No one knows who is behind the wave of poisoning attacks on Iranian schoolgirls. Frankly, no one really even knows what exactly is going on. The authorities in the country and the girls and their families believe that the girls have been exposed to poisonous gas. What kind of gas? That is unclear. The exposure apparently took place in schools, which are the common denominator between all the affected girls. This has made the still-ongoing attacks a particularly loaded affair. The schools at the center of events are located in strongholds of the popular anti-government protests that have hit Iran over the past few months. The protests erupted over the refusal of some Iranian women to wear the Hijab head-covering in public, as required by law. The protests, held under the banner, "women, life, freedom," have also led other sectors to call for the Islamic Republic to be toppled.
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The protest may have died down in recent weeks, but it has unleashed processes that the regime has found difficult to stop. More and more women are violating the mandatory hijab laws – even without any connection to political protest. The Islamic Republic is, at the least for the moment, no longer enforcing the law.
The Iranian opposition outside of the country has accused the Revolutionary Guards of an ongoing attack on Iranian women. They charge that the regime is taking revenge on young women who led the protest and is doing so in a sophisticated way without opting for measures such as imprisonment and executions. In reality, however, things are far more complex than "good" against "bad" or than a simplistic "revenge" mechanism.
The authorities in Iran have been left embarrassed by the poisonings. There are no hints such as those familiar to Israelis – "according to foreign sources" that suggest an operation carried out in a far-off country by the Mossad or IDF. It's true that the authorities didn't rush to investigate, but there is no evidence to suggest any attempt at a coverup once the investigation began.
One possibility is that the attacks were carried out by a radical religious organization. Embarrassingly for the Shiite Islamic Republic, these organizations share the ideology of the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and wish to ban girls from receiving an education. The Islamic Republic always boasted that if women stuck to the rules of "modesty and morality" it wouldn't prevent them from acquiring an education or working. Iran's leaders find themselves between the hammer of the protests led by young women who wish to change these "modesty laws" and the anvil of radicals who wish to enforce one, uncompromising version of religion in the public realm. The religious radicals supposedly operate in the name of Islam.
The poisonings could also be a counter-reaction to the loosening of hijab enforcement that is evident across Iran. The new reality that has been established is perceived as a victory for the protest movement and as proof of the structural weakness of the Islamic Republic. If this is the case, then this could be an expression of anger and frustration in revolutionary circles. The poisonings and the way they have been handled are testimony to the complex reality faced by the leadership in Tehran. It is important to remember this complexity in political and strategic contexts as well.
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