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Features

Almost 90 Kurdish Citizens Arrested in Less Than a Month

February 1, 2021
OstanWire
1 min read
Almost 90 Kurdish Citizens Arrested in Less Than a Month

Reports have of the arrests of three more Kurdish Iranians in the cities of Oshnavieh and Urmia, in West Azerbaijan province.

These latest arrests follow a widespread wave of detentions of Kurdish citizens in Iran which began on January 9 this year.

The Kurdish human rights organization Hengaw writes that on Saturday, January 30, security forces arrested an Oshnavieh resident named Fardin Bayazidi and transferred him to an unknown location.

Then on the evening of the same day, officers raided the home of another Oshnavieh resident, Vahed Sheikh Mohammadi, and took him away.

The day before, a Kurdish citizen named Rasoul Ghezelbash had been detained in the Shahriar neighborhood of Urmia.

Hengaw states that all three men were charged with “collaborating with a Kurdish party” – as opposed to the Islamic Republic – and their whereabouts remains unknown.

In the past four weeks alone, at least 89 Kurdish citizens have been detained by the security apparatus in various cities in Iran. The first few days of arrests were conducted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s intelligence branch in Urmia. Since then, other detentions have taken place under the auspices of the Ministry of Intelligence.

The Human Rights Organization of Iran has said that the purpose of these arrests was to suppress the growth of Kurdish civil society. The detainees, this NGO claimed, had been active in the various fields of culture, the environment and student life.

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