🔶 Publication of the names of “student leaders”; fear of the start of protests in Iran

🔶 Publication of the names of “student leaders”; fear of the start of protests in Iran

🔻 A report by Morad Rehmati

At the same time as a devastating war between the United States and the Islamic Republic, another battle has flared within society. Some political analysts say the Iranian government is worried about the start of popular protests and is trying in advance to engineer them.

The Ministry of Intelligence has recently published the names of hundreds of media outlets and “anti-establishment human-media,” and announced the seizure of their assets; but it wasn’t long before they went after students.

In a report titled “From exposé to threat to the student,” the newspaper Shargh has written that a number of Telegram channels, including “Ikhwan-al-Mukhabirin,” “Kaftariyab,” “Zombi-yab,” and “Daeshjo,” have started publicly disseminating students’ identity information from various universities at the same time; information including their first and last names, national identity number, address of their place of residence, and the phone numbers of the students and their family members.

The publication of these data has been accompanied by a wave of threatening messages, threats of expulsion and arrest, as well as harassment of students’ families and their workplaces, disrupting their personal, academic, and professional lives.

The breadth of the information released and the existence of documents such as university grade records raise the question of how the administrators of these channels obtained data that is usually only available to universities and official institutions.

At the end of its report, Shargh has written that what has been clarified so far is the leaking of students’ private information and the use of this information for retaliation against them.