‘Geniuses’ Versus the Guns: A Campus Crackdown Shocks Iran

There was just a fence and a barred locked gate separating the students from the men with the guns.

Trapped in the area behind the gate with the guns pointing at them, the students on the campus of Sharif University of Technology, a storied institution in Tehran whose students are commonly referred to as “nokhbegan,” or “geniuses,” responded with defiance.

“Death to the dictator!” they shouted, and a chorus of slurs targeting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei erupted among the several hundred students facing the plainclothes militia forces known as the Basiji, riot police and security forces, all armed with guns.

The Basiji opened fire through the gate with rubber bullets and paintballs, hitting the students, some on their heads and necks, some on their legs and arms. There were screams for help. Students collapsed, bleeding from their wounds. Others tried fleeing to another gate but found it locked too.

“We thought they were going to kill us,” said Mahan, a 25-year-old engineering student at Sharif. “It felt like we were in a war zone and the enemy was hunting us down looking for victims to slay.”

The scenes that unfolded at Sharif University on Sunday afternoon were some of the most shocking in the three weeks of protests led by women calling for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule that have convulsed Iran since a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of the morality police. Security forces have cracked down violently on the protests but they continue.

The account of the crackdown is based on interviews with students, professors and alumni, as well as internal university communications and audiotapes of staff recounting the events of the day that were shared with The New York Times. The witnesses all asked not to be fully identified out of fear of retribution.

University campuses across Iran have erupted after more than decade of being politically dormant, with students chanting for freedom and joining the nationwide protests demanding an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule. The raid on Sharif has sparked a wave of solidarity protests at many university campuses, with videos circulating of students raising their fists in the air and chanting their support for the students at Sharif.

Students at Sharif are considered the elite in Iran; many are prodigies in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Its professors are celebrated globally as top-tier scientists, and its graduates are routinely recruited by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Stanford. Its list of star alumni include Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the Fields Medal, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics. Ms. Mirzakhani died of breast cancer in 2017.

“Sharif always seemed untouchable because of its place in our society and this raid was meant as a warning to all universities that if we can do this to Sharif, we will do much worse to you, so be quiet,” Reza, a 45-year-old industrial engineer and Sharif alumni, said by telephone from Tehran.

The attack on Sharif has reverberated and prompted outrage inside and outside of Iran. A statement condemning the attack was issued on Tuesday. It was signed by more than 700 academics, including seven Nobel laureates, representing institutions in the United States and Canada. It said the “unspeakable violence against students is an assault on the sanctity of education, academe, and fundamental human rights.”

University campuses have long been at the forefront of struggles for democratic change in Iran — in 1953 the Shah’s security forces attacked Tehran University to crush protest and shot and killed three students. University students played an influential role in the revolution that toppled the monarchy and birthed the Islamic Republic in 1979.

In post-revolution Iran, generations of students have carried the mantle of campus activism and continued to challenge the establishment. The authorities have cracked down repeatedly — attacking campuses, beating, expelling and arresting students and banning them from higher education. During one such attack, a violent raid on a dormitory at Tehran University in 1999, a student was killed.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, center, at a graduation ceremony on Monday at the police academy in Tehran. Credit...Wana News Agency/Via Reuters

“If your ultimate aim is to hold on to power, you want to limit or dismantle any form of effective mobilization of thought and dissent,” said Reza H. Akbari, an expert on social movements in Iran at American University in Washington. “That is why they see students as such a threat. They know its potential. They have seen what it can do.”

With the protests raging across Iran, students at Sharif began staging silent sit-ins, including on Sunday, holding signs demanding the release of classmates arrested during demonstrations.

After the sit-in the students streamed into the main yard of the university and realized they were under siege. Campus guards were clashing with the security forces to prevent them from entering the school and locked the gates. When four students tried to leave, the Basiji grabbed them, pounding them with batons. One student was taken to the hospital for treatment for a head injury.

A group of about 70 faculty members were meeting in a nearby building to discuss the protests and a strategy for freeing detained students when they heard a commotion outside and rounds of gunfire. Their phones began to beep with appeals from students seeking help.

The professors ran outside and encountered a scene of chaos that one of them described as a war zone: blood on the ground, tear gas in the air, bullets flying, shrieking cries for help. The professors encircled the students, locking arms to form a human shield around them.

One of the professors shouted to the Basiji that they would have to kill them first if they wanted to shoot or arrest the students. The Basiji fired shots in the air and one told a professor to shut up or he would be shot dead.

When some professors approached the Basiji to try to negotiate a secure exit for students, they beat them violently. One professor was thrown to the ground and kicked repeatedly. Another who tried unsuccessfully to take some female students away in his car was seized by the Basij and choked with a baton. He was told, according to the internal communications seen by The New York Times, that “we could kill you, and no one would know.”

Hundreds of students fled into an underground parking garage that exited onto a busy street and into a nearby subway station. But they didn’t realize that dozens of Basiji had forced their way into the garage and locked the gates.

The events that followed were captured by students in a video posted on social media, and corroborated with witness accounts. Young men and women, wearing backpacks and trying to flee, screamed as the Basij opened fire on them with rubber and paintball bullets. The floor of the parking garage was covered with blood. Basij rooted out students hiding behind cars and pounded their bodies and heads with kicks and punches. About 50 students were arrested and some were shoved into vans and taken away with sacks placed on their heads and handcuffs around their wrists. If anyone intervened they would beat them too.

One young female student, a freshman, hid in the bathroom of the garage and called her mother, sobbing that she was going to die and begging for her to send help.

As word of the siege at Sharif spread on social media, anxious parents and outraged alumni rushed to the scene, demanding that security forces leave and students be released. They were joined by other Tehran residents in their cars, creating a miles-long traffic jam around the campus in support of the students, honking their horns and shouting “death to the dictator” from their windows.

The minister for higher education, Mohammad Ali Zolfigol, showed up with an entourage late Sunday, but he was unable to defuse the tension and evacuate the Basiji from the area. He held a meeting with students and professors in which he blamed the students for “violating the law,” said they deserved punishment, and said he could do nothing about students “getting beaten up outside,” according to a video of the meeting.

The standoff lasted until 3 a.m. About 80 students, exhausted and too terrified to leave, slept on bare floors in laboratories and classrooms. Some tried to return home or to their dorms but were hunted down in the neighborhood around campus and arrested. Students at the dorms took shifts guarding the doors, fearing a raid. The sound of the Basij’s motorcycles circling the area and occasional bursts of gunfire could be heard until dawn.

“It was the darkest, most horrifying day in the history of the university. I have never experienced anything like this,” a professor at Sharif University said in an interview from Tehran. “The trauma of what took place will stay with the students and all of the faculty for the rest of our lives.”

Sharif’s campus remains closed. Some students have been released but many are still detained and some are missing, their whereabouts unknown and no confirmation of their arrest. Faculty members have said they will not teach, online or in person, until all students are released and their safety is guaranteed. But they do plan to hold a vigil on campus on Saturday.