Iranian women have always borne the brunt of the clerical regime’s suppression with their flesh and bone. As for occupation, education, sports and clothing, they suffer from restrictions and deprivations far more than men. However, they enjoy “equality” in executions, arrests and torture. In every political impasse and economic crisis, women are the first group to pay the price. On the flip side of the coin, the regime’s unbridled terrorism has no mercy on female opponents.
On August 21, International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism, we commemorate Iranian women who became victims of the Iranian regime’s terrorism for their opposition to the regime.
Effat Haddad and Fereshteh Esfandiari
On the morning of May 17, 1995, terrorists dispatched by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry to Baghdad opened fire from behind on a vehicle carrying five women, members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), and escaped.
Effat Haddad and Fereshteh Esfandiari were killed in this attack and Sedigheh Khodaii Sefat was seriously wounded.
Effat Haddad had four children from 9 to 14 years old. She was a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and one of the officials in charge of logistics in the National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA).
Fereshteh Esfandiari was an experienced announcer of the PMOI’s Voice of Mojahed Radio.
Zahra Rajabi
On the night of February 21, 1996, Zahra Rajabi who had travelled to Turkey to attend to the situation of Iranian refugees in that country was assassinated in Istanbul by the Iranian regime’s terrorist diplomats and three other terrorists directly sent by the Intelligence Ministry in Tehran to carry out this mission according to a plan approved by the regime’s Supreme Security Council.
Zahra Rajabi was in charge of refugee affairs in the National Council of Resistance of Iran. She was a member of the PMOI’s Leadership Council. She had studied at Tehran’s Melli University and graduated in Architectural Engineering. During her time in college, she became one of the leaders of the student movement in Tehran.
Pouran Najafi
Pouran Najafi and five other PMOI members were killed in the first missile attack on Camp Liberty on February 9, 2013. Camp Liberty accommodated some 3,000 members of the PMOI who were protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Born in 1960 in Rasht, Pouran Najafi had a daughter and a son. She had spent five years in the clerical regime’s jails as a political prisoner and had written a book about her experiences and what she had witnessed in prison.
Kolsoum Serahati
On June 15, 2013, simultaneous with Rouhani’s election as the regime’s president, the clerical regime’s terrorists launched another terrorist attack, firing dozens of 107mm missiles at Camp Liberty in a bid to take more lives of PMOI members. Kolsoum Serahati was among the victims of this attack.
Massacre on September 1, 2013
Iraqi mercenaries of the Iranian regime infiltrated into Camp Ashraf on September 1, 2013, bent on slaughtering more than 100 PMOI members based there. They killed 52 of them including six women and abducted 7, including another six women. No information has been available on the fate of the hostages to date.
Zohreh Ghaemi, Giti Givechinian, Mitra Bagherzadeh, Jila Tolou, Fatemeh Kamyab, and Maryam Hosseini were among the victims of this vicious terrorist attack on residents of Camp Ashraf.
The history of the Iranian regime shows that four decades of appeasement by the West has enabled and emboldened the mullahs to commit countless crimes with impunity. The time has come for major powers to give up their appeasement of the first state-sponsor and the central banker of terrorism and the world’s top record holder of executions, and stop giving it concessions.
It is time for them to stand on the side of the Iranian people and Resistance. Any commerce, trade or exchange with the mullahs’ regime which turns a blind eye on the abuse of Iranian people’s human rights and ignores double discriminations against Iranian women, will encourage the clerical regime to continue their suppression and ceaseless executions, trample the Iranian people’s rights and ignore the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Charter.
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