Iran protests: Bereaved families prevented from mourning their loved ones move their memorials online
When protests broke out across Iran in September, 26-year-old Mohammed Hassan Torkaman’s message was one of defiance.
“Personally, if I see even one symbolic protest in Babol, I will support it,” he wrote on Twitter.
The nature-loving student was shot dead by security forces during a demonstration just two days later – protests had broken out over the death of a young woman in police custody who was arrested for wearing her hijab “incorrectly”.
Months on, his family say they are still being harassed by the authorities in an attempt to silence them about what happened. It is an experience that human rights experts say is common for those whose loved ones died as a result of state violence in Iran.
For some families like Mohammad Hassan’s, however, remaining silent is not an option. And social media is providing them with a way to memorialise and seek justice for the dead.
Mohammad Hassan Torkaman’s story
Mohammad Hassan was a typical 26-year-old. He loved the outdoors, and could often be found exploring the forest with his friends. He was fascinated by space too, covering his home with posters of stars and far-flung galaxies.
His fluffy white Persian cat, Pashmak, was his pride and joy.
Mohammed Hassan and his cat, Pashmak. Pic: Twitter
His brother says he was a calm, kind person who had great ambitions.
“He had big ideas and wanted to make an impact in the future,” his brother said.
Mohammed Hassan had moved to Babol five years ago to study at university. So on 21 September, his family in Shahin Shahr, Isfahan, didn’t know he had gone out to protest.
It was only when they received a worried phone call from one of his friends that they realised something awful had happened.
“I was in a terrible state of shock, so I remember everything like a nightmare,” his brother said.
The friend told them that he had been calling Mohammad Hassan after he failed to turn up to his house as expected. An unknown voice eventually picked up and said that Mohammad Hassan had been shot.
His father, a veteran and former prisoner of war during the conflict between Iran and Iraq, was so shocked by the news that he suffered a stroke and was taken into intensive care.
His brother says that when he went to see Mohammad Hassan’s body in the morgue, he saw a bullet wound in his head.
For three days, the authorities refused to release the body and only did so on the condition that the family would remain quiet about where he had been shot and held the funeral under strict security.
But even then, their ordeal was far from over.
“The events for the third and the seventh days were held under watchful eyes of the agents,” his brother said.
At the 40th day ceremony, the situation escalated.
“They were attacked by the security forces, plain clothes militia using stun grenades, tear gas, rubber bullets, paintballs and batons. Many were arrested and wounded,” his brother said.
It’s now been months since Mohammad Hassan’s death and the memorial gatherings that followed. But relatives say the authorities are still harassing them.
“We are more or less threatened, we are monitored and controlled, some days they follow us, some nights they are stationed near our home,” his brother said.
Digital memorialisation
Azadeh Pourzand, a human rights researcher at SOAS University of London, explains that Iranian authorities have a history of treating families of those killed by the state in this way as they fear the impact the killing could have.
“It’s ironic that the regime is so strong with its state violence as a repressive regime but is scared of the dead bodies it creates,” she told Sky News.
“It’s not new to see the burial ceremonies for victims of state violence being disrupted in this way. It’s used as a tool to further harass and silence families,” she said.
Azadeh says that for many years, this meant that the only cases that would garner attention were those in which the victim was already publicly known or of a certain societal status. It was therefore largely left to human rights organisations like the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center to document the stories of all of the others who died at the hands of the state.
Since 2002, the centre has run the Omid Memorial project which is a digital archive of all of those who have been killed by the state and acts as an online memorial.
“The project’s mission is to ensure that all victims of the state’s violation of the right to life are memorialised, that society acknowledges the harm done to them and their loved ones, to help start their healing process in the absence of justice,” said Roya Boroumand, who runs the centre.
The advent of social media, however, has meant that individuals are now empowered to do this themselves in ways that they were previously unable to. It means that social media pages dedicated to the memory of those who have been killed in Iran are increasingly common online.
Many of these accounts are run by bereaved family members. Three months after Mohammad Hassan’s death, two of his relatives set up Twitter pages that post on a daily basis, almost exclusively about Mohammad Hassan. They now have a combined following of over 27,000.
This digital image of Mohammed Hassan has been shared on pages dedicated to his memory and across social media
Among the posts are pictures of Mohammad Hassan as a child, as well as his gravestone and memorial shrine. Many include anecdotes about Mohammad Hassan and calls for justice.
The hashtag of Mohammad Hassan’s full name in Farsi, which features in each of the posts, has been tweeted over 143,000 times according to data collected by social listening platform TalkWalker.
One of the posts shared in memory of Mohammed Hassan, which was originally written in Farsi describes how the cemetery he is buried in was blocked off by security agents
“It is my duty and my family’s duty to be the voice of my brother’s unjustly shed blood. My father was the one who stood in front of Iraqi soldiers and defended his country. We learned our courage from him,” Mohammad Hassan’s brother said.
Other accounts dedicated to memorialising all of those who have died have also sprung up.
One page was initially created to pay tribute to the 1,500 protesters killed in 2019. The account now creates and shares memorials for those who have died during the recent protests and for those who have been executed. It has 27,000 followers on Instagram and a further 7,000 on Twitter.
“The government of Iran wants these things not to be mentioned at all, not to be heard at all. The government media denies this at all,” the page’s operator told Sky News.
“I am the voice of their grieving families,” they said.
“What we are seeing here is grassroots archiving and memorialising,” said Azadeh Pourzand.
She explains that these memorials are also about achieving justice for those who have died.
“The ultimate goal is: we are not going to forget and we are not going to forgive. We’re not going to let our loved one’s blood go to waste. We are going to keep it alive, we are going to remember and we are going to seek justice,” she told Sky News.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Sky News analysis shows that aid distributions by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) are associated with a significant increase in deaths.
Warning: This article contains descriptions of people being killed and images of blood on a hospital floor.
The US and Israeli-backed group has been primarily responsible for aid distribution since Israel lifted its 11-week blockade of the Gaza Strip last month.
The GHF distributes aid from four militarised Secure Distribution Sites (SDSs) – three of which are in the far south of the Gaza Strip. Under the previous system, the UN had distributed aid through hundreds of sites across the territory.
According to Gaza’s health ministry, 600 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid from GHF sites, which charities and the UN have branded “death traps”.
The UN put the figure at 410, but has not updated this number since 24 June. Both the UN and health ministry source their figures from hospitals near the aid sites.
Speaking to Sky News, GHF chief Johnnie Moore disputed that these deaths were connected with his organisation’s operations.
“Almost anything that happens in the Gaza Strip is going to take place in proximity to something,” he said.
“Our effort is actually working despite a disinformation campaign, that is very deliberate and meant to shut down our efforts.
“We just want to feed Gazans. That’s the only thing that we want to do.”
However, new analysis by Sky’s Data & Forensics Unit shows that deaths in Gaza have spiked during days with more GHF distributions.
On days when GHF conducts just two distributions or fewer, health officials report an average of 48 deaths and 189 injuries across the Gaza Strip.
On days with five or six GHF distributions, authorities have reported almost three times as many casualties.
Out of 77 distributions at GHF sites between 5 June and 1 July, Sky News found that 23 ended in reports of bloodshed (30%).
At one site, SDS4 in the central Gaza Strip, as many as half of all distributions were followed by reports of fatal shootings.
Sky News spoke to one woman who had been attending SDS4 for 10 days straight.
“I witnessed death first-hand – bodies lay bleeding on the ground all around me,” says Huda.
“This is not right. Food should be delivered to UN warehouses, and this entire operation must be shut down.”
Huda told Sky News that she has been trying to obtain aid from SDS4, in the central Gaza Strip, for the past 10 days
Huda says that the crowds are forced to dodge bombs and bullets “just to get a bag of rice or pasta”.
“You may come back, you may not,” she says. “I was injured by shrapnel in my leg. Despite that, I go back, because we really have nothing in our tent.”
One of the deadliest incidents at SDS4 took place in the early hours of 24 June.
According to eyewitnesses, Israeli forces opened fire as people advanced towards aid trucks carrying food to the site, which was due to open.
“It was a massacre,” said Ahmed Halawa. He said that tanks and drones fired at people “even as we were fleeing”. At least 31 people were killed, according to medics at two nearby hospitals.
Footage from that morning shows the floor of one of the hospitals, al Awda, covered in blood.
The IDF says it is reviewing the incident.
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Doctor’s final moments revealed
Issues of crowd control
Unnamed soldiers who served near the aid sites told Israeli newspaper Haaretz that they were instructed to use gunfire as a method of crowd control.
An IDF spokesperson told Sky News that it “strongly rejected” the accusations that its forces were instructed to deliberately shoot at civilians.
“To be clear, IDF directives prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians,” the spokesperson said, adding that the incidents are “being examined by the relevant IDF authorities”.
Eyewitness testimony and footage posted to social media suggest that crowd control is a frequent problem at the sites.
The video below, uploaded on 12 June, shows a crowd rushing into SDS1, in Gaza’s far southwest. What sounds like explosions are audible in the background.
Footage from the same site, uploaded on 15 June, shows Palestinians searching for food among hundreds of aid parcels scattered across the ground.
Sam Rose, the director of UNRWA operations in Gaza, describes the distribution process as a “free-for-all”.
“What they’re doing is they’re loading up the boxes on the ground and then people just rush in,” he says.
Sky News has found that the sites typically run out of food within just nine minutes. In a quarter of cases (23%), the food is finished by the time the site was due to officially open.
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Doctors on the frontline
Confusing communications
Sky News analysis suggests that the issue may be being compounded by poor communications from GHF.
Between 19 June and 1 July, 86% of distributions were announced with less than 30 minutes’ notice. One in five distributions was not announced at all prior to the site opening.
The GHF instructs Palestinians to take particular routes to the aid centres, and to wait at specified locations until the official opening times.
The map for SDS1 instructs Palestinians to take a narrow agricultural lane that no longer exists, while the maps for SDS2 and SDS3 give waiting points that are deep inside IDF-designated combat zones.
The maps do not make the boundaries of combat zones clear or specify when it is safe for Palestinians to enter them.
The same is true for SDS4, the only distribution site outside Gaza’s far south. Its waiting point is located 1.2 miles (2km) inside an IDF combat zone.
The official map also provides no access route from the northern half of Gaza, including Gaza City, across the heavily militarised Netzarim corridor.
“They don’t know what they’re doing,” says UNRWA’s Sam Rose.
“They don’t have anyone working on these operations who has any experience of operating, of administering food distributions because anyone who did have that experience wouldn’t want to be part of it because this isn’t how you treat people.”
Once the sites are officially open, Palestinians are allowed to travel the rest of the way.
The distance from waiting point to aid site is typically over a kilometre, making it difficult for Palestinians to reach the aid site before the food runs out.
The shortest distance is at SDS4 – 689m. At a pace of 4km per hour, this would take around 10 minutes to cover.
But of the 18 distributions at this site which were announced in advance, just two lasted longer than 10 minutes before the food ran out.
“We don’t have time to pick anything up,” says Huda, who has been visiting SDS4 for the past 10 days.
In all that time, she says, all she had managed to take was a small bag of rice.
“I got it from the floor,” she says. “We didn’t get anything else.”
More than 200 charities and non-governmental organisations have called for the closure of GHF and the reinstatement of previous, UN-led mechanisms of aid distribution.
In a joint statement issued on 1 July, some of the world’s largest humanitarian groups accused the GHF of violating international humanitarian principles. They said the scheme was forcing two million people into overcrowded, militarised zones where they face daily gunfire.
Additional reporting by OSINT producers Sam Doak and Lina-Serene.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
World
Teens unable to walk, mothers with rash-covered babies: Kush is ruining lives – and made with ingredients shipped from the UK
A red shipping container sits on the tarmac of Sierra Leone’s Queen Elizabeth II Quay, under swinging cranes and towering stacks of similar steel boxes.
This one will likely be parked at the port permanently. The contents are suspected to be the ingredients of kush, the deadly synthetic drug ravaging Sierra Leone.
Sky News was given access to the container two weeks after it was seized.
“Preliminary testing has shown that these items are kush ingredients,” says the secretary of the Ports Authority, Martin George, as he points to the marked contraband in massive multicoloured Amazon UK bags and a large blue vat of strongly smelling acetone.
He adds: “Shipped from the United Kingdom.”
The container was selected for screening based on its origin. The UK is with the EU and South America on the list of places considered high risk for the import of illicit substances fuelling the drug trade in Sierra Leone and the region.
Kush has shaken this part of West Africa to its core – not just Sierra Leone but Liberia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia. It is highly addictive, ever-evolving and affordable.
The sprayed grey-green marshmallow leaves are rolled in a joint like marijuana and are extremely dangerous. Samples of the drug tested by researchers contained nitazens, one of the deadliest synthetic drugs in the world.
“It was a shock to find them in around half of the kush samples we tested, as at that point there was no public evidence they had reached Africa,” says Lucia Bird Ruiz-Benitez de Lugo from Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) who independently tested kush from Sierra Leone.
“Nitazenes are among the deadliest drugs available on retail drug markets across the world – with one nitazene in kush in Freetown being 25 times stronger than fentanyl,” she added.
The shocking effects of its potency can be seen on the bodies of young men and women around Freetown. Teenagers with sores eating away at their legs, unable to walk. Mothers who smoked during pregnancy carrying sickly rash-covered infants. Young men drooling from the intense high and slumped over while still standing.
They are not the fringes of Sierra Leonean society but a growing demographic of kush users searching for an escape. People riddled by poverty and unemployment, living in the dark corners of a capital city which has endured a brutal civil war and Ebola epidemic in the last three decades alone.
An entire community of men and women of all ages is held together by kush addiction under a main road that cuts through the heart of Freetown.
They call themselves the “Under de Bridge family” and live in the shadows of the overpass, surrounded by the sewage and rubbish discarded by their neighbours.
One of them tells us the harsh conditions drive him to keep smoking kush even after losing more than 10 friends to the drug – killed by large infected sores and malnutrition.
Nearby, 17-year-old Ibrahim is pained by growing sores and says the drug is destroying his life.
“This drug is evil. This drug is bad. I don’t know why they gave me this drug in this country. Our brothers are suffering. Some are dying, some have sores on their feet. This drug brings destruction,” he says.
“Look at me – just because of this drug. I have sores on my feet.”
Read more from Sky News:
Man separated from family by war returns home
Sky reporter returns to family home left in ruins
Across a stream of sewage, a young mother expecting her second child cries from fear and anguish when I ask her about the risk of smoking while pregnant.
“Yes, I know the risk,” Elizabeth says, nodding.
“I’ll keep smoking while I live here but I have nowhere else to go. It helps me forget my worries and challenges.”
Life under the bridge is disrupted from its sleepiness by a yell. A plain-clothed police officer is chasing a child accused of selling kush.
The lucrative industry is absorbing all age groups and spreading rapidly to nearby countries – even passing through three different borders to reach the smallest nation in mainland Africa, The Gambia.
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Police hunt for kush dealers in West Africa
Gambian law enforcement has cracked down on spreading kush use with regular zero tolerance drug raids. The small population is extremely vulnerable and the country is yet to open its first rehabilitation centre. Rising xenophobia seems to be mostly directed at Sierra Leonean immigrants who they blame for smuggling kush into the country.
We spoke to one man from Sierra Leone who was arrested for dealing kush in The Gambia and spent a year in prison. He says that though he feels saddened other Sierra Leoneans are being alienated as a result of the trade he was involved in, he has no remorse for “following orders”.
“Do I feel guilty for selling it? No, I don’t feel guilty. I’m not using my money to buy the kush, people always give me money to get kush for them,” he tells Sky News anonymously.
“I needed a job. I needed to take care of my son.”
Gambia’s hardline approach has been credited with driving its local kush industry underground rather than eradicating it but is still hailed as the most impactful strategy in the region. Sierra Leone’s government told Sky News it needs help from surrounding countries and the UK to tackle the sprawling crisis.
Transnational crime experts like Lucia Bird Ruiz-Benitez de Lugo see the rise of kush as part of a global synthetic drugs network that requires a multi-national response.
“Coordinated action is urgently needed across the supply chain, particularly focused on nitazenes – the deadliest kush component,” says Ms Bird.
“Our research indicated that kush components are being imported to West Africa from countries in Asia and Europe, likely including the UK. All countries in the supply chain bear responsibility to act to mitigate the devastating and expanding impacts of kush across West Africa, a region with scarce resources to respond.”
The Women’s Euros begin in Switzerland today – with extreme heat warnings in place.
Security measures have had to be relaxed by UEFA for the opening matches so fans can bring in water bottles.
Temperatures could be about 30C (86F) when the Swiss hosts open their campaign against Norway in Basel this evening.
Players have already seen the impact of heatwaves this summer at the men’s Club World Cup in the US.
The Spain squad pauses for refreshments during a training session. Pic: AP
Read more: A complete guide to the Women’s Euros
It is raising new concerns in the global players’ union about whether the stars of the sport are being protected in hot and humid conditions.
FIFPRO has asked FIFA to allow cooling breaks every 15 minutes rather than just in the 30th minute of each half.
There’s also a request for half-time to be extended from 15 to 20 minutes to help lower the core temperature of players.
FIFPRO’s medical director, Dr Vincent Gouttebarge, said: “There are some very challenging weather conditions that we anticipated a couple of weeks ago already, that was already communicated to FIFA.
“And I think the past few weeks were confirmation of all worries that the heat conditions will play a negative role for the performance and the health of the players.”
Football has seemed focused on players and fans baking in the Middle East – but scorching summers in Europe and the US are becoming increasingly problematic for sport.
England are the tournament’s defending champions. Pic: AP
While climate change is a factor, the issue is not new and at the 1994 World Cup, players were steaming as temperatures rose in the US.
There is now more awareness of the need for mitigation measures among players and their international union.
FIFPRO feels football officials weren’t responsive when it asked for kick-off times to be moved from the fierce afternoon heat in the US for the first 32-team Club World Cup.
FIFA has to balance the needs of fans and broadcasters with welfare, with no desire to load all the matches in the same evening time slots.
Electric storms have also seen six games stopped, including a two-hour pause during a Chelsea game at the weekend.
This is the dress rehearsal for the World Cup next summer, which is mostly in the US.
Players are also feeling the heat at the Club World Cup. Pic: AP
The use of more indoor, air conditioned stadiums should help.
There is no prospect of moving the World Cup to winter, as Qatar had to do in 2022.
And looking further ahead to this time in 2030, there will be World Cup matches in Spain, Portugal and Morocco. The temperatures this week have been hitting 40C (104F) in some host cities.
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Football star mural unveiled
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Wildfires erupt in Italy and France amid heatwave
FIFA said in a statement to Sky News: “Heat conditions are a serious topic that affect football globally.
“At the FCWC some significant and progressive measures are being taken to protect the players from the heat. For instance, cooling breaks were implemented in 31 out of 54 matches so far.
“Discussions on how to deal with heat conditions need to take place collectively and FIFA stands ready to facilitate this dialogue, including through the Task Force on Player Welfare, and to receive constructive input from all stakeholders on how to further enhance heat management.
“In all of this, the protection of players must be at the centre.”
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