“In the eyes there are tears, in the heart there is pain while the tongue keeps repeating a pray to Allah, may Allah has mercy on those who become under the earth in Aleppo and may Allah avenge their innocent souls from the ones who oppressed them”, those are the words that are repeated by Abo Mohammad (47 years) who comes from Aleppo city where he is a displaced in the northern Syria after a long journey of pain to flee the reality of vengeance that becomes a weapon of the Iranian militias and regime forces whose main concern is getting revenge without any mercy.
In our meeting with Abo Mohammad in Idlib city, he told us about being happy considering the news of some Iranian families who are using graves as a place to reside sheltering them from the cold of winter; as if he was saying in another words” Thanks Allah, who seeks to light up the fire in my homeland must be burnt and harmed with this fire”. Here the Iranian are paying for their bloody war which has negative backfire on their community facing worsen wave of poverty and social miseries which are aggravating on daily basis as a price that the citizens have to pay for a foreign policy that harms the citizens in Iran.
After the harsh details of Shahryar graveyard west Tehran were reported by Iranian media; where extreme poverty and homelessness besides addiction pushed a number of families to live in the graves so to shelter themselves from winter cold and suffering, there are much criticism about the government which is according to many is busy with war and foreign policy in Syria and Yemen in addition to supporting Lebanese Hezbollah and the Shiite Iraqi militias; leaving the advantage of its citizens aside.
Usually graves are made to receive the dead to then be occupied by two, three or even four persons of the same family. Those poor families beg in the streets of Tehran in the day, then they go back to the graveyard to stay the night where many of them complain about abuse whether physically or insult; as if saying “why is this happening to us at the time we are just exactly like the rest Iranians and we are not strangers or even foreigners”.
Social media revealed a large scale of Unsympathetic position regarding those homeless -except for a few number of people- to the extent the neighbors in residential buildings are used to these miserable and dire scenes because of the growing number of the poor and addicts.
Considering the reply of the Iranian president “Hasan Rohany”, he said:” No one can accept people to live inside graves in a country like Iran which has capabilities” and he mentioned appointing a local official to settle the issue. However, the truth is clear that the phenomena is increasing as poverty and unemployment grow in the Iranian community
It is a social disease whose phenomena started to emerge and it is not a social crime; which forces the Iranian people to get into discussion about it, in addition it leads to criticism about the expanding foreign policy pursued by Tehran in circumstances of complete absence of care about the Iranian citizens.
by Bayan Alahmad
translated by Sabah Najem
Syrian Press Center