Iran’s president announced this Wednesday the end of the Islamic veil, discontinued since the death of the young Mahsa Amini last September, as part of a campaign of repression for women to cover their heads again.
“This removal of the veil will definitely come to an end,” Ebrahim Raisi said in a speech at an official ceremony in memory of Iranian soldiers killed in Syria.
Raisi said women who don’t wear the ‘hijab’ (Islamic veil) are “unconscious” who need to be “made aware” so that they cover up again.
“We have to face this small number of people who act in an organized and abnormal way with certain objectives,” the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran insisted.
Raisi’s words come amid the escalation of repression to re-impose the use of the veil, with the return to the country’s streets of the country’s dreaded morality police since mid-July and punishments such as cleaning corpses or scrubbing public buildings for offenders.
In squares and major intersections, women wearing the traditional ‘chador’, a piece of black clothing that covers the entire body, warned women not to be covered with a veil to cover themselves, testifying to the Spanish agency EFE on Wednesday.
The women in ‘chador’ were accompanied by a police car and two officers. Many of the young women ignored the authorities’ warnings.
The country’s security services are also using car registrations to identify women without headscarves, who are receiving text alerts threatening their vehicles could be seized for being caught on camera without a ‘hijab’, the human rights group Amnesty International (AI) denounced .
In addition, numerous women have been suspended or expelled from universities, banned from taking exams and denied access to banking services and public transport, while hundreds of businesses have been forced to close for failing to enforce the mandatory use of headscarves, AI said.
Many Iranian women have stopped wearing the compulsory Islamic headscarf as a form of protest and civil disobedience since the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini, three days after she was beaten and detained in the street by vice police, because despite wearing of a veil, it was allowed to see part of her hair.
Source: DN
