Introduction
The Khuzestan province in the southwest of Iran is home to most of the country’s Ahwazi Arab people, an Arabic-speaking minority of somewhere between two and five million (Minority Rights Group, n.d.). This article explores how the Iranian government considers the Ahwazi Arab identity to be a threat, ignoring peaceful demands for clean water and freedom of speech, instead turning the law against them and breaching the human rights treaties the country has long been party to.
Who The Ahwazi Arabs Are and Why They Keep Protesting
Once known as Arabistan, the region of Khuzestan was once fairly independent until Reza Shah brought it fully under central control in 1925. With the Arabic names of many places being swapped for Persian ones, the province was renamed Khuzestan.
The years since have been marked by a steady list of complaints. Ahwazi Arabs say their land has been taken from them. They say they are passed over for the well-paid jobs in the oil industry that sits right beneath their region, even though Khuzestan produces a large share of Iran’s oil and gas (Minority Rights Group, n.d.). They also watch their rivers and marshes shrink year after year, drained by dams and diversion projects built upstream (Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, 2024). The clearest example is the Hawizeh Marshes, known in Arabic as Hoor al-Azim, an ancient wetland on the Iran-Iraq border that has long supported Ahwazi farming, fishing and water-buffalo herding. The marshes have been hit from two sides at once, by the Karkheh Dam upstream cutting off their main water source and by oil drilling that has deliberately dried large sections of the wetland (Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, 2024). The result is collapsing fisheries, dying livestock, vast dust storms over Ahvaz and families forced to leave villages they have lived in for generations.
How Ordinary Life Is Turned into a Crime
In the process of securitisation, the Iranian government has taken the demands and complaints of the Ahwazi Arabs and presented it as a threat to the survival of the nation, legitimising harsh measures that impose on the community’s stability (Buzan et al, 1998). Simple yet crucial cultural and community actions such as teaching a class in Arabic, holding a cultural festival, or sitting on the road to ask for water, gets rewritten in court as an attack on the state. The case is then taken away from the ordinary courts and handed to the Revolutionary Courts, where the right to a fair hearing all but disappears. The two Al-Hiwar teachers, Hashem Shabani and Hadi Rashedi, for instance, were tried behind closed doors and hanged in 2014 after confessions taken under torture were aired on state television (Amnesty International, 2018). As Shahin Helali, a senior director of the Association for the Human Rights of the Azerbaijani People in Iran (AHRAZ), puts it, the state treats these civil activities as a national security issue and keeps fanning that flame (Center for Human Rights in Iran, 2021).
This is made possible by a handful of loosely written articles in the Islamic Penal Code, and three of them can lead to a death sentence. Article 279 sets out the charge of moharebeh, which means enmity against God, used against anyone said to have taken up arms to spread fear. Article 286 sets out efsad-e fel-arz, which means corruption on earth, used for acts described as wide-ranging crimes against the security of the country. And there is Article 287, which sets out the charge of baghi, which means armed rebellion, used against people said to belong to a group fighting the Islamic Republic (Iran Human Rights, 2021). Two further articles, Articles 498 and 499, often aimed at peaceful activists, make it a crime to belong to any group that disturbs national security or to spread so-called propaganda against the state. The trouble with these articles is that they are written so vaguely that almost any organised cultural or political act can be forced to fit.
Iran Human Rights notes that since 2013 the charges of corruption on earth and armed rebellion have been used more in place of the older enmity charge, even when the accused never used any violence at all (Iran Human Rights, 2021). Confessions are often taken under torture and then shown on state television before any trial has finished. These are the tools that let the state treat an identity as a crime.
A Language and a Culture Pushed to the Margins
On paper, Iran seems to offer something kinder. Article 15 of the Constitution makes Persian the official language but says that regional languages may be used in the media and that their literature may be taught in schools alongside Persian. Article 19 of the Constitution says that all Iranians have equal rights no matter their ethnic group or language (Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979). However, this contradicts direct practice. The free expression group ARTICLE 19 (2014) reports that teaching in the mother tongue is in effect banned in areas where Persian is not the first language, so Arabic-speaking children are forced to study and learn in a language that is not their own. The damage shows up in school results, with many Ahwazi children dropping out early.
The political path has been closed too. On February 26th, 2025, only days after International Mother Language Day, the Iranian Parliament threw out proposal to allow some teaching of ethnic-minority literature in schools, and the representative of President Masoud Pezeshkian’s own government voted with those who opposed it (Sinaiee, 2025). People who teach or promote Arabic are not simply brushed aside. They are watched, questioned and often charged as security suspects (Center for Human Rights in Iran, 2021).
The clearest proof of how cultural work can become a deadly crime is the story of the Al-Hiwar Institute, a name that means “dialogue”. It was set up in the city of Ahvaz in 2000, to support Ahwazi Arab culture and the teaching of Arabic. The state shut it down in 2005 and put its founders on trial. Two of them, the poet and teacher Hashem Shabani and the chemistry teacher Hadi Rashedi, were hanged in secret on January 27th, 2014, after confessions were beaten out of them and broadcast on television (Amnesty International, 2018). Their real work had been to run poetry evenings and Arabic lessons. In May 2021, during the Eid al-Fitr holiday, the authorities arrested 16 Ahwazi Arabs, among them the elderly mother of a man killed in earlier protests, for nothing more than gathering to sing traditional songs in memory of the dead (Iran Human Rights Monitor, 2021). When a folk song can land a grieving mother in a cell, the warning to the whole community could not be louder.
Bullets, Prisons and the Gallows
The same thinking shapes the way Iran handles protest. During the nationwide demonstrations of November 2019, Khuzestan suffered some of the worst bloodshed in the country, when security forces shot dead large numbers of unarmed Ahwazi men who had run for cover into marshland near the town of Mahshahr. Less than two years later, in July 2021, the province rose up again over a desperate water shortage, in what local people called the ‘Uprising of the Thirsty’ (Amnesty International, 2021). Amnesty International (2021) found that security forces fired live ammunition and birdshot at crowds, killing at least eight people, including a teenage boy, across seven cities in just over a week. The International Crisis Group (2023) confirmed that the protests grew out of years of poor water management and discrimination, not out of any foreign plot. Even so, the official answer was to send in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and to arrest hundreds of people. Once more, a problem about water and fairness was met as though it were an armed uprising.
The harshest part of this policy is the gallows. On May 6th, 2023, Iran secretly executed the Swedish-Iranian Ahwazi activist Habib Chaab, who had been seized abroad and convicted of corruption on earth. Experts at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) (2023) called the execution an arbitrary killing. The pace has only quickened since. On September 4th, 2025, six Ahwazi Arab men, named as Ali Mojadam, Moein Khanfari, Mohammad Reza Moghadam, Salem Mousavi, Adnan Ghobeishavi, and Habib Deris, were put to death together, even though Amnesty International (2023) had warned that their confessions were obtained through torture.
These deaths are part of a much larger wave. The Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights (2025) counted at least 1,858 executions across Iran in 2025, more than double the number from the year before, with ethnic minorities making up a large share of the dead. Human Rights Watch (HRW) (2025) has called this an execution spree carried out with little regard for fair trials, and the Center for Human Rights in Iran (2026) reports that political hangings have kept rising into 2026.
The story sits inside a wider crackdown. After the protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran found that minorities, including Ahwazi Arabs, were often wrongly accused of security crimes as part of a long-standing official story that paints minority activism as a danger to the nation (OHCHR, 2024).
What International Law Requires of Iran
None of this can be waved away by talk of national security, because Iran has freely agreed to limits on how it may behave. It is a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
The single most important rule here is Article 27 of the ICCPR, which says that members of ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities must not be denied the right to enjoy their own culture or to use their own language. Articles 19, 21, and 22 of the same treaty protect free speech, peaceful assembly and the right to form associations, and all three are broken when people are jailed for speaking, gathering, or organising. Article 6 protects the right to life and limits the death penalty to the most serious crimes after a fair trial, evidently outlawing secret hangings based on confessions of torture.
Under ICERD, the United Nations body that monitors racial discrimination has told Iran to protect its Arab community from unfair treatment in education and expression and to let minorities have access to education in their mother tongue (International Federation for Human Rights, 2010). The refusal to allow Arabic schooling also breaks the rights to education and to take part in cultural life that are promised under the ICESCR. A state cannot simply turn these duties off by sticking a security label on a problem. Article 4 of the ICCPR does allow some rights to be limited in a genuine emergency, but it also sets out a small group of rights that can never be suspended, and both the right to life under Article 6 and the ban on torture under Article 7 are among them.
The wider world has started to notice. A series of United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteurs have raised the alarm, with Javaid Rehman, the then Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, warning that he was alarmed by the targeting of minorities, including Ahwazi Arabs, through executions and unfair sentences (OHCHR, 2021).
Conclusion
Taken together, the evidence tells a single, troubling story. Iran does not treat Ahwazi Arab language, culture, and protest as a normal part of public life to be managed in a calm and lawful manner. It treats the community as a threat to be crushed, and it uses vague laws that carry the death penalty to do the crushing. This punishes their identity and goes against the very treaties Iran chose to sign. A banned cultural institute, a rejected school proposal, a water protest met with birdshot, and a row of men sent to the gallows are not separate events. They are different faces of the same policy, one that sees Arab identity itself as something to be feared and controlled.
In order to remain faithful to its human rights obligations, Iran must stop executing Ahwazi Arab prisoners and commute the sentences of those still on death row, prioritising their right to a free trial. To stop holding people prisoner simply for activities pertaining to culture, linguistics, or political expression, it should rewrite the loose security articles of the Islamic Penal Code, honour Article 15 of its own Constitution, and let UN investigators into the country. However, these actions are unlikely to be taken by the current Iranian leadership.
In terms of aiding the people on the ground who require assistance immediately, the most important groups are the human rights monitors who still gather first-hand accounts from inside the country, such as the Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights, Iran Human Rights and the Centre for Human Rights in Iran, together with Ahwazi groups in exile such as the Ahwaz Human Rights Organisation. Because Iran blocks UN investigators from entering the country, these networks and the families of prisoners are often the only way the outside world learns a person’s name before it is too late. Lawyers who defend prisoners, teachers and language activists, and the relatives of those facing execution, are all people who can be reached, protected, and amplified. International channels still matter too, even when they move slowly. The current UN Special Rapporteur, Mai Sato, and the Fact-Finding Mission, both depend on exactly this kind of testimony, and ordinary people’s accounts can be carried to them through NGO submissions and through the Universal Periodic Review at the Human Rights Council.
The conclusion is straightforward. The right to use one’s own language, to practise one’s own culture and to commemorate one’s own dead does not threaten any state. Treating it as such is the real danger, both to the Ahwazi Arab community and to the rule of law that is meant to protect every citizen.
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