The Jamestown Foundation recently reported that the Islamic Republic of Iran handed out prison sentences to five Azerbaijani activists for supporting Azerbaijan during the Second Karabakh War. Simultaneously, they reported that during Armeniaâs occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh, many Azerbaijani mosques were transformed into Iranian mosques and were thus were made âPersianâ in style following repair work, a reality that greatly infuriated Azerbaijanâs president, who viewed the measure to be cultural repression.
Around the same period, Hamid Mutashir, the President of the Al Ahwaz Liberal Party, reported that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards killed six Baloch civilians. Sirwan Mansouri, a Kurdish journalist based in the Middle East, added: âThe Iranian regime has arrested more than 100 Kurdish activists from different cities in Kurdistan, among them men, women and even children without any reason. Most of them are now getting tortured and their families have no news regarding where they are or what their condition is.â In recent days, a number of Kurdish journalists and political activists took part in a twitter campaign and wrote letters of protest to the European Parliament to no avail.