#Ahwazna – Iranian regime has forcibly evicted Ahwazi Arabs from their lands under pretext of existence of mines

Ahwazna

According to informed sources from Ahwaz, during the past few days, occupying regime officials have prevented large number of Ahwazi Arab villagers from returning to their own villages around Al-Mohamerah city.

The Ahwazi Arabs have been insisting to settle in their villages once again which are situated in a war-stricken town called “Shalamcheh”.

The local people have told Ahwazna sources that they came to their villages in order to plant their agricultural lands which were abandoned against their willing over 26 years ago during Iran-Iraq war.

The local villagers said that “they are facing two predicaments for reviving their lands including, the deliberate neglect of regime policy which is clearly reluctant in removing the mines from their lands and the scarcity of water due to excessive diversion of water ‘rivers from their main flow and redirecting it to Persian regions like Isfahan, Yazd provinces”.

The local Arab people are wondering of goals and intentions of the regime officials, who refrain from demining and cleaning the lands from mines and other legacies’ war but at the same time, they are threatening and placing pressures on Arabs to evacuate and sell their lands to regime’s institutions with very cheap prices.

It is noteworthy that the agricultural arable lands in Shalamcheh were used be one of the most exporters of dates ‘palm and other crops but after the Iran-Iraq war, many of palm groves had been destroyed forever and in return were planted with a lot of land mines.

Despite, regime has adequate tools to remove the land mines; the Iranian regime keeps this region neglected intentionally without any serious action to clean the area from mines which are left over 26 years after of war between Iraq-Iran.

In fact, the Iranian regime not only has not taken any steps forward to clean up the Ahwaz region from unexploded bombs and mines but instead they deployed the land-mines as a weapon against the local Arabs to fulfill their vicious ethnic cleansing policy in confiscating and grabbing the Ahwazis’s lands which goes in line with changing the demographic structure of Ahwaz region.