The commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has announced the creation of a new law enforcement body that will monitor compliance with the rules for wearing womenʼs clothing.
This was stated by the head of the Kurdistan Workersʼ Party in Tehran Hassan Hassanzadeh, Radio Svoboda reports.
According to him, the members of the squad have already been trained in "stricter" control over the wearing of the hijab in public places.
Recently, there have been more reports in Iran that women are being attacked by police because of their "wrong appearance". The authorities are carrying out the operation, which has received the code name "Nur" (from the Persian language — "light").
"Today, the authoritarian theocracy has unleashed a full-scale war against all women on all the streets of the country, not from a position of power, but out of desperation," commented Narges Mohammadi, an imprisoned Iranian human rights activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. An audio message appeared on her Instagram account the day before. In it, the woman claims to be speaking from Evin prison in Tehran.
According to her, the journalist Dina Ghalibaf, who was arrested earlier this month for speaking publicly about her own experience of being detained by Iranʼs morality police, went to the same prison. Mohammadi claims that Ghalibaf was brought to the prison beaten and she told about sexual harassment.
After mass protests broke out in Iran in 2022 due to the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not observing the rules of wearing clothing, the countryʼs authorities promised to review the law on the mandatory wearing of the hijab and abolish the morality police. However, in September 2023, a stricter law was passed, which provides for up to ten years in prison for wearing "revealing" clothes.
- Last month, the Taliban leader vowed to begin publicly stoning women to death as a sign of his fight against Western democracy.