few videos were able to circulate to show the harrowing scenes of an impending massacre in the city. 

The ferocity of the attack on the city prompted Amnesty International to issue a warning about the violent crackdown taking place, accusing the authorities of cutting access to the internet in order to conceal their crimes. 

“I can only tell you that in Baharan and Neysar [neighborhoods], they did not have mercy on the dead or the living, it was just constant shooting,” one protester told Rudaw's Fuad Haghighi from the city. “There were security forces as far as the eye could see.” Other videos showed fires sparked across the city as protesters confronted the security forces.

Hengaw, which monitors the violations in the Kurdish areas, published a video showing the range of bullets used by the authorities against protesters in recent days, including tear gas cannisters and bullets of Kalashnikovs.

“They killed all of them, they killed all our youth,” a woman can be heard sobbing in a video from the city on Monday night, two nights after the security forces gunned down four young men in the city and killed another during torture in the nearby town of Saqqez, where the nationwide protests originated last month. A seven year old child was also shot killed by the security forces.

“No one is coming to our rescue, all we can do is to scream from our houses,” the woman cried out as gunfire could be heard in the distance.

Kurdish areas in western Iran (Rojhelat) have seen violent protests in the wake of the death of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini at the hands of the morality police in mid-September in Tehran. At least 185 people have been killed countrywide by the security forces and many more have been wounded with thousands of people detained, according to Oslo-based Iran Human Rights Organization. 

Paris-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN), which is run by a number of Kurdish activists, said that at least 30 were killed in the Kurdish areas in four weeks of protests while 825 people were wounded.

The war on the city of Sanandaj is reminiscent of the war in April 1980 in which the IRGC pounded the city with helicopter gunships, mortars, and heavy machine guns, killing hundreds of the residents. The massacre gave the city the nickname of “bloodied Sena, the gateway to revolution,” in a reference to the city’s Kurdish name.  

The 1980 attack on the Kurdish areas came after the Kurds rejected the Islamic republic’s implementation of Sharia law on the country. The founder of the Islamic republic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a religious edict describing the Kurds who rebelled against the state as infidels. In recent weeks, Iranian officials, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have described protesters as agents of foreign countries such as Israel and the US. 

“The IRGC attacked the city for 24 days with all they had and fired on people, and killed hundreds and thousands were wounded, the fired mortars from their bases into the city,” a nurse who remembered the massacre of 1980 recalled the nearly one month siege on the city.

For years, the extent of the 1980 massacre in the city of Sanandaj was largely unknown as the security forces arrested thousands of people while many others were dealt with by the firing squads. 

With no internet in the city, it is difficult to gauge the extent of the current crackdown but many families are reported to have kept their wounded loved ones at home for fear of being arrested by the security forces.

Violent unrest also took place in other parts of the country, in particular in several neighborhoods of the capital Tehran. Security forces did not shy away from arresting school children.

“This is Sanandaj,” another resident said from his apartment window as a large number of security forces gathered near his apartment building firing randomly in different directions.