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On Saturday morning, Zari, a 42-year-old housewife, was in a food market in Shiraz, Iran. She was daily investigating the ever-changing prices of staples and trying to figure out how to make money to buy the groceries she needed to feed her three teenage sons.
She went home after spending the same amount as the previous week but with a much lighter bag of food. By angrily rearranging her shopping in her kitchen, she called her sister. It was not long before she cursed the government for its mismanagement of the economy, which made life more and more difficult. These calls to his sister were regular and his litany of frustrations had increased since the Iranian currency had fallen to record levels in July. Interrupting his mid-term list, Zari's sister told him to turn on the television. There had been a terrorist attack in the country.
Moments earlier, at least five gunmen opened fire at a routine military parade in the southwestern town of Ahvaz, capital of Khuzestan Province, Iran. The terrorists, whom the official Iranian news agency has identified as separatists "backed by Arab reactionary countries," killed at least 24 people, including a four-year-old boy, and injured nearly 70 others. including young soldiers serving their mandatory two-year military service.
Zari's body froze. "The grocery store was no longer important to me," she said on the phone. "I just watched the news, switch between public TV and satellite stations. I saw pictures of all those scared young men while they were being attacked. My boys will be in military services in a few years. And if it was one of them? I thought at that time: "We are really attacked".
Zari's reaction was echoed by others, including those who criticized the regime's treatment of the economy. Reza, a 52-year-old engineer from Isfahan, has a daughter studying in the United States. He ended up in the hospital in July because of dangerous high blood pressure after the initial fall of the currency. "Every hour of the day, I dig my brain trying to figure out how to get my daughter out of school, and blame the government for everything," he said. "But with Saturday's attack, he continued, it's not just about economics for me anymore." It's now about protecting the country. "
Like many other people around the world, the terrorist attack rallied the Iranians around the flag. Over the last two decades, Iranian nationalism has already developed in response to a regime that has constantly brought Islam to the fore. The trend of patriotism has recently been driven by the increasingly extensive proxy war with Saudi Arabia, which has fueled anti-Arab sentiment in the country. Since the early 2000s, there has been a spike of pre-Islamic Persian names for babies. the farvahar– a symbol of Zoroastrianism, which predates Islam – became a popular tattoo, just like a pendant sold across the country. And there has been a revival of interest in the pre-Islamic history of Persia, fueling domestic tourism to archaeological sites. The regime, yet Islamist, sought to capitalize on this rise of nationalism, including draping large national flags along the highways and bridges (pillar of the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from 2005 to 2013, with his notion of "l & # 39; 39, Iranian Islam ").
Saturday's attack also touched a particular nerve because many of the dead were conscripts. In a country where all young men must eventually serve in the military, their deaths have created empathy in all sectors of society, regardless of individual opinions of individuals on politics or the regime.
The strike in Ahvaz has become a particularly significant day – the 38th anniversary of the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), which the military parade was to commemorate. Although the rest of the world has moved out of this conflict, it has had a profound impact on both countries concerned and on the geopolitics of the Middle East. The war lasted for eight long years and involved a bloody war in the trenches and the use of chemical and neurotoxic agents. "The Iran-Iraq war was the Third World War," said Morteza Sarhangi, a writer and leader of one of the main government cultural centers, Howzeh Honari.
He is not wrong. The United States and the European powers – with the help of almost all Arab states – provided arms to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein during the war in the hope of undermining the new revolutionary regime led by the United States. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. West Germany even helped build factories in the Iraqi cities of Samarra and Fallujah to make chemical bombs that would be dropped on battlefields in Iran, civilian cities such as Sardasht and Marivan and the Kurdish city. from Halabja. Meanwhile, the United States has secretly sold arms to Iran (in what has been called the Iran-Contra scandal) to prolong the war of attrition between the two Middle East neighbors and weaken them. in the new geopolitical order after 1979.
In the end, the war (in which both sides declared victory) helped the nascent Iranian revolutionary government, which had just overthrown the American shah and declared Iran a nation independent of US and Soviet interference, consolidate his power. But, more importantly, war has become the goal through which a whole generation of Iranians has understood the consequences of such a declaration of independence.
These eight long years, with nearly 500,000 victims, gave rise to the concept of realpolitik. "Just because we did not want to be the lackeys of the United States anymore … [the United States] makes sure to isolate our country and make us their number one enemy in the region, "said a captain of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Even though "other countries in the region have formed and funded terrorists who have attacked the United States," he continued, "they are never the target of American anger because their leaders are bowing to the whims of the United States. he said, "but today's young people have had a hard time believing it, and it's our fault if we can not communicate that to them." .
The majority of the 80 million Iranians are under 35 years old. Most of these Iranians do not remember the 1979 revolution or the war. And explaining to them the meaning of these events confused the regime, which debated how to convince increasingly disgruntled groups, such as young people, women and workers. These debates became more important after the massive protests of 2009, the most important since the 1979 revolution, during which songs of "Down with the dictator" were heard in the streets for the first time in 30 years.
Faced with a crisis of legitimacy, the regime's media producers have worked seriously to reframe the Islamic Republic, and in particular the IRGC, into a nationalist force that defends all Iranians, not just those they consider to be Islamic citizens. . Since such efforts have been accompanied by a high dose of oppression, they have mostly fallen in the ears of a deaf person. However, there were times, especially when the Arab Spring gave way to civil war and the specter of US-backed opposition forces became reality. Tehran has managed to position the IRGC as a national symbol protecting Iran from falling into the same fate as its neighbors. With the Iranian economy collapsing in recent months, and with nationwide protests to strengthen the regime's management and mismanagement, this support has further diminished.
Saturday's attack provided a golden opportunity for the regime to connect the points to the public. The fact that Saudi Arabia supported the Iranian armed opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) to foment discord within Iran also contributed to the situation. Even more striking, the personal lawyer of US President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, spoke the same day at a major MEK conference in New York, where he called for a regime change in the country.
The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was quick to make the jump. The attack in Ahvaz, he said, "is the continuation of the plots of regional states that are puppets of the United States and their goal is to create insecurity in our beloved country". between US activities in the region and Trump administration officials speaking favorably of WIPO. On the social networks, Iranian users circulate memes and text messages accusing US-backed actors in the region of tragedy and denouncing the MEK for being traitors to their country.
"I thought that with the agreement on Iran, we could finally be welcomed into the international community and the situation in the interior of the country could be approved," said Hamid, a 25-year-old engineer who is currently doing his two-year compulsory military service. IRGC in Tehran. "But Trump and the Saudis want to provoke us in a war." And for him, that changes things. "I never considered myself a nationalist. I always wanted to finish this service and continue my studies abroad. But now, I can feel that they are fighting against us on many levels, including economically, and I will defend my country. While it is difficult to gauge the scope of these feelings, the Iranian nationalists' online sentiments and a rise in anti-Arab rhetoric, especially anti-Gulf and anti-Saudi, since the weekend.
For Zari, the thought of her three sons who fought during a war prevented her from staying in the night since Saturday's attack. "We struggled economically during the eight-year war and with sanctions afterwards," she said. "I was hoping things would change, but now I see that the United States does not want to leave us alone." And so, she said, "If prices keep rising, I'll bite my teeth as before, but I'm not waiting here for foreign powers to dictate who will govern us." We are an independent country.
