Mar 07, 2024 - 09:29
By asiatimes.com

Time to stop Iran’s unchecked killing of Kurds

Since the 2022 death of Jîna Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman held in police custody for wearing her hijab inappropriately, Iranian demonstrators have protested against the repressive regime and the surge of executions of ethnic and religious political dissidents.

In the first 11 months of 2023, Iran had executed 746 people, prompting United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to observe that Iran was carrying them out “at an alarming rate.”

So far in 2024, Iran has executed at least eight Kurdish political prisoners, including four on Jan. 29, 2024, who were convicted on dubious charges such as waging war against God and corruption on Earth.

As a Kurdish-born scholar and a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Central Florida, I have previously written about the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement and the Kurdish female fighters who focus on the protection of women’s rights and protests by the Iranian people against their government.

Those demonstrations include protests against Iran’s use of the death penalty that, according to a 2022 US Department of State report, “disproportionately affected religious and ethnic minorities.”

With hardliners maintaining grip on parliament after the election held on March 1, 2024, the plight of ethnic and religious minorities remains an ongoing tragedy with no end in sight. Because of a nationwide boycott of the election, voter turnout was estimated at less than 41 percent, the lowest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

As human rights organization Amnesty International warned in 2023, the Iranian authorities had embarked on an “execution spree.”