Fires under the ashes flare up in Iran

Susan.Sh. FCNN News Agency: The situation in Iran is heading towards unrest. The fires under the ashes in the country are blazing. There are hands at work to fuel these unrest. Strikes have begun and fake news and rumors on some social networks are feeding the mills of those who are taking advantage of this unrest.

Meanwhile, the reaction of the Islamic Republic's officials is surprising. Instead of being a balm for the people's pain, they are rubbing salt in their wounds. This way of governing a country whose people are suffering inclines minds to the view that "the leaders of the Islamic Republic see their survival in war and unrest and want to use military force to maintain domestic and foreign power."

Unconditional support for Assad

The most obvious example of these regime positions is the statements made in recent days by the president and the leaders of the Revolutionary Guards in support of Bashar al-Assad.

Hassan Rouhani went even further, openly expressing all kinds of support for the Assad government, saying: "Just as we have been with the Syrian people in all struggles, we will be with you for reconstruction with all the means available."

They have declared their readiness for unconditional and limited reconstruction of Syria, ignoring the sensitivities of the people. However, the Iranian people have experienced all kinds of deprivations and shortages for decades, and now, due to the regime's policies, they are forced to shoulder the burden of nuclear sanctions again.

Any common sense would agree that this situation will exacerbate unrest in the country and will inadvertently cause people to have emotions and reactions that are most likely what the Revolutionary Guards want.

Increased pressure on sensitive areas

Meanwhile, some regions of the country are more sensitive. The deprived but oil-rich province of Khuzestan is one of them.

 Even before summer has arrived, most regions of the country are facing a severe shortage of drinking water. Widespread power outages are also looming. Official sources have announced: "27 provinces are facing water shortages and 8 provinces are in critical conditions with a reduction in rainfall of more than 50 percent. In addition to the shortage of water, they are also threatened by the risk of land subsidence."

These same officials have said that to deal with this situation, we need financial resources that we do not have available.

In addition, out of the 177 major dams in the country, 69 dams, including the Zayandeh Rud, Shahid Rajaee, Saveh, and Mulla Sadra dams,  They have less than 40% stored water, which will severely limit the supply of electricity needed by people in the summer.

The main burden of these problems will fall on the shoulders of the southern provinces and tropical regions of the country. Khuzestan, an oil-rich but deprived province of the country, is one such province.

However, to deal with this situation, the authorities of the Islamic Republic have put pressure on farmers in Khuzestan and other provinces at high risk and have announced a ban on cultivation, without providing them with any financial compensation to compensate for this situation.

In other words, it is not clear how a significant percentage of the people in these provinces are going to make a living.

This is despite the fact that people are well aware that the water from rivers like the Karun is being withheld from the people of Khuzestan and is being diverted to the central provinces to provide drinking water. 

This problem threatens the peace of the people of Khuzestan and other deprived compatriots, who, according to predictions made in the coming months, will have to endure the bitter experience of fine dust, as in previous years, and will not have access to justice. Because there is no money, they are forced to suffer from various respiratory and skin diseases.  Accept the cardiovascular disease, because this is a condemnation of a people whose rulers have nothing in their pockets to support them.

Indifference to the deaths of the deprived

Recently, news has spread in the country that the government will decide to remove medicine from the list of essential goods, which will pose an even greater threat to people's health, which officials simply justify by citing a lack of available financial resources.

This is despite the fact that for years people have been facing the death of their loved ones due to the lack of medicine, forced use of low-quality drugs, and the high cost of medicine and treatment.

The authorities are also not thinking of any solution. Meanwhile, officials of insurance organizations, especially social security, have been repeatedly accused of financial corruption and illegal withdrawals from these funds.

Recently, the news of the death of 93 thalassemia patients due to poor quality domestic medicines shook hearts. But the authorities remained indifferent. The medical conditions in Iran are not comparable to many other Asian countries. 

For example, people with SMA in Iran  Drug-free and  They are uninsured and must spend about $750,000 to cover the cost of the medication in the first year of treatment. However, the medication for this disease is provided to patients free of charge in the United States, Europe, Japan, and even Colombia, Brazil, and Turkey.

In the case of non-specific diseases, more than two-thirds of the costs must be paid out of the insured's own pockets, and the inability to provide it has jeopardized people's health and well-being. 

Workers' empty hands and tables 

In recent months, we have repeatedly witnessed protest rallies by workers employed in various industrial and service sectors who have not received their last salaries for months.

Their livelihood situation can be safely added to the more than 3.5 million officially unemployed in the country. Official news sources in the country have recently announced that 80 percent of Iranians live below the real poverty line and that the minimum wage in Iran covers only one-third of the minimum living expenses for a three-person household. Another news report states that there are at least two million hungry people in the country, but experts have estimated this figure to be more than 5 million.

People have become thugs again.

This news and information is only a small part of the conditions that the people of Iran are experiencing these days, and they have not been in the air for decades. But they are ready to flare up like a fire under the ashes.

These conditions have led to warnings from some individuals and social media users, and there are fears that the experience of protests and the killing of innocent people will be replicated on a wider scale in different provinces, especially in more deprived areas such as Khuzestan.  It should be repeated. The confrontation between the regime's officials and leaders is also clear.

As we have seen in the past week, the public gatherings in Kazerun, as always, were accompanied by threats.  And the mass arrests ended. The authorities, calling the protesters thugs, said that legal and decisive action was ahead for those arrested. Again, as always, it was announced that behind the protest rallies in Kazerun were foreign enemies and hostile and malicious networks of the Islamic Republic.

But the undeniable facts prove that the authorities of the Islamic Republic are indifferent to the public's reactions. They pursue their own interests and, with the support of the sponsors of terrorism in the world, sharpen their claws and teeth against the defenseless people of our country.

In the meantime, there is a fear that the regime's leaders will achieve their predetermined goals by arousing the emotions of the wounded and oppressed nation, and the people will be buried empty-handed.