Armita is dead. Like Mahsa Amini, like Nika Shakarami, Armita Garavand will never wake up again. After 28 days in a coma in Tehran’s Fajr military hospital, they pulled the plug. Six days ago, confirmation of the “brain death” of the sixteen-year-old girl who was attacked by moral police in the capital’s subway arrived; her father had also said: “There is no hope.”
And now social media is awash with pictures of his face. Photographs, drawings, paintings. This happens to every young person killed by the regime. The activists, the Iranian youth, are making their voices heard wherever they can, however they can. For them, hashtags are not empty slogans, but become promises of resistance: We will not forget you, we will not forgive them.
Armita, originally from Kermanshah, a Kurdish-majority city about 500 kilometers from the Iranian capital, lived in Tehran and attended high school. On the first Sunday in October, she met her classmates at the Shohada subway station. In Iran, students stay home from school on Thursdays and Fridays.
Thanks to the subway’s surveillance cameras, we can tell his story. In these videos, we saw the friends walking across the platform with their heads uncovered. We saw them enter the car with backpacks on their shoulders and talk to each other. Then we had to rebuild because the video story stopped exactly in the seconds that proved fatal.
Although each carriage is equipped with at least two cameras, we learned what was happening inside through the statements of other commuters, as the dictatorship did not allow these images to be viewed. Some children say that during this race Armita encountered the morality police who asked her and her friends why they were not wearing a veil. Like many Iranian girls, Armita would have preferred not to remain silent and defended her hair in the wind: “I ask you why are you wearing it instead?” At this point, they pushed her so hard that she hit her head, resulting in a very serious head injury . Then the videos return. In the following pictures we saw the friends dragging the unconscious young Kurdish girl out of the carriage. From that moment on the Shohada station platform, Armita will never wake up again. No more youth and no more dreams to realize. Enough painting, music, taekwondo, his passions.
They took her to the Fajr Military Hospital in Tehran, a high-security hospital. Because the regime knows the power that lies in its name Armita, which is identical to that of Mahsa, Nika, Asra. A little more than a year after the murder of Mahsa Amini, another story comes from Tehran like that of the 22-year-old from Saqqez, who started the largest protests of the last 40 years in the history of the Islamic regime. Mahsa was also Kurdish. She was also beaten by the moral police because a strand of hair came out of her veil and fell into a coma before dying. Armita’s parents were also forced to provide false information. His mother, like Mahsa’s relatives, ended up in prison because she demanded the truth from a regime that denies it. “Armita had low blood sugar and hit her head,” authorities said. Everything identical. Everything can be overlaid.
The NGOs say the family’s request to take the body to Kermanshah, the Kurdish city where it comes from, was rejected. She must be buried in Tehran. “They are afraid of the reaction of the Kurdish people,” say the activists.
How will the streets react? How will Khamenei and his Pasdaran justify the new death of a girl who didn’t want to look like them? Especially now, when the Ayatollah government is also being criticized for supporting Hamas in the war with Israel, there is a risk that Armita’s story will explode against them.