An 18-year-old Ahwazi youth is believed to have drowned on Wednesday when he was swept away by floodwaters as he and his father searched for livestock who had been washed away by the torrential flooding that submerged their area.
The young man named Mohmmad Bin Nasser Al-Hussein Al-Makhlilif Al-Nessi had reportedly gone with his father to search for their buffalo that had been swept away by the flooding in a rural area near the regional town of Tester [Shuster], which also destroyed much of their home, as well as their crops.
Mohammad’s devastated father said that his son had been attempting to ford the deep, fast-moving floodwater separating their land from another area to search for the animals when he lost his footing and was swept away. His father is still searching for him at the time of publishing this report.
Over 1.5 million people have been displaced by the catastrophic flooding in the region in southwestern Iran since it began 11 days ago, with the Iranian regime continuing to provide no food or humanitarian aid; many credible reports suggest that although aid has been sent for the people, much of it is being confiscated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and sold in regime-loyalist, non-Ahwazi areas.
According to the displaced resident, the regime has not even provided a single rowing boat to help rescue the people. At least two Ahwazis have been shot dead by IRGC forces since the crisis began two weeks ago, days after the flood, and the death toll has reportedly reached to three persons. In addition, many Ahwazis suspect that the regime is exploiting and exacerbating the flooding problem in order to confiscate more Ahwazi lands and homes as part of its massive river diversion and damming program.
The people are extremely reluctant to leave the area despite the heavy flooding, fearing that the regime will use it as a pretext to permanently forcibly displace them and relocate them to other non-Arab areas and then confiscate all their lands and enforce demographic change, a policy that the regime has pursued by every possible means and under various excuses.
According to the state-run Mehr news agency, Mohammad Islami, Minister of Transport and Urban Development, said, “The important thing in the recent flood was that the president in the previous meeting has emphasised at the previous meeting that homes, farms, and fish rising farms and businesses, residential homes that were located near to the rivers and sustained damaged will be rebuilt in new locations meaning that all homes will be moved to places that are more appropriate and safe to prevent other similar flood incidents, and the judiciary is also supposed to participate in this process so that the rebuilding and reconstruction project won’t be repeated in the same current flooded areas”.
This clearly demonstrates the regime’s true intention of enforcing the demographic alteration against Ahwazis, confiscating their lands permanently and forcibly relocating them to new areas as a means of denying them any sovereignty over their own lands or resources, particularly the oil and gas, with over 95 per cent of the oil and gas resources claimed by Tehran located in Ahwaz.
For this reason, many Ahwazis, despite the floods, remained in their areas, and the regime is still pressuring them by depriving them of food, water, and medical aid to force them to give up and leave. This is one of the reasons for not providing aid, and the regime even is unhappy at Ahwazi people in other areas who bring food and aid to their counterparts in the flood-hit areas and even arresting dozens of them and not allowing them to enter the flooded areas leaving hundreds of thousands hungry and thirsty, and without medical aid.
Despite the intensifying flood crisis, the regime officials still insist on protecting their oil and gas wells in the wetlands and not redirecting the water to the main course toward wetlands but diverting it to Ahwazi areas to kill two birds with one stone, firstly displacing Ahwazis and secondly protecting the oil and gas reserves in the wetlands at the price of millions of Ahwazi lives. So, over 20 towns, cities, and over 200 rural areas have been evacuated due to the surging water.
In an interview with the state-run Fars News Agency, Ghasem Sa’edi, the Parliament representative for Khafajiyeh and Howyezeh in the Islamic Consultative, said, “From the start of oil exploration and drilling in the wetlands, the oil ministry turned the whole wetlands into five reservoirs; while reservoirs 1 and 2 have a small amount of flooding water, but reservoirs 3, 4 and 5 are completely dry”.
“In recent years, when Ahwazi people were suffocating due to the rise of dust air storms from the dried wetlands because of the building of dams on the Karkheh river the main water source for the marshlands, the ministry of oil was arguing that by placing of enough water behind the dam they will not release the water to the wetlands, but now with opening the floodgates of the dams, Ahwazi people have been devastated and the infrastructure of their cities and villages was damaged; the government and its officials are supposed to direct the water to wetlands, not the Ahwazi residential areas.”
By Rahim Hamid, an Ahwazi author, freelance journalist and human rights advocate. Hamid tweets under @Samireza42.