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Iran: Furious, the regime takes revenge by attacking high school girls with poison gas

By the editor

After 100 days of poison gas attacks on girls' schools in Iran resulting in the poisoning, intoxication and hospitalization of thousands of school and high school girls, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the theocratic dictatorship, finally broke his silence to attribute these crimes to hands outside his regime. This is hardly surprising for connoisseurs of the all-out demagoguery mixed with the Goebbelsian propaganda that characterizes the old loner of Tehran.

"If really hands are behind this case," said Ali Khamenei, "it is a big intolerable crime." "If individuals are implicated in this affair", he repeated, "the authors and the sponsors must be sentenced to the maximum penalty".

For more than three months, an unprecedented wave of gas attacks has targeted high school girls in more than half of the country's departments. Two high school girls lost their lives in these biological attacks, and thousands more were hospitalized. The virtual silence and inaction of the authorities on this targeting of high school girls leaves little doubt as to the intentions underlying this violence, especially if we consider the decisive role played by these young girls in the revolution which shook the Iran since last September. Although the movement took on a less violent or visible form, everyone, including the regime's leaders, recognizes that it never completely died out and that a spark would be enough to reignite the flame.

Although Khamenei tried to exonerate his regime from the gas attacks, he still acknowledged that "the goal is to create a climate of terror and psychological insecurity in society".

Who benefits from this climate of terror in the current circumstances, if not a beleaguered regime which is trying by all means to prevent a resumption of the revolt which promises to be much more devastating for power than the previous one? Theocracy has too often played this card of mass crime committed by itself and then attributed to others, with the aim of deceiving and distracting national and international opinion from the real difficulties and crises it faces. many Western media "a large number of citizens believe that power is actually at the origin of these poisonings. And anger is igniting again across the country. " (The world)

The chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabsha during the Iran-Iraq war, the bombing of the mausoleum of the 8th Imam of the Shiites in Mashhad (northeastern Iran) in 1994, the serial acid attacks against women in 2015, the attack on another mausoleum in Shiraz (south of the country) in 2022 and dozens of other examples, all of which turned out to have been ordered by the Supreme Leader in no one, recall that this method has become commonplace for Khamenei, without forgetting the experience acquired by the regime's forces during the war in Syria where they supported the regime in Damascus and where chemical attacks of various intensity were used against the civilian population to kill, incapacitate or create a climate of terror.

The pill is so hard to swallow that even the government-sanctioned press cast doubt on claims that the source of the poisonings of high school girls is outside the inner circle of the top of the hierarchy in Tehran. This unprecedented case is so serious that we can afford to see cracks appear within the power itself.

Thus, for example, "procuring a toxic gas is the business of specialists and could not be the work of the ordinary citizen. Those who poison high school girls are certainly among our ignorant friends," wrote the newspaper Arman Meli on March 4.

"Whatever the origin of these attacks, let's hope that the language of the sponsor and the hands of the executors are torn out, even if they claim to obey the faith", adds the same day the newspaper Jomhouri-Eslami, in an allusion to trouble hidden from hidden hands within power.

An idea retained by authorities who want to believe in crimes committed by lone wolves or at most organized religious extremists. But the population is of the opinion that the most extremist, most fanatical and best organized structure in Iran is the Iranian regime itself.

"The gas attacks on high school girls sparked protests in Tehran and several other cities. Over the weekend, parents gathered in some cities in front of government centers to protest the authorities' inaction. Usually, the demonstrators were brutally attacked by the Revolutionary Guards and the police dressed in civilian clothes of the regime, was to promise more repression by threatening protesters with maximum sentences.

"Khamenei is taking revenge on the young girls who have been instrumental in the uprisings of the past few months to try to intimidate them", replied Maryam Rajavi during her address to the World Women's Day Conference which was held in Brussels on March 4th.

The President-elect of the Iranian Resistance underlined that these attempts by the regime will remain ineffective: "In her vanguard role, the Iranian Woman supported by men across Iran will defeat the religious dictator and contribute to the advent of democracy and equality between men and women.

"An uprising a hundred times more devastating than the previous one will soon come," she promised.