لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
On Saturday morning, Zari, a 42-year-old homemaker, was in a food market in Shiraz, Iran. She was going about her daily investigation into ever-changing prices on basic goods and trying to figure out how to make her money stretch to buy the groceries she needed to feed her three teenage sons.
She came home having spent the same amount as the week before but with a far lighter bag of food. As she angrily rearranged her groceries in her kitchen, she called her sister. It wasn’t long before she was cursing the government for its mismanagement of the economy, which was making life harder and harder. Such calls to her sister were regular, and her litany of frustrations had grown longer since the Iranian currency plummeted to record lows in July. Interrupting her list about halfway through, Zari’s sister told her to turn on the television. There had been a terrorist attack in the country.
Just moments before, at least five gunmen had opened fire at a routine military parade in the southwestern city of Ahvaz, the capital of Iran’s Khuzestan province. The terrorists, whom Iran’s official news agency identified as being separatists “supported by the Arab reactionary countries” had killed at least 24 people, including a 4-year-old boy, and wounded nearly 70. By the latest count, 11 of those killed included young soldiers serving their mandatory two-year military service.
Zari’s body froze. “The groceries no longer mattered to me,” she said by phone. “I just looked at the news, flipping between channels on state television and the satellite stations. I saw pictures of all those young men scared as they were under attack. My boys will be in military services in just a few years. What if it had been one of them?
I thought at that point, ‘We really are under attack.’”
Zari’s reaction was echoed by others, including those who have been critical of the regime’s handling of the economy. Reza, a 52-year-old engineer from the city of Isfahan, has a daughter studying in the United States. He ended up in the hospital this July from dangerously high blood pressure after the initial plunge of the currency. “Every hour of the day, I’m racking my brain trying to figure out how to make sure my daughter can finish her studies abroad, and I blamed the government for everything,” he said. “But with Saturday’s attack,” he continued, “it’s not just about the economy anymore for me. It’s now about safeguarding the country.”
Like it would many other people around the world, the terrorist attack has rallied Iranians around the flag.
Over the past two decades, Iranian nationalism had already been growing in response to a regime that has constantly foregrounded Islam instead. The trend toward patriotism has recently been pushed even further by the ever-expanding proxy war with Saudi Arabia, which has fueled anti-Arab sentiment in the country. Since the early 2000s, there has been a spike in pre-Islamic Persian names for babies. The farvahar—a symbol of Zoroastrianism, which predates Islam—has become a popular tattoo as well as pendant sold across the country. And there has been a resurgence of interest in pre-Islamic Persian history, fueling domestic tourism to archaeological sites. The regime, staunchly Islamist though it may be, has sought to capitalize on this rise in nationalism, including by draping large national flags along highways and bridges (a mainstay of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency from 2005 to 2013, along with his notion of “Iranian Islam”).
The attack on Saturday also hit a particular nerve because so many of the dead were conscripts. In a country in which all young men must eventually serve in the military, their deaths have been met with empathy across all sectors of society, regardless of people’s individual opinions on politics or the regime.
Making the deaths all the more poignant, the strike in Ahvaz came on an especially meaningful day—the 38th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), which the military parade there was meant to commemorate. Although much of the rest of the world has moved on from that conflict, it had a profound impact on the two countries involved and on the geopolitics of the Middle East. The war lasted for eight long years, and it involved bloody trench warfare and the use of chemical and nerve agents. “The Iran-Iraq War was World War III,” said Morteza Sarhangi, a writer and leader of one of the government’s main cultural centers, Howzeh Honari.
He’s not wrong. The United States and European powers—with the help of nearly all the Arab states—provided weapons to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein during the war in the hopes of undermining the new revolutionary regime led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. West Germany even helped build factories in the Iraqi cities of Samarra and Fallujah to manufacture chemical bombs, which would be dropped on battlefields in Iran, civilian towns such Sardasht and Marivan, and Iraq’s own Kurdish town of Halabja. Meanwhile, the United States also covertly sold weapons to Iran (in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal) to prolong the war of attrition between the two Middle Eastern neighbors and render them weak in the new post-1979 geopolitical order.
In the end, the war (in which both sides declared victory) helped Iran’s nascent revolutionary government, which had only just ousted the U.S.-backed shah and declared Iran a nation independent from both American and Soviet meddling, consolidate its power. But, more importantly, the war became the lens through which an entire generation of Iranians came to understand the consequences of such a declaration of independence.
Those eight long years, with nearly 500,000 casualties, brought home the concept of realpolitik. “Just because we were no longer willing to be the lackeys of the United States … [the United States] made sure to isolate our country and to make us their No. 1 enemy in the region,” a captain in the country’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said. Even though “other countries in the region have trained and funded terrorists that have attacked the United States,” he continued, “they’re never the target of American ire because their rulers bend to America’s whims.” This is something the older generation understands, he said, “but young people today had a hard time believing that, and that’s our fault for not being able to communicate this to them.”
