Iran’s Khuzestan: Thirst and Turmoil

The anti-government protests that erupted throughout Iran in September 2022 were the latest episode in a dismayingly familiar cycle: when discontent boils over in unrest, the Islamic Republic vaguely acknowledges popular concerns, perhaps even signalling measures to quiet them, but then proceeds to quash their expression with brute force and to revert to its old ways. Failing to address the underlying grievances, it sets the stage for another bloody confrontation between state and society. Nowhere is this cycle more apparent than in provinces historically mismanaged by the capital and beset with local social and environmental problems. In one such province, Khuzestan in the south west, protests have been frequent, including as part of the late 2022 nationwide movement. Yet the piecemeal government efforts to respond cannot repair the damage done by decades’ worth of mismanagement, exacerbated by factors like sanctions and climate change. The necessary changes go beyond what Tehran has proven willing or able to undertake, underscoring the need for a fundamental reconsideration of how it governs.

During the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, Khuzestan was a major battleground, symbolising the values the nascent Islamic Republic sought to inculcate: resistance, determination and sacrifice. Yet the wounds of that bitter decade have been left to fester, not by a foreign foe but by successive Iranian governments, which have drawn on the province’s wealth of natural resources without efficiently investing in its development, a fact of which its population is glaringly aware. As a result, in Khuzestan today the country’s most troubling fault lines are cast in sharp relief. While being one of Iran’s most resource-rich provinces, it suffers from environmental degradation, reducing the supply of water, the scarcity of which sparked protests in mid-2021; socio-political dissatisfaction that reflects a broad repudiation, evident across the country, of state mismanagement and corruption; economic uncertainty and unemployment; ethnically tinged resentment among its sizeable Arab population; and, above all, government neglect despite repeated pledges to tackle growing problems.

Examining these challenges at the provincial level reveals the difficulty in addressing them. There are useful steps the government could take in Khuzestan, especially to alleviate political grievances and water scarcity. Empowering local officials, and incorporating the views of the Arab population, who at best feel left off Tehran’s list of priorities and at worst suspect intentional discrimination, could help defuse the brewing trouble. More sustainable models of agriculture management, smarter resource allocation and greater consideration of problems arising from environmental degradation could mitigate the impact of worsening living conditions.

But these steps would still amount to only a partial remedy, even if they bring about a needed shift from the short-term, reactive policies that have largely characterised the state’s approach to planning thus far. Khuzestan has local drivers of discontent, demonstrated in the 2021 protests over water, and also reflects grievances prevalent elsewhere in the country, as seen during the nationwide tumult in late 2022. Its experience shows that policies must address both national and provincial sources of unhappiness. The recurrence of popular unrest has led even stalwarts of the Islamic Republic to warn of the danger of continuing down a path that premises political stability on exclusion of all but the most loyal. Events in Iran’s peripheral provinces demonstrate that such exclusion does little more than perpetuate mismanagement, which in turn lays the groundwork for more frequent turbulence, rendering Iran vulnerable to the same pathologies that have caused civil strife elsewhere in the Middle East.

Ahvaz/Washington/Brussels, 21 August 2023

In the summer of 2021, in the wake of Ebrahim Raisi’s victory in Iran’s presidential election, the south-western province of Khuzestan was gripped by a two-week uprising. The unrest, rooted in pent-up frustration with political stagnation and economic malaise, was triggered by severe scarcity of water.[1] The authorities eventually dispersed the demonstrations, but the president-elect had taken notice. It was no accident that Raisi broadcast his maiden address to the nation – on Nowrouz, the first day of the Persian calendar, in March 2022 – from the grand mosque in Khorramshahr, a city in Khuzestan.[2] Many Iranians see the sanctuary as a symbol of resistance to the Iraqi occupation of the city from 1980 to 1982.[3] But there was another reason behind the choice of venue: the government felt it had to signal the intent to tackle Khuzestan’s accumulating problems, if nothing else to keep the province quiet.

A year later, however, citizens’ unhappiness had only deepened – not just in Khuzestan but also throughout Iran. Months of anti-government protests prompted by the death in September 2022 of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa (Jhina) Amini, in the custody of Tehran’s “morality police” had laid bare the regime’s unwillingness or inability to address nationwide discontent with its repressive cultural practices and stifling restrictions on personal freedoms. The protests were particularly intense, and the state’s crackdown especially violent, in the provinces, underscoring how deep the fissures between state and society run in regions the central government has long viewed as peripheral, meriting an afterthought at most with respect to investment and service provision.

Nestled on the Gulf’s northern shores, abutting Iraq, Khuzestan is a microcosm of the many intersecting challenges facing the Islamic Republic. Rich in natural resources but poverty-stricken, historically verdant but increasingly parched, ground zero in the brutal eight-year Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) yet subsequently treated as literal and metaphorical fringe, the province faces financial, developmental, environmental and social challenges deriving from governance failures that make it look like a bellwether for the entire country. The protests that have repeatedly roiled Khuzestan reflect widespread discontent with local conditions, as during the 2021 water crisis, but also nationwide anger at the regime’s abuses and chronic mismanagement.

On paper, Khuzestan is an engine of Iran’s economy. It produces nearly 15 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product; only the capital Tehran contributes more, and no other province delivers a double-digit share.[1] Oil was discovered in Khuzestan in 1908. It has subsequently been synonymous with Iran’s energy industry: the province is estimated to hold more than 80 per cent of the country’s oil and gas reserves, and more than a third of Iran’s petrochemical plants are located there.[2] It also grows around 14 per cent of the country’s agricultural output, importantly wheat, more than any other province; it has around 33 per cent of Iran’s surface water; it hosts the nation’s second biggest steelmaker and one of the most important commercial hubs, the Imam Khomeini seaport.[3] These assets have helped make the province “cosmopolitan”, according to scholars, a place that has long drawn migrant workers from elsewhere in Iran.[4]

Yet harsh realities underlie all this productivity. Nearly one third of Khuzestan’s population live in poverty.[5] Unemployment exceeds 12 per cent, with the real number likely much higher than the official one.[6] Water scarcity due to factors like constant droughts and mismanagement of resources is a critical problem in Khuzestan.[7] The province suffers from frequent dust storms; air pollution in Ahvaz, the provincial capital, is alarmingly high not only by national but also by global standards.[8] These socio-economic and environmental woes intertwine with longstanding political grievances among Khuzestan’s sizeable Arab minority, who complain of discrimination and abandonment by central and local authorities.[9] The repeated bouts of unrest stem from the combination of these problems.

Not all of Iran’s regions contend as fiercely as Khuzestan with every one of these myriad challenges, but conditions in the province reflect many of the stresses facing the country as a whole. So long as the Islamic Republic’s approach is to suppress dissent rather than address its causes, the potential for instability will only rise, especially in areas where those stresses are most acute.

This report examines the immediate and longer-term drivers of discontent in Khuzestan, which manifest most prominently in the form of recurrent anti-government protests. While it focuses on local experiences, the lessons for considering and addressing environmental, social and political strains are more broadly relevant. It is based on more than 50 interviews with experts, activists and residents in Khuzestan, former and current Iranian officials, and foreign diplomats. Women and ethnic minorities were represented among all the above categories of interlocutors. A sister report on Iran’s Baluchestan will follow.

Khuzestan has seen repeated outbreaks of violent unrest in recent years. At times, these are reverberations of nationwide protests, with those triggered by Mahsa Amini’s death in September 2022 being the latest of three major rounds since late 2017.[1] At others, such as during the 2021 water crisis that led to the province’s “uprising of the thirsty”, the spark is local.

Protests over severe water shortages in Khuzestan, a risk that activists had repeatedly warned the government about, first erupted on 6 July 2021, when Arab residents of Maravnieh, a rural district near Ahvaz, gathered at the local energy ministry office, accusing the government of “manufacturing” drought by building too many dams and diverting rivers that had once allowed for abundant crop yields.[2] They said the government’s intent was to displace Arab farmers. Video footage of dead fish floating in the Hur al-Azim wetlands and starving buffaloes, as well as of angry farmers demanding water, flooded social media.[3] On 15 July, demonstrations spread to more than seventeen cities throughout the province.[4] In Shadegan, a man was killed in disputed circumstances.[5] In Hamidiyeh, protesters chanted, “I am thirsty!” – a cry that became the uprising’s defining slogan.[6]

Despite government-directed blackouts and internet slowdowns aimed at preventing news of the protests from spreading to inspire others, people in other provinces, including Isfahan, Lorestan, East Azerbaijan, Tehran and Alborz burst into the streets in solidarity with their compatriots in Khuzestan.[7] The demonstrations, which assumed an increasingly anti-regime tone, lasted for two weeks, as the government responded with deadly force.[8] Human rights activists say security forces killed six protesters and arrested at least 361 more during this period.[9]

The crackdown occurred in parallel with professions of sympathy and promises of reform from the government. “People are expressing their feelings. One cannot blame them for that”, said Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on 23 July. “If the necessary measures [on waste removal and water shortages] had been adopted … this situation would definitely not have arisen”.[10] President Hassan Rouhani and President-elect Raisi each issued a statement.[11] Rouhani’s deputy visited the province, where he had a contentious meeting with tribal leaders.[12] Raisi, who took office on 5 August, made a point of visiting Khuzestan in his first trip to a province as president, accompanied by a coterie of cabinet ministers.[13] Yet the recurrence of demonstrations since then, either local or as part of nationwide movements, suggests that grievances will continue to simmer, both in Khuzestan and around the country.[14]

Khuzestan has a long history of popular protest. In 2000, demonstrators gathered in Abadan to decry shortages of drinking water; local authorities responded forcefully, reportedly causing several deaths and making at least 150 arrests.[15] In 2005, security forces reportedly killed dozens and arrested hundreds in clashes following the publication of a 1999 letter, posted on the internet and attributed to President Mohammad Khatami’s chief of staff (which the administration maintained was a fabrication), outlining plans to alter the province’s demography by transferring Arabs out and non-Arabs in.[16] Repression triggered several bombings, which authorities attributed to separatists.[17]

In the following years, unrest in Khuzestan continued almost with the regularity of a metronome, particularly over environmental and economic concerns. In 2015, people protested the government’s failure to respond to health risks deriving from increasingly frequent dust storms.[1] In 2017, students took to the streets in Ahvaz to express their frustration with power blackouts, which led, inter alia, to a lack of air conditioning while they were trying to prepare for exams.[2] In 2018, residents of Abadan and Khorramshahr demonstrated over water shortages, leading to clashes with the police.[3] During the November 2019 nationwide protests sparked by an abrupt fuel price hike, almost 60 of the 324 documented deaths occurred in Khuzestan.[4]

The collapse of the commercial Metropol building under construction in downtown Abadan, which killed at least 43 and injured more than three dozen, sparked protests again in May 2022.[5] Popular outrage stemmed from a sense that gross negligence and endemic corruption had caused the tragedy.[6] What added fuel to the fire of public fury was the state’s response to the catastrophe: from sluggish crisis management and immediate deployment of anti-riot police in anticipation of protests to the Supreme Leader’s three-day delay in issuing condolences and the administration’s announcement of just one day of national mourning one week after the incident.[7] People in other provinces again held rallies in solidarity with Khuzestan.[8]

The September 2022 nationwide protests triggered by Mahsa Amini’s death in detention also spread to Khuzestan, leading to clashes with security forces. Izeh, an impoverished city in the province’s north east whose majority group is the Bakhtiyari tribe, made headlines in November after security forces fatally shot at least seven people, including three children.[9] Kian Pirfalak, a nine-year-old boy, lost his life when troops allegedly opened fire on his family’s car in the city centre.[10] The government blamed “terrorists” for exploiting the protests to fuel anti-regime sentiment and firing machine guns at both civilians and security forces in the area.[11] Despite the conflicting accounts, protesters recognised Kian, one of the youngest victims, as a martyr of the 2022 protests. Home videos depicting his childhood innocence went viral, turning him into a symbol.[12

The recurrence of protest in Khuzestan underscores the fundamental disconnect between the Iranian state and the citizenry, while the increasing frequency of unrest suggests that the gap is widening. People’s grievances are rooted in the same socio-political discontent seen elsewhere in Iran but compounded by local factors.

Government pledges to address Khuzestan’s challenges are as longstanding as they are unfulfilled. There are parallels to the economic and ethnic discontent seen in other peripheral provinces, as well as echoes of the dissatisfaction voiced throughout the 2022-2023 nationwide protests. What makes Khuzestan’s experience noteworthy, as a prelude and possible warning sign, is the multiplicity of fault lines, the repeated government commitments to fix the province’s problems and its failure to deliver on those promises. These three factors combine to suggest that the system can suppress open dissent temporarily, at best. At worst, it will face more regular, more determined and more confrontational rounds of protest.

Successive Iranian governments since the 1979 revolution have failed to give proper attention to economic development in Khuzestan and other far-flung provinces. The centre-periphery gap is evident in a variety of indices – from poverty to unemployment, which creates a ring of relative deprivation in western, northern and especially south-eastern Iran.[1] But in Khuzestan the discrepancy is greater because the province entered the post-revolutionary era having sustained such great damage.

The culprit was the Iran-Iraq war, which ground on from 1980 to 1988. Khuzestan was devastated, with hundreds of thousands of residents displaced.[2] The leadership in Tehran never ceases to praise the people of Khuzestan for their sacrifices on the nation’s behalf, but the latter claim it has not done enough to help them recover.[3] In 2006, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that the government had deliberately avoided investing in Khuzestan’s western areas, on the Gulf coast and along the Iraqi border, for nearly two decades after the war, as it feared that conflict with Iraq might resume, undoing any progress made.[4] Landmines also littered the province, further hampering reconstruction.[5]

Where Tehran did encourage development, it either mismanaged the ventures or aimed primarily to exploit the region’s natural riches with no regard for environmental or social consequences.[1] Post-revolutionary Iran incorporated environmental protection in its constitution, but every single one of its governments has failed to enforce the rules or hold those who violated them accountable.[2] The law is also silent on the social impact of development projects.[3]

One example is the government’s rapid expansion of sugarcane fields through large-scale land confiscation or purchase, which forced many farmers and agricultural workers into nearby slums, where they had to eke out a living in near-destitution alongside people displaced by the Iran-Iraq war.[4] As Jasem Shadid Zadeh, a former representative of Ahvaz in parliament, noted:

The sugarcane industry in the province alone destroyed more than 700 Arab villages and replaced thousands of self-reliant Arab farmers with workers from other provinces, turning them into slum dwellers struggling with unemployment and drug addiction.[5]

The waste removal system in Ahvaz is another case in point. It allows raw sewage to pour into the Karun river from 24 different points, polluting the waterway and its environs.[6] Water treatment and supply remain appallingly inadequate despite the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars in international and state support.[7] “Years of neglect cannot be rectified overnight”, a local official in Ahvaz lamented, ignoring the fact that successive Iranian governments have failed to resolve this particular challenge.[8] Others put the blame on Western sanctions that deprive Iran of access to foreign investment and technology.[9]

The May 2022 collapse of the Metropol building in Abadan put corruption on tragic display, along with Khuzestanis’ deep distrust of the government. Construction had proceeded despite warnings from engineers, primarily because the municipality had a financial stake in the building and its owner, Hossein Abdolbaghi, was well connected among Khuzestan’s officialdom.[10] Abdolbaghi reportedly died when the building fell down, but on social media accusations flew that authorities had faked his death to avoid accountability.[11] State-run outlets have since reported that 21 people associated with the Metropol have been sentenced to three years in prison on involuntary manslaughter and negligent assault charges, including the serving mayor, two former mayors and engineers supervising the project.[12]

Specific cases aside, statistics paint a picture of government failure across the board in the province where the majority of Iran’s oil originates.[1] Khuzestan has an official unemployment rate of 12.6 per cent, which is equivalent to a 219,000-strong “army of unemployed people”, as the head of the provincial planning organisation puts it.[2] Of the province’s nearly five million residents, at least 800,000 live in slums.[3] A patchwork of ethnicities, Khuzestan scores low on social cohesion.[4] Reflecting widespread despondency about the future, three in four young Khuzestanis reportedly want to leave for other parts of the country.[5]

Local officials say poor administration is at the root of Khuzestan’s problems. As Khamenei’s representative in Khuzestan conceded, “It’s not that insufficient resources have been allocated to the province, but that they were wasted through mismanagement, causing bigger problems”.[6] A former official wondered if “the water crisis would have been so calamitous if the government had literally done nothing”.[7]

In July 2021, amid protests in Khuzestan, President-elect Raisi unprecedentedly vowed to appoint a “special governor” with enhanced authority to address the province’s accumulated problems.[8] A month after he took office, he named Sadegh Khalilian, an Ahvaz-born former agriculture minister, as the special governor, affording him the distinct rights to attend cabinet meetings and contact ministers directly.[9] Months later, however, residents reported seeing little change on the ground.[10] Little surprise, then, that when Iran was engulfed in a nationwide uprising in the latter half of 2022, Khuzestan exploded as well.

Khuzestan’s ethnic minorities, especially its Arab population, view what is considered mismanagement elsewhere in Iran as systematic and even deliberate discrimination against them. Many Arabs believe that the government purposely neglects the province’s environmental woes to force them to abandon their lands.[1] The spark for the 2021 protests was a fiery speech by Sheikh Khalaf al-Mahalhel, the chief of the (Arab) Maravneh tribe, who accused the government of using drought to force Arab farmers to relocate.[2] The leader of the Bani Turuf, one of the largest Arab tribes in Khuzestan, echoed the allegation, urging people to protest.[3]

Perceptions of such nefarious designs in Tehran run deep among Khuzestan’s Arabs.[4] As evidence, Arab activists cite an alleged Supreme National Security Council document that came to light in April 2016.[5] The document is unverified and may be fake, but many consider it authentic and resent the ethnic bias they believe it represents.

Khuzestani Arabs feel that their ethnicity puts them at an economic disadvantage.

Khuzestani Arabs feel that their ethnicity puts them at an economic disadvantage. Iranian scholars often attribute the inequality between centre and periphery to “uneven development”, as wealth and power are concentrated in the central provinces, leaving the peripheral ones less developed in comparison.[1] But many Arabs see an explicitly ethnic dimension. A Khuzestani analyst said, “The Arabs compare their quality of life with that of their counterparts in other provinces and Gulf Arab states. In light of perceived economic inequalities, the ethnic framework has become a cognitive scheme for the Arab minority to make sense of their lives”.[2]

Lack of job opportunities, particularly in government and state-owned enterprises, is a key grievance.[3] Complaining that oil and sugarcane companies hire too few locals, contributing to Khuzestan’s high unemployment rate, a former provincial representative of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Mousavi Jazaieri, noted, “It’s disconcerting to see government officials disregard the disastrous consequences of decision-making, alienating our Arab people from the Islamic Republic, paving the way for enemies to invest in the disaffection of our people”.[4] As a Khuzestani activist put it,

We live in one of the wealthiest lands on earth. [We have] oil, gas, fertile land, water, everything. Our ancestors lived here with dignity for hundreds of years. But our generation has nothing but tremendous poverty, polluted air, contaminated water and scores of [related] diseases. In Mahshahr [in south-eastern Khuzestan], the government built dozens of oil refineries and petrochemical plants, and dozens of luxury settlements for non-Arab staff arriving from outside Khuzestan, while Arab people are living in dirt just a few kilometres away.[5]

There are other points of contention. One is the lack of mother-tongue education for Khuzestani Arabs.[6] As a teacher pointed out, “Beginning schooling in Persian is a form of institutional discrimination for young students who have never spoken the language before”.[7] People also voice demands for starting Arabic-language publications, opening space for Arab civil society organisations and renaming cities in the original Arabic.[8]

Minorities see few ways to bring about positive change. Khuzestan has eighteen representatives in the 290-seat Iranian parliament, some of them Arabs, but they say they have trouble delivering for their constituents, since Tehran favours central provinces.[9] The regime has, in effect, barred Khuzestani Arabs from creating political parties or advocacy groups of their own, and international human rights groups have noted that the government harasses civil society activists in the province, accusing them of links to separatism or terrorism.[10] Khuzestan is not the only peripheral region to suffer such problems: civic organisation is stifled in most.

Women’s rights activists, meanwhile, say the province’s economic challenges harm women more than men.[11] The unemployment rate for university-educated Khuzestani women averaged 60.8 per cent in the period 2017-2019, above the national average of 58.7 per cent.[12] The situation is worse for women with little formal education or vocational training. An activist claimed that the difficulty of finding a job forces many women into sex work, which in turn has significantly increased violence against women, including so-called honour killings.[13]

A severe environmental crisis, the legacy of decades of ecological mismanagement, compounds Khuzestan’s socio-economic troubles.[1] Frequent droughts notwithstanding, the province’s water use from both renewable and non-renewable sources has steadily increased, causing a state of “water bankruptcy” where usage exceeds renewable supply.[2] Even during an unusually wet period in 2019-2020, when rains caused flooding, Iranian officials failed to effectively store excess water for future droughts.[3]

Though Khuzestan has five large rivers – the Karun (Iran’s only navigable river), Karkheh, Dez, Maroon, Shavoor and Zohreh-Jarrahi – water shortages plague residents’ lives.[4] Rationing is frequent in cities across the province.[5] With urban and industrial waste dumped into the rivers, water quality is also poor.[6] Drinking water has thus become a precious commodity. Households that can afford it have large filtration systems essential for turning piped water potable; those without such means have to purchase filtered water from shops or consume substandard water.[7]

Water woes are hurting other public utilities. Temperatures in the summer often surpass 50°C, causing water to evaporate from irrigation canals, reservoirs and rivers, which in turn reduces the volume available for generating electricity, prompting cuts in service.[8] In the winter, rain combined with particles of dust and sand deposits an insulating layer around electrical wires, which in turn disrupts the power grid and cripples water treatment plants. In 2017, power cuts forced water purification plants offline, leaving millions of residents without electricity or water for days in a province that is the country’s largest hydroelectricity producer.[9]

Water shortages also affect air quality. The wetlands in Khuzestan, Shadegan and Hur al-Azim, are so depleted that they are producing dust storms. The first area has been languishing for decades, due to damaging agricultural initiatives and the environmental fallout from the destruction of Kuwaiti oil wells by Iraqi forces in 1991.[10] The second wetland, shared with Iraq and one of the largest marshes in the Middle East, provided a habitat for mammals, fish and birds until Iran dried up swathes of it to drill for oil, a step the government contends it had to take in response to U.S. sanctions, which limit its access to modern equipment for oil extraction.[11] Other parts of Hur al-Azim have too little water due to dams and drought, wrecking the ecosystem and the livelihoods of locals, especially buffalo herders, who once relied on the wetlands as their primary source of income.[12]

Khuzestan is also exposed to dust originating from outside Iran, including Iraq and Syria, due to shrinking water bodies and abandoned farmlands in those countries.[13] The government has been unable either to address the dust problem at home or to use diplomacy to plan regional cooperation in mitigating it.[14] The regular dust storms often make Ahvaz and other Khuzestani cities the most polluted in the world by inhalable particulate matter.[15]

Acts of nature certainly play their part in driving environmental dilapidation. Khuzestan is prone to both floods and droughts.[16] Droughts are associated with reduced water availability, smaller crop yields, drying wetlands, wildfires, deforestation and desertification. Floods can temporarily increase the volume of available water by filling up reservoirs and wetlands. But they take lives, displace farmers and destroy agricultural lands.[17]

Still, mismanagement appears to be the main factor causing and exacerbating Khuzestan’s environmental degradation. The province’s resource abundance became a curse, tempting governments – both before and after the 1979 revolution – to over-exploit it.[1] Governments expanded irrigation and drainage networks, built dams and diverted water flows. The combined burden on Khuzestan’s ecology was unsustainable, particularly when added to the steady increase in demand for water, fuelled by rapid urbanisation and population growth, as well as agriculture and industry.[2] As a Khuzestani environmental activist said, “If the pressure you put on any system exceeds its capacity, it will eventually collapse”.[3]

Across Iran, the agriculture sector, which accounts for more than 90 per cent of the country’s water consumption, is highly inefficient.[4] Over the last few decades, the area of irrigated land has expanded dramatically, due to the leadership’s ideological desire for self-sufficiency in food production despite declining water availability and environmental degradation.[5] A senior Iranian official said, “Many arid countries produce sufficient agricultural products for their own needs and exports. Why should Iran, which has done so for centuries, be an exception?”[6] Yet the government has chosen crops poorly for Iran’s climate, planting too many that are water-intensive.[7] As a former senior Khuzestani official explained, highly politicised planning aimed at resolving these issues has only perpetuated them:

It is like a game of whack-a-mole: if you shut down dams or illegal wells, you restore the rivers but drive up unemployment and risk unrest. When there are protests in one province, the government diverts water to rectify the problem, stirring protests downstream. When the energy ministry bans cultivation of a particular water-intensive crop, the trade ministry pushes to remove the prohibition. So, you get short-term unsustainable plans at best; at worst, one plan neutralises the other.[8]

While demand for water has continued to rise, the construction of numerous dams, inside Iran and in neighbouring countries, has diminished both the supply and quality of water. Türkiye has placed several dams upstream on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, reducing the flow of water into the Shatt Al-Arab, the 200km-long river that separates Iran from Iraq and merges with the Karun before emptying into the Gulf.[9] But Iran itself has built dams at a frenzied pace for years.[10]

Khuzestan’s infamous Gotvand dam on the Karun, completed in 2012, is emblematic of development gone wrong. Despite numerous expert warnings, the dam was constructed over salt beds, which turned it into a de facto salination plant.[11] This catastrophe, which has put far too much salt into the Karun’s water and thus the soil downstream, has badly disrupted farming. It cannot be remedied, moreover, as neither removing the dam nor desalinating the water appears feasible.[12] “With this one engineering mistake, we turned Khuzestan’s water salty”, acknowledged a senior government official.[13] As a result, thousands of date palm trees, on which the livelihood of many Khuzestanis depends, have shrivelled up.[14

Corruption is partly responsible for such disastrous decisions. Khatam al-Anbiya, an engineering firm belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, is the main beneficiary of mega-projects like dams.[1] It lobbies the government to approve such ventures with little or no regard for the ecological ramifications. “The damage that Khatam al-Anbiya and its associates have inflicted on Khuzestan’s landscape and water resilience is bound to render this province uninhabitable in the near future”, said an environmental activist.[2] Equally damaging is the Revolutionary Guards’ hostility toward environmental activism as a pursuit supposedly susceptible to infiltration by Iran’s foes. The government has silenced high-profile environmental experts, many of whom they have forced into exile or imprisoned on spurious espionage charges, heightening the dangers associated with activism in this field.[3] As an environmental expert put it, “What the [Guards] see as cooperating with the enemy is nothing but scientific and technical cooperation with the outside world, which Iran now needs more than ever. But the main reason they mistrust us is that they believe we endanger their vested economic interests”.[4]

Iran’s leadership often makes climate change and sanctions the scapegoats for its own governance failures.[5] While neither is the root cause, both do contribute to Khuzestan’s troubles.[6] Data from the past century show that since the 1990s the Middle East has warmed at double the global average, leading to more frequent and severe heat waves, floods, dust storms and droughts.[7] Along with an expected drop in precipitation, the effects of climate change are projected to reduce the snowpack in mountains, leaving less to melt into Khuzestan’s rivers.[8] Sanctions compound these predicaments, primarily by limiting Iran’s access to state-of-the-art technology, know-how and money, especially international aid and climate adaptation financing (eg, from the World Bank or the Global Environment Facility).[9] More importantly, sanctions have pushed environmental issues down Iran’s public policy agenda. Under sanctions, the leadership has adopted survivalist policies that are highly damaging to the environment, but which it sees as politically justified.[10]

Like other peripheral regions of Iran home to large ethnic minorities, notably the heavily Kurdish areas in the west and the Baluch lands along the south-eastern frontiers with Afghanistan and Pakistan, Khuzestan has militant groups agitating for greater autonomy and even independence.[1] These organisations, some of which operate from abroad, have at times resorted to violence, and the central government frequently spies a foreign hand behind their activities. To be clear, government neglect and mismanagement, not external meddling, are the primary causes of economic, social and political discontent in Khuzestan. Still, while separatist sentiments are born of local circumstance, foreign governments appear on occasion to have encouraged them. Such support stems from longstanding regional practices, which Iran has engaged in at least as much as anyone else, of keeping foes preoccupied with internal dissent.

Separatist violence in Khuzestan is irregular, but occasionally deadly. In June 2005, four bombs went off at government and private buildings, including the provincial governor’s residence; the attacks went unclaimed, but the Supreme National Security Council pinned them on externally backed and foreign-based groups.[1] Four months later, when a bombing at an Ahvaz market killed six and injured 100, President Ahmadinejad’s government alleged it had been orchestrated by the UK, without presenting any credible evidence.[2] Subsequent years saw attacks on military personnel and energy infrastructure.[3]

Most significantly, in September 2018, the armed wing of the separatist Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA) claimed it had carried out an attack on a military parade in Ahvaz that killed 25 and injured scores. The Islamic State, or ISIS, issued a competing claim of responsibility.[4] Iran responded as if both claims were accurate. First, it launched ballistic missiles at what it said was an ISIS base in Syria.[5] Then, in November 2020, Iran’s intelligence ministry announced the arrest of ASMLA figure Habib Chaab, accusing him of plotting the Ahvaz attack as well as a series of others on pipelines and government facilities in Khuzestan.[6]

In keeping with tactics used against other separatist movements, Tehran has in recent years reportedly killed or kidnapped several prominent figures associated with Arab secessionism and living abroad, especially in Europe. In November 2017, ASMLA’s founder, Mola Nissi, was shot and killed in The Hague; Dutch intelligence found “strong indications” of Iranian government involvement, which Tehran denied.[7] The following year, Danish authorities revealed what in their judgment was an Iranian plan to kill ASMLA’s Denmark-based leader.[8] Such attacks and alleged plots led the European Union to sanction an Iranian intelligence ministry directorate and two government officials in January 2019.[9] Later that year, Swedish authorities convicted an Iraqi-Swedish dual national for what prosecutors asserted had been a four-year effort tracking Iranian Arab refugees in at least four European countries; a Stockholm court ruled that it was a “systematic” intelligence operation linked to the Iranian government.[10]

Dutch intelligence claims to have found evidence of Saudi support for ASMLA, as well as evidence of failed Saudi attempts in 2018 to encourage cooperation between it and Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian dissident group based in Albania that the U.S. and EU labelled a terrorist organisation until the early 2010s.[11] In 2020, Danish intelligence asserted that an investigation into a trio of ASMLA members had shown them to have “carried out espionage activities on behalf of a Saudi intelligence service” over a six-year period.[12] A Danish court found the three men guilty and, in March 2022, handed down sentences ranging from six to eight years.[13] The March 2023 China-brokered deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to resume diplomatic relations could erode Saudi backing for such groups.[14]

Ethnic grievance in Khuzestan has led to a rise of forms of Salafism.

External interference aside, ethnic grievance in Khuzestan has led to a rise of forms of Salafism.[1] The majority of Khuzestan’s Arabs are Shiite, but in recent years, thousands, mostly from lower-income urban and rural areas, have converted to Sunni Islam, particularly its Salafi version.[2] In impoverished slums, converts walk the streets dressed the Salafi way, proud of their new religious identity, which they have adopted largely as a sign of defiance of the ruling elites, who are Shiites hewing to the notion of vilayet-e faqih, rule by a senior cleric in the mould of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.[3] The regime links the rise of Salafism to “religious extremism”, blaming “Wahhabi sects” in Saudi Arabia for efforts to promote “deviant beliefs”.[4]

In a sense, the rise of Salafism in Khuzestan is part of a national trend. More than four decades of (Shiite) theocratic rule have alienated many Iranians, especially among the middle class, from religion altogether, with some turning to secularism, agnosticism or atheism.[5] Iranian women’s growing pushback against the mandatory hijab, which accelerated in September 2022, is partly a manifestation of this phenomenon.[6] But among poverty-stricken Arabs who feel discriminated against and follow Arabic-language satellite television channels promoting Salafism, the religious disaffection is increasingly taking a different form.[7] As an Iranian sociologist put it, “There is evidence that ethnic grievance is driving the rise of Salafism in Khuzestan, and conversion to Salafism acts as a form of dissent from oppressive ethnic policies”.[8]

The rise of Salafism in Khuzestan is thus another example of the country’s fault lines deepening in its neglected peripheries. While separatist feelings appear more subdued than in the past, activism by Iran’s minorities, and other under-represented groups, has increased amid the political mobilisation against the government across the country.[9] Members of various ethnic groups, including Turks, Turkomans, Kurds and Baluchis, hailed the 2021 uprising in Khuzestan as part of the historical struggle of “non-Persian minorities”.[10] Just days after the uprising, hundreds of people demonstrated in the streets of Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan province.[11] Still, even without overtly ethnic or religious motives, the widespread sense of discrimination, compounded by environmental problems and economic hardship, will breed further resentment and could push Khuzestani youths toward anti-regime protest and violence.[12]

Khuzestan’s intersecting challenges defy quick or easy solutions. Were the government to appreciate their scale, and be willing to constructively address them, it could take steps that would do some good. For example, administrative and socio-economic reforms signalling seriousness of intent to elevate periphery concerns would go some way toward ameliorating Khuzestanis’ perception that they are little but a nuisance in Tehran’s eyes. Improved foreign relations, especially with adjoining states, would ease technical cooperation on the environmental front. Yet the standoff with the West is likely to complicate such efforts, especially with respect to economic engagement and provision of international investment and expertise, and to remain of only partial benefit so long as the state fails to reconsider its fundamental approach to governance.

Successive Iranian governments have addressed Khuzestan’s deep problems in a primarily reactive fashion. In the wake of an extreme event, such as a drought, the government compensates farmers to placate them and pre-empt protests.[1] The appointment of a “special governor” is another example of stamping out brush fires rather than tackling the causes.[2] This pattern of temporary fixes means that the problems not only recur but often get worse. Sustainable solutions have three components: a strategic vision backed by durable political commitments; the funding to pay for adequate remedies; and the capacity – in terms of technology and personnel – to carry them out. All have been lacking to date.

But the past need not be prelude to further failures. Each of Khuzestan’s challenges could be addressed, if not necessarily resolved, through particular reforms. It is especially important that Arabs and other minorities, as well as other marginalised groups such as women, have a role in governance. More participatory politics could increase people’s buy-in for policy changes. In the same vein, anti-discrimination legislation could provide a legal basis for protecting minorities in Khuzestan and elsewhere; at present the constitution ostensibly prohibits discrimination but is silent on penalties for those who exercise it, or redress for those who experience it.[1]

Reform of Khuzestan’s resource management is essential. Unbridled extraction and water-intensive agricultural methods risk rendering swathes of the province uninhabitable, even if they help keep unemployment from spiralling out of control. Anger will mount as more and more people suffer dislocation, while little of the province’s oil wealth finds its way back in through investments. Yet tackling Khuzestan’s environmental crisis requires radical changes to Iran’s unsustainable economic development model, in which stopgap measures addressing immediate needs undermine strategic planning that considers long-term implications, especially in terms of depleting natural resources like water.

Such planning means making smarter investments. Rather than focusing on highly pollutant energy infrastructure, the Iranian government, supported by international partners and experts, should explore renewable energy, particularly solar and wind power, carbon mitigation, capturing flared gas, greenhouse farming and water-retention landscape regeneration.[2] It is also crucial that future infrastructure projects include environmental impact assessments. Building early-warning and monitoring systems for droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires and dust storms can help the government and other stakeholders better cope with extreme-weather events. Mitigating the dust problem requires collaboration with neighbouring countries in addition to serious local investment.[3]

Were the Islamic Republic actually willing to enact such reforms, Western sanctions would be an obstacle – certainly to investment. Those sanctions preclude the possibility of Iran’s Gulf Arab neighbours, who have the requisite capital and with whom Tehran has taken initial steps to repair ties, to invest in the necessary projects.[4] Iran needs the sanctions lifted or at least modified so that environment-related activities are exempt. It also needs more stable relations with other regional and extra-regional powers capable of helping it, whether with funds, technical expertise or coordination on environmental concerns, like damming or dust storms, that transcend borders.

For now, though, the bigger problem lies with the regime. The above-mentioned steps may seem like common sense, but none is likely, given the Islamic Republic’s decades-long track record of stymied change, poor governance and endemic corruption, let alone the rupture between state and society on display in the unrest that erupted in 2022.[5] Iran needs a political, economic, social and foreign policy about-face.

Even former senior regime officials, critical of the government but reluctant to break with the Islamic Republic altogether, increasingly contend that the system has reached a dead end.[1] Society has passed a psychological threshold, they acknowledge. Iranians demand transformation and no longer believe in reform. Many call for a referendum on the country’s trajectory.[2] Former President Mohammad Khatami argues that the revolution has been “diverted from its path”, beseeching the leadership to opt for “self-correction instead of self-destruction”.[3] One of his successors, Hassan Rouhani, has suggested that a plebiscite on three fundamental questions (domestic politics, the economy and foreign policy) could save the country from disaster.[4] Former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who has been under house arrest since 2011, has called for a referendum on a new constitution.[5] So, too, has the country’s most prominent Sunni cleric.[6] Many human rights and civil society activists support this call.[7]

But, again, the outlook is bleak for a change of course. Ayatollah Khamenei seems determined to rely on the security forces to suppress protests.[8] Only truly pluralistic elections can open the way to a better future, not only for Khuzestan, but for the country. But these would require curtailing the authority of the Guardian Council, which signs off on laws and evaluates candidates for elected office; granting more press and personal freedoms; and de-escalating tensions with the West.

Iran’s government cannot control the weather. But that is perhaps the only challenge facing Khuzestan of which it can be absolved – and, even then, with the qualification that better long-term planning would help remediate the worst impact of droughts, floods and dust storms. Successive administrations have adopted the same approach that characterised the regime’s response to the nationwide protests: a perfunctory nod to the scale of the crisis, followed by recommitment to policies that only exacerbate it over time.

Khuzestan’s experience proves that the crisis is not going away. Unrest may have ebbed since late 2022, letting the Islamic Republic believe that repression, once again, has removed the immediate threat to its rule. But events in Khuzestan and other peripheral regions show that drivers of discontent accumulate and intersect. They will require a more strategic vision for prosperity than the system seems to acknowledge, let alone tries to put into practice. Put another way, if the system managed to somehow defuse the social discontent it has faced in past months, it would still confront, in regions like Khuzestan, a set of structural problems, which are bound to get worse with the effects of climate change, requiring fundamental reconsideration of its model of governance.

One should not be fatalistic about the prospects of improving Khuzestan’s fortunes – or, for that matter, Iran’s. But policymakers need to have a clear understanding of the daunting task ahead and the urgency of addressing it through both local and national measures, as well as relations with neighbouring states and Western powers. Little suggests that the government will make a good-faith investment of time, attention and money out of concern for ordinary citizens. But it is not in Tehran’s interest to let the embers of discontent smoulder, either.

Ahvaz/Washington/Brussels, 21 August 2023