The way the Persians believe and use to restore their lost glory, as the commander of their military militia, “Qassem Soleimani” once said, is through the extermination of the Arabs who destroyed their Persian empire.

As a matter of fact, only the colonialists and terrorist organizations share this view therewith. The method of razing the land from indigenous people and uprooting them from their state is an attribute that accompanies occupiers wherever they go. In Arab Ahvaz, this is confirmed at every opportunity Iranian Persians may have.

For Ahvazi Arabs, resisting the occupier was not just a luxury or separatist tendencies, nor a search for an improvement in the deteriorating life or a rebellion against the abhorrent racism imposed thereon by the Persians. It was an inevitable choice to attain freedom and exit from Persian slavery.

Being the descendants of the first Arabs who left the Arabian Peninsula, Arabs of Ahvaz have always asked themselves: “Is this how the Persians return the favor to the Arabs who left their countries and went out to the corners of the world, including Persia, carrying Islam and the values of and Sunnah of Muhammad the Prophet? Arabs spread that great message in Persia and turned them away from worshiping fire and heavenly bodies to worshiping the One and Only, and from sharing wives to decent morals.

In Persian conscience, the Arabs, children of the desert, are still of lower status and they only see them lizards’ eaters. This racist concept has continued since Khosrau kings’ invasions of the Arabian Peninsula before Islam until today.

The fall of the Arab Emirate of Ahvaz under the Persian occupation was never easy for the Arab people there. Several months after the occupation in 1925, soldiers of Sheikh Khazal and his private guards, known as the “Ghilman” or the Boys, ignited the first uprising named thereafter. That limited uprising was merely a spark followed by successive revolutions rejecting the occupation till today, calling for Arab independence from Persian rule.

The revolution of “Bani Tarf”, the Arab Ahvazi clan, was in search of lost freedom and desired justice. Musleh Khader al-Jubouri explains in his book, Political Role of Minorities in the Middle East, how the Arab uprising took on a broader dimension with the entry of other tribes and clans that were the backbone of moving against the occupier, especially Banu Sala, Banu Lam, Al-Shorfa and Al-Muhaisin, after which the rebellious clans took control of all the villages, outposts and cities scattered in their regions. That uprising lasted for a few months.

Such rapid spread of the uprising prompted the Persian occupier to mobilize a large army from various military barracks, yet that did not deter the Ahvazi Arabs from their independent project. They faced the Persian occupier with great resistance on passing Ahvazi areas under the control of the uprisers, due to the tight fortifications they built and the nature of the land, which abounds with rivers, swamps and palm groves. This prompted the Iranian-Persian army to use heavy weapons, such as artillery and tanks, as well as fighter planes that bombed villages and clan gatherings, burned homes and farms and killed Ahvazi people indiscriminately.

Iranians viewed the rising Arabs as an armed army, while they were defenseless civilians who had nothing to resist the occupier with except their hands and their Arabism that had never been broken. Arab people in Ahvaz have had enough, so they went out in their uprising looking for death, after they despaired of that life of humiliation, disgrace and tyranny that they lived under the hateful Persian occupation.

Author Musleh Khader al-Jubouri also says: Indiscriminate aerial bombardment of cities and villages and the burning of orchards and houses continued for consecutive days, until the Ahvazis who rose up were brutally eliminated.

In another narration of the scene of the wounded Ahvaz that confirms what the residents lived through, well-known Arab writer, Dr. Ali Al-Wardi, said:

It was a heinous, barbaric, terrible terrorist massacre that claimed the lives of thousands of innocent women, children, elderly and uprising men. Parity in military force between both parties was almost nil, except for the solid national will of the uprising. When the Persian regular and air forces overcame the Arab steadfast uprisers in Ahvaz, Persian racist authority deported hundreds of the uprisers, who numbered about (1,500) Ahvazi citizens, to northern Persia, on foot at gunpoint, where dozens were executed dozens. The Persian enemy, with all its prisoners and detainees, passed through those rugged mountains and deep valleys, and most of them died on the way due to execution, hunger, exhaustion, fatigue and cold. Only forty Ahvazi citizens arrived in Tehran, who were distributed by the Iranian authorities to remote villages. That was a crime, racism and a Persian terrorist act that Ahvazi generations are still talking about.

“Iranian-Persians” certainly know that they live on the bounties of the Arab Ahvaz region; oil, gas, water, crops and fish resources, knowing that abandoning them shall bring them back to their true geographical borders and their modest position in the world, fully aware that the regions they occupy – Arab, Baluchi, Kurdish, and Jarjaniya – did not and will not submit to them except with blood, killing and continuous intimidation. Therefore, their bloody policy is still working on the ground relentlessly, especially in Ahvaz since its occupation to this day.