As Iranian Teens Lead Protests, Scores Are Killed or Imprisoned

Sarina Esmailzadeh, a 16-year-old Iranian, once documented sunny outings at her shopping mall in Karaj, an industrial town near Tehran, on her YouTube channel. She often used Western imagery in her videos, including clips from popular American TV shows, singing to pop music or sporting a T-shirt of her favorite soccer team, Borussia Dortmund in Germany.

“We’re not like the previous generation 20 years ago who didn’t know what life was like outside Iran,” she said in a YouTube video posted shortly after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September touched off protests nationwide. “We ask ourselves, why aren’t we having fun like the young people in New York and Los Angeles?”

A few days later, on Sept. 23, Ms. Esmailzadeh became one of dozens of young people to have been killed by Iranian police during protests, beaten to death by security forces, according to Amnesty International. Iranian authorities said she had died by suicide by jumping from a neighbor’s rooftop.

Minors, those under the age of 18, have accounted for 44 of the 300 protesters killed by Iranian authorities since the unrest began, triggered by Ms. Amini’s death in police custody after she was arrested for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code.

The growing caseload reflects how Iran’s youth are on the front lines of the movement that is seeking to overthrow the country’s clerical rulers. At least 320 other minors have been imprisoned, according to a network of Iranian exiles calling themselves the Volunteer Committee to Follow-up on the Status of Detainees.

Many of those killed or imprisoned were teenage girls who were arrested and beaten to death by police for taking part in protests against the veil, or hijab, according to the committee.

At least three of those teenage detainees could face the death penalty, says the Oslo-based Center for Human Rights in Iran.

Young people “have ensured the continuation of the protests so far,” said Asef Bayat, a professor of sociology and Middle East studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The deaths have provided fuel to a growing movement against Iran’s rulers. Women across the country, including girls and teenagers, have protested against laws that require women to wear a veil, but the protests have since expanded to include the downfall of the Islamic Republic.

The government, meanwhile, has attributed the killings to terrorists, health ailments or suicide. “The Iranian authorities have routinely harassed and intimidated the families of child victims to coerce them into silence or to force them to accept narratives absolving authorities of responsibility for the deaths of their loved ones,“ said Amnesty International in a report on child killings during the protests published on Friday.

Another female victim, Nika Shakarami, 17, was killed after joining the protests, telling friends she was being pursued by the police. It took 10 days for her family to recover her badly-bruised body from a Tehran morgue. Relatives say she died from a police beating. The authorities said she had fallen from a roof.

Iran’s clerical regime holds less sway over many young Iranians than their parents or grandparents. A 2018 study by Pew Research Center found that, along with young Tunisians, young Iranians were less likely to attend weekly prayer services than older generations by a larger margin than in any other Muslim-majority nation.

Young girls in particular are part of a “new generation that the school system of the Islamic Republic has failed to mold,” said Mr. Bayat. Their views are shaped by social media and “their mothers who have also suffered from the structural misogyny of the regime, and who support the protests of their girls,” Mr. Bayat said.

Social-media savvy students have become a vital component of the movement. Footage they have posted shows schoolgirls ripping pictures of Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, out of schoolbooks and then trampling over them. In one video, a group of schoolgirls forces a schoolmaster to leave.

As a result, the government has taken the rare step of sending riot police into high schools to quell unrest, sometimes with lethal consequences.

In mid-October, security forces stormed a girls’ school in Ardabil, northern Iran, after a compulsory ceremony to celebrate Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei turned into an antiregime protest.

Among the crowd was 16-year-old swimming champion Asra Panahi, who died of injuries from a police beating, according to the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations, a teachers’ trade union. State television later aired an interview with her uncle in which he said she died of heart failure. A local lawmaker said she had died by suicide by swallowing pills.

One high-schooler was arrested for tearing up a photo of the Supreme Leader and summoned to court on charges of “insulting the leadership,” the Iran-focused Committee to Follow-up on the Status of Detainees said.

Because of a lack of juvenile detention capacity, children often mix in overcrowded cells with adults, says Azin Mohajerin, the lead human-rights officer at U.S.-based, Iran-focused rights group Miaan. Others have been expelled from school or deprived of education as a punishment for joining the protests, she said.

Some are also facing possible execution by the regime. At least three teenage boys were among a group of 15 people the government accused of killing a member of the Basij paramilitary force during Nov. 3 protests in Karaj, near Tehran. According to Iran’s judiciary news agency Mizan, the court in that city indicted the suspects on Nov. 30 for “corruption on earth,” a charge routinely used by the regime to punish opponents with the death penalty.

In court, the boys said they had gathered to commemorate the death of a young female protester killed the previous month. One admitted stabbing the victim with a knife and another to throwing a stone at security forces while a third denied any responsibility.

There has been no reported execution of minors involved in the demonstrations. At least one protester was executed on Dec. 8 and another on Dec. 12.

“The government of Iran not only shoots children on the streets, it sends them to the gallows,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran in a Nov. 30 press release.

Other children have died in the line of fire, as authorities move to violently suppress protests. Kian Pirfalak, 9, was killed late November in Izeh, an Arab-majority town near Iran’s Southwest border with Iraq. His mother said at his funeral he was killed by bullets fired by security forces as the family drove near a protest. The authorities called him a “martyr,” saying he had been killed by terrorists.

Protesters have been using the deaths of teenagers as further evidence that the current government needs to be overthrown.

During demonstrations this week, protesters chanted at a Tehran subway station, “We don’t want this child-killing regime.”