Iran’s Revolutionary Guards plan to turn at least 14 main squares in Tehran into stations where civilians learn to handle weapons, an official of the Guards’ Basij militia said at a news conference this month.
The official, Ali Kowsari, the Basij’s deputy for training, said the aim was to use one to three squares in the capital of every province, Al Jazeera reported on Sunday. He didn’t say how many cities already take part in the drive, called Janfada, or “those who sacrifice their life.” It started in late March, at the height of the war with the United States and Israel, and is open to men and women of any age, with a stated focus on young people.
The expansion comes as fears grow that the fighting could resume soon. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has called toppling Tehran his “primary objective”. Nearly eight months of attritional war have killed thousands of people, left Iranians poorer and destroyed parts of the country’s civilian infrastructure. Organizers say volunteers could later be used for rescue work, social services and media and financial support. The government has also asked them to burn less fuel and use less electricity to ease the strain of the war, the U.S. naval blockade and sanctions.
State-organized events and armed “exercises” have been held in Tehran, Isfahan, Zanjan, Shiraz, Kerman, Mashhad, Bojnord, Ahvaz and other cities. A training camp opened in Tehran’s Imam Hussein Square on Oct. 4, Africanews reported. IranWire reported that a campaign first billed as a popular civic movement had moved to signing citizens up for military training and organizing them into 1,000 “National Resistance Battalions.”
A resident of Gilan province in northern Iran, who asked not to be named for security reasons, told Al Jazeera that the stations are a regular sight on commutes in big and small cities there.
“Sometimes they hold competitions to win some small prizes. They bring in live bullets, teach people how to load them into magazines, how to arm pistols and assault rifles, and how to aim and fire,” the resident said.
The organizers are mostly old men, the resident said, and since the war began they have gathered around the main square almost every night, often playing revolutionary songs and chanting over loudspeakers. In Rasht, Gilan’s capital, residents objected on Oct. 15 to the noise and a street blocked for one of those gatherings. Videos on social media showed the dispute turning into a brawl. The authorities did not comment.
On Saturday, officials warned residents of Karaj, near Tehran, to expect explosions and loud noises from a Janfada exercise.
The government says 33 million Iranians have registered on the campaign’s website, more than a third of the population and over half of everyone older than 12. It hasn’t offered evidence. Earlier this year, activists based abroad got into the site’s source code, which showed fewer than four million registrations. Signing up took only a phone number, with no national identification number.
Children are now a main target. Education Minister Alireza Kazemi said last week that the Basij was registering “student Janfadas” and planned more mobilization and ceremonies involving children in the coming weeks.
Iranian human rights groups based abroad call the armed rallies intimidation. They come months after nationwide protests in January, when thousands of civilians, many of them young, were killed by gunshots and stab wounds. The government acknowledges protests in more than 400 counties but calls them a coup attempt run by the United States and Israel. It rejected the finding of an independent UN fact-finding mission that the crackdown amounted to crimes against humanity. The mission’s September report listed murder, imprisonment and torture among those crimes.
Last week, a large procession in Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan province on the Iraqi border, was described by the Guards-linked Tasnim News Agency as an exercise in “unity” between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Nematollah Bagheri, the Guards’ commander in Lorestan province, said last week that “the aim is to show that, just as the government supports the people, the people support the Islamic Republic and the Islamic revolution.”
Mehran Kamrava, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera that the war had “presented another opening for the more revolutionary elements of the Iranian body politic.”
“Revolutions are like riding a bicycle. To avoid a nasty fall, you must pedal hard. And this is precisely what the Janfadas and their leaders are trying to do - to remain relevant,” Mr. Kamrava said.
He said the campaign probably wouldn’t win the state new support in the wider society. “It does, however, serve to deepen the legitimacy that the state already has among its existing supporters,” he said. “It reinforces belief in the revolution’s ideological and political mission and reifies the siege mentality that all revolutionaries have.”