WASHINGTON DC, United States (Kurdistan 24) – The head of a major ethnic liberation movement in Iran, Ahmad Mawla Abu Nahidh, was assassinated Wednesday, Sky News Arabia reported.
The director of the London-based Ahwaz Center for Media and Strategic Studies, Hassan Radhi, disclosed news of the murder, as he accused Iran of killing Nahidh.
Nahidh headed the “Movement for Arab Struggle to Liberate Ahwaz from Iranian Occupation.” He was killed by three bullets—one to his head and two to his heart— as he stood outside the door of his home in the usually placid Dutch city of The Hague.
Dutch police managed to arrest one man, whom they caught fleeing the scene.
The assassination is reminiscent of earlier Iranian-sponsored assassinations in Europe of leaders of the country’s ethnic minorities, including Kurdish leaders. In 1989, Dr. Abdel Rahman Ghassemlou, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, was murdered in Vienna.
Three years later, Ghassemlou’s successor, Dr. Sadegh Sharaf Kandi, was murdered in Berlin, along with three other men. In 1997, a German court issued an arrest warrant for Iran’s intelligence minister, saying he had ordered the murders with the knowledge of Iran’s political leadership.
Ahwazis are Arabs, one of several major non-Persian ethnic groups in Iran that also include Kurds, Turks, and Baluch.
In 2015, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both protested an Iranian crackdown against Ahwazi Arabs, as the regime undertook a large-scale campaign of arbitrary arrests in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, where Ahwazis live and where most of Iran’s oil and gas reserves are located.
The arrests were triggered by mass protests that coincided roughly with the anniversary of Ahwazi demonstrations a decade before.
Iran had demanded that Interpol arrest Nahidh, and his assassination is, almost certainly, related to the escalating tensions between Iran, on the one hand, and Saudi Arabia and the US on the other.
Those tensions have been most prominent elsewhere, like Lebanon, where Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned on Nov 4, charging that Iran was behind a plot to assassinate him. On the same day, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen fired a ballistic missile at Riyadh’s International Airport, where it was shot down by a Patriot missile.
But the tensions are evidently extending to other areas, as well. On Oct 25, Saudi Arabia’s Acting Permanent Representative to the UN, Khalid Manzlawi, denounced Iran’s “racial and religious discrimination against non-Persian people, such as Ahwazis, Kurds, Turks, and Baluchis.”
Editing by Nadia Riva
What a sural world we live in. we have head chopping Neanderthals Saudi Arabia openly discriminating against their own Shia population by bombing the hell out of their villages and now worrying about bunch of separatists in Iran!
Should I mourn the loss of a separatist? No... Should I be angry with the Dutch who keeps the IRI embassy/ spies den open? Yes.
Unfortunately, killing the separatists only makes heroes and martyrs out of them. You should let them live and talk and show the public their true nature.
The failed separatist movement in the Iraqi Kurdistan is a good example of how to defeat these folks.
Irrespective of the politics of this murdered man, I condemn this cowardly terrorist act of murder, perpetrated by a cowardly terrorist and murderous regime , upon an opposition figure who had taken refuge from fascist Islamist dictatorship, in a western democracy...
As a footnote, from legal perspective, Supporting or justifying --overtly or covertly-- this cowardly act of terror & murder, would only expose one to the potential charge of being an accessory to murder & terrorism.....
"If they don't join you, Kill'em" - This has been the MO of the Turbans since they were allowed the deconstruction of Iran!
You should let them live and talk and show the public their true nature.
Golden words for a pigeon fancier !!!!!! See here for yourselves;
http://iroon.com/irtn/photo/8409/