As the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued evacuation orders on Thursday for hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon while the war in Iran spreads across the Middle East, global affairs experts, including here in Colorado, are sharing insight into the conflict.
“On Saturday morning, the U.S. and Israel effectively declared war on Iran, although the U.S. did not get congressional approval," Marie Ranjbar, University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of women and gender studies, said. “On Saturday, the military strikes assasinated the supreme leader of the country, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as several top officials in leadership. Unfortunately, one of the civilian casualties of the first day of the war was a strike on a girl’s school in the south of Iran. One-hundred, seventy-five school girls were killed in that strike.”
Ranjbar, an Iranian American who’s done extensive research on social movements in Iran, said multiple hard truths are co-existing in the region.
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“The Islamic Republic is a deeply unpopular government. In January of this year, they were responsible for, arguably, crimes against humanity, where they brutally cracked down on protesters... and there are estimates of up to 36,000 Iranians massacred by the Islamic Republic, tens of thousands arrested and disappeared," she said. "This is, again, a deeply unpopular regime. However, we do need to hold that intention with the fact that a U.S. and Israeli war against Iran doesn't necessarily advance the cause of human rights, or women's rights.”
Ranjbar said the protests of the 2022–23 Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement is an example of the mass wave of anti-government protests that have ignited over the past few years in Iran, with citizens expressing extreme discontent with the government.
“These were women-led protests that spread throughout the country, where Iranian women were articulating a very clear vision of what they wanted a future Iran to be: One that was secular, one that was Democratic, with deep respect for bodily autonomy and human rights," Ranjbar said. "And my fear is that in this moment of a war that was launched without discussion with the American public, without a clear end game of what the reasoning for going to war right now is, etc., will threaten or worsen human rights conditions within the country."
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Ranjbar said as bombing and airstrikes continue, she’s afraid for the hundreds of thousands of civilians in the region, including her own family.
“My family are all in the north, and I have not been able to reach them since Saturday morning because the internet is cut off in many parts of the country. So it's a very terrifying time and again, we have to ask ourselves, especially a place like Iran, whose neighbors are Afghanistan and Iraq: Does military intervention or regime change lead to, for example, a Western liberal democracy?" said Ranjbar. "I think we need to be very cynical of some of those discourses. We actually don't have acting U.S. ambassadors in many of the countries that were asking U.S. citizens to evacuate on their own dime.”
According to CNN, more than 11,000 flights across 10 countries in the region have been canceled since February 28.
ABC News reports the State Department announced on Wednesday that a charter flight for American citizens stuck in the Middle East was en route to the United States.
