A century after Iran occupied Ahwaz, its colonised Ahwazi Arab people and other non-Persian peoples still face erasure—while the world continues to look away.
It was supposed to be a celebration. On a balmy spring evening on April 20, 1925, Sheikh Khazal—ruler of the largely independent Arab emirate of Ahwaz, a resource-rich region in southwest Iran near the Arabian Gulf—was invited aboard a British cruiser anchored in the Shatt al-Arab. The occasion: a ceremony to renew British and Persian recognition of Ahwazi independence. He boarded the ship in good faith. But the ceremony never happened. Instead, Khazal was cruelly betrayed — seized, arrested, and handed over to Reza Khan’s forces. By nightfall, Iranian troops had marched into Mohammerah. The flag was lowered. The capital had fallen.
That grim day marked the end of Ahwazi Semi-independent rule and the beginning of a century-long struggle for freedom under Iranian rule. Sheikh Khazal was imprisoned in Tehran until his death in 1936—some say by assassination. Around the same time, hundreds of Ahwazi men, women and children who dared to demand their freedom were forcibly marched from Ahwaz to Tehran. Few survived.
What followed was not peaceful integration, but escalating repression and pitiless crushing of any protest or dissent. Uprisings in 1946, 1979, 2005, and 2011 were all met with overwhelming force—mass arrests, executions, and the silencing of any call for self-determination. Ahwazi Arabs were stripped of their land, their cultural identity, language, and their future. The region’s vast oil and gas wealth was siphoned away—an ongoing theft that scarred Ahwazis’ land, poisoned their rivers and drove the people ever deeper into poverty. Over time, Ahwazi Arab territories were carved up and parcelled out between different Iranian provinces, predominantly Khuzestan(North Ahwaz), Bushehr and Hormozgan(south Ahwaz). Its ancient Arab history and culture were—and still are—denied, with the historical revisionism of successive Iranian regimes rivalling the worst authoritarian impulses of other tyrants. Mohammerah became Khorramshahr(Persianised Name). The erasure and repression remained constant features, whether under the Pahlavi monarchy or the Islamic Republic.
As the decades went by, the face of power changed, but the authoritarian repression and anti-Arab racism remained constant. The theocratic regime pursued the same policies of forced assimilation, economic colonial exploitation, and violent suppression as the royalist Pahlavis. For Ahwazis, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Baluchs, Lurs and other non-Persian communities—Iran is less a homeland than a colonial occupying state. The regime’s bombastic claims to be heading an Axis of Resistance devoted to attaining Palestinian freedom meet with withering contempt from Ahwazis who’ve experienced a century of murderous oppression of the kind Palestinians are also familiar with—a grim litany of displacement, ethnic cleansing, demographic change, militarisation, cultural erasure, and collective punishment. For Tehran as for many colonial states, justice is not a universal principle but a political weapon, selectively applied.
In 2011, inspired by the Arab Spring, hundreds of the Ahwazi Arabs again took to the streets to demand their rights. The response was swift and brutal: mass arrests, televised confessions, and executions of several political activists. The message was clear—resistance of Iranian colonisation would be met not with dialogue, but with silence or death.
Today, Ahwaz remains one of the most resource-rich yet impoverished regions in Iran. Its oil feeds the national economy and Iran’s efforts at regional expansionism, but the Ahwazi people see none of the benefits. Instead, they endure severe air pollution, contaminated water, and rising rates of cancer and respiratory illness. Rivers have been diverted to Persian-majority provinces, leaving Ahwazi Arab farmers without livelihoods and entire villages without clean water. This pattern is not unique. In Luri, Baluchi, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, and Turkmen regions, the state’s extractive policies disproportionately impact these non-Persian territories. These are not just economic decisions but instruments of brutal colonial control. And throughout, international powers have looked away—or worse, profited. From the British betrayal of Sheikh Khazal to modern oil contracts, global silence and complicity have been part of the system.
Much to the Iranian leaders’ frustration and displeasure, however, 100 years of occupation, colonisation, systemic impoverishment, and injustice have failed to quash the Ahwazi people’s passion for their land, their heritage, and above all for freedom and dignity. This heroic struggle, waged in global silence, has seen students, poets, environmental campaigners, and cultural organisers facing arrest, torture, execution, or ‘disappearance’ for daring to speak their language, defend their land, or demand basic rights. Peaceful protesters are automatically labelled separatists or terrorists. Entire families are targeted in retaliation for one family member’s words. With no space to organise safely inside the country, many Ahwazi activists have been forced into exile. From Europe to North America, diaspora activists carry the struggle forward—amplifying voices from inside Iran, documenting abuses, and reminding the world that Ahwaz still exists, and still resists.
The centenary of Iran’s occupation of Ahwaz is not just a historical marker. It is a mirror held up to the present. From the streets of Mohammerah to the mountains of Lurestan and Kurdistan, as well as the valleys of South Azerbaijan and the deserts of Baluchistan, Iran’s colonised non-Persian peoples continue to fight for freedom within a state built on their exclusion But the winds are shifting. From Iran to Sudan, from Palestine to Ukraine, East Turkestan to the Indigenous lands in the Americas, peoples globally are rising against injustice, refusing oppression and reclaiming their histories. The Ahwazi struggle is not isolated — it is part of a global chorus demanding dignity, sovereignty, and liberation. A century of silence is long enough.
By Ruth Riegler, a freelance journalist based in Glasgow.
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