War Veteran's Mother and Sister Attacked by Fanatics Over Hijab

An alleyway in Shiraz has been sealed off after two veiled women were physically attacked by two conservative women influenced by government policy on hijab.

The incident on Sunday came in the wake of a wide-ranging crackdown by the Iranian state on women’s civil rights, affecting major cities including Shiraz. Multiple women have been arrested in recent months for not following Tehran’s mandatory hijab rule.

The Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has also issued a 119-page policy document aimed mostly at local government, calling for increased surveillance of women and a higher degree of interventions over what they wear.

Iranian news outlets report that on this occasion, though, the two victims of state-sanctioned violence happened to be the wife and daughter of an Iran-Iraq war martyr named Mansour Karim Sadegh.

Their two assailants were later arrested in the Golestan Town area of Shiraz while the scene of the assault, Mostafavi Passage, was closed by police. The governor of Shiraz city, Lotfollah Shibani, said on Monday night that they had acted “because of the verbal reminders to observe hijab, enjoin what is good and prevent what is bad.”

Last May Ahmah Alam al-Hoda, the influential Friday Imam of Mashhad and President Ebrahim Raisi’s father-in-law, told people not to wait for the police to act if they saw an unveiled woman in public.

“The prevention of vice is obligatory on all, and it is not permissible to be indifferent about lack of hijab,” he said. “Everyone should feel responsible.”