Exclusive – Ahwaz Floods: Environment Catastrophe and Demographic Engineering

An aerial view of flooding in Khuzestan province, Iran, April 5, 2019. (Reuters)
An aerial view of flooding in Khuzestan province, Iran, April 5, 2019. (Reuters)
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Exclusive – Ahwaz Floods: Environment Catastrophe and Demographic Engineering

An aerial view of flooding in Khuzestan province, Iran, April 5, 2019. (Reuters)
An aerial view of flooding in Khuzestan province, Iran, April 5, 2019. (Reuters)

The floods in Iran, which have raged for more than 30 days, have imposed a stifling “siege” on Arab cities in the southwestern regions of the country, forcing some 500,000 people to leave their homes.

The floods, which have headed south, have left devastation in their wake in the Kurdistan, Kermanshah, Lorestan and Ilam provinces. Interior Ministry figures showed that 24 out of 31 provinces have been affected by the flooding.

“The recent floods are unprecedented... 25 provinces and more than 4,400 villages have been affected,” Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli was quoted as saying in parliament by state news agency IRNA on Sunday.

Fazli said the floods had caused around 350 trillion rials ($2.5 billion) worth of damage.

The European Commission said that 11 million Iranians have been affected and Iranian authorities revealed that 76 people were killed. State television said that the rainfall in the country was unprecedented in 300 years.

Political aspect
A week after the western provinces were struck by floods, President Hassan Rouhani headed to the Ahwaz area to inspect the damage. National Security chief Ali Shamkhani had previously warned that Ahwaz was vulnerable to a “humanitarian catastrophe”, speaking of challenges due to the flooding. The governor of Ahwaz, Gholamreza Shariati, denied these claims.

On Friday, head of the Khomeini Relief Foundation, Parviz Fattah, underscored the severity of the situation in the Arab regions, saying that “this could have been avoided and that the dams authority was mistaken in its estimates.”

Water management
Climate experts, meanwhile, dismissed the government’s assertion that the flooding has helped ease the effects of drought in Iran. They instead said that the flooding was a consequence of climate change, warning that more severe floods should be expected in the future. Meteorological Organization chief, Sahar Tajbakhsh, said that 60 to 65 percent Iranian territories were still suffering from drought. The government has ignored these claims, instead insisting that the drought was over.

Moreover, the floods and heavy rain have exposed the harm dam projects have had on the country’s rivers. The projects have also negatively affected the Hawizeh Marshes, which straddles the Iraq border.

The Ministries of Roads and Urban Development and Energy and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) agricultural arm, the Khatam-al Anbiya Construction Headquarters, have all collaborated in setting up dam projects in Iran. Since 1979, ten major dams have been built on the Karun and Karkheh Rivers. Dozens of smaller ones have been constructed to divert river routes and control water levels.

Arab residents of the southwestern region have expressed concern over the authorities’ plans to set up two other dams that could divert waters from Ahwaz to central Iran.

Oil facilities
The flooding has exposed the Energy Ministry’s plan to divide the Hawizeh Marshes into several basins to drain the marshes on the Iranian side of the border as part of its efforts to develop the Azadegan oilfield. Activists have launched campaigns in Persian and Arabic against these ambitions. The IRGC and Energy Minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh have denied the plans and sought to contain local anger.

Arab displacement
The floods have also heightened concerns over the forced displacement of Arabs in the Ahwaz region. In 2005, hundreds of thousands of Arabs marched in protest against then President Mohammad Khatami’s plans to displace them to other regions and encourage non-Arabs to take up residence in their place.

The area has for years suffered from government negligence, most notably after the end of the Iraqi-Iranian war, where it has yet to recover from the impact of the conflict. The authorities have only sought to reconstruct oil facilities and neglected to revive and improve services.

In addition, since the 1990s, successive governments have sought to implement several major projects aimed at reducing agricultural land owned by Arabs and consequently force them to quit the area.

This year’s floods have revived concerns over displacement when the authorities ordered the evacuation of 12 cities and towns. Official sources said that only some ten percent of the locals heeded this call. Some social media users have also posted recordings of Ahwaz locals, who claimed that authorities deliberately caused the floods in order to displace the population.



UN Says Has ‘Credible’ Evidence Israeli Forces Sexually Abused Detained Palestinians 

14 May 2025, Berlin: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres gives a press conference at the German Federal Chancellery. (dpa)
14 May 2025, Berlin: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres gives a press conference at the German Federal Chancellery. (dpa)
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UN Says Has ‘Credible’ Evidence Israeli Forces Sexually Abused Detained Palestinians 

14 May 2025, Berlin: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres gives a press conference at the German Federal Chancellery. (dpa)
14 May 2025, Berlin: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres gives a press conference at the German Federal Chancellery. (dpa)

The UN chief warned Israel that the United Nations has “credible information” of sexual violence and other violations by Israeli forces against detained Palestinians, which Israel’s UN ambassador dismissed as “baseless accusations.”

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a letter to Ambassador Danny Danon that he is “gravely concerned” about reported violations against Palestinians by Israeli military and security forces in several prisons, a detention center and a military base.

Guterres said he was putting Israeli forces on notice that they could be listed as abusers in his next report on sexual violence in conflict “due to significant concerns of patterns of certain forms of sexual violence that have been consistently documented by the United Nations.”

Danon, who circulated the letter and his response Tuesday, said the allegations “are steeped in biased publications.”

“The UN must focus on the shocking war crimes and sexual violence of Hamas and the release of all hostages,” he said.

Danon was referring to the group's surprise attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, where some 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage. Israeli authorities said women were raped and sexually abused.

The Hamas attack triggered the ongoing war in Gaza, which has killed more than 61,400 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters or civilians but that about half were women and children.

Danon stressed that “Israel will not shy away from protecting its citizens and will continue to act in accordance with international law.”

Because Israel has denied access to UN monitors, it has been “challenging to make a definitive determination” about patterns, trends and the systematic use of sexual violence by its forces, Guterres said in the letter.

He urged Israel’s government “to take the necessary measures to ensure immediate cessation of all acts of sexual violence, and make and implement specific time-bound commitments.”

The secretary-general said these should include investigations of credible allegations, clear orders and codes of conduct for military and security forces that prohibit sexual violence, and unimpeded access for UN monitors.

In March, UN-backed human rights experts accused Israel of “the systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other gender-based violence.”

The Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said it documented a range of violations perpetrated against Palestinian women, men, girls and boys and accused Israeli security forces of rape and sexual violence against Palestinian detainees.

At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the UN Human Rights Council, which commissioned the team of independent experts, as an “anti-Israel circus” that “has long been exposed as an antisemitic, rotten, terrorist-supporting, and irrelevant body.” His statement did not address the findings themselves.