March 17, 2023
The country has been overwhelmed this past month by concerns over apparent “poison” attacks on girls’ schoolS all across the country.
Thousands of students have reportedly been made ill by “poison gas” released in school buildings.
this year in Dusseldorf, Germany, showing a woman’s tresses restraining an
Iranian mullah.
The “poisonings” have overtaken the protests as the focus of public concern and the regime response to the poisonings has become the latest example of disgust with the regime as the public accuses the government of ignoring what is happening in the schools.
The rash of poisonings is seen as a political act by some group, with regime opponents generally hypothesizing that the attackers are hardliners who believe like the Taliban in Afghanistan that girls should not be educated and are releasing poison gas in schools to try to induce parents to withdraw their daughters from school. Regime supporters, on the other hand, tend to blame the opposition of using poison gas to further disrupt the country and promote more opposition to the regime.
A minority suggests that there may be no attacks at all and that the girls are victims, not of poison gas, but of mass hysteria.
The bottom line is simply that no one really knows what is going on.
The first report of a gas attack on a girls’ school was made November 30 in Qom. In succeeding days, there were more and more reported attacks on more and more schools in more and more cities and towns across the country. The media was filled with photos of ambulances whisking girls off to hospitals, from which most were released within hours, but a few kept overnight or even for days.
There have been no credible reports of deaths or of any serious injuries. The girls generally report some odd smells in their school, followed by nausea, fatigue, headaches, dizziness and sometimes vomiting.
There have been many reports that the substance released in the schools is N2 gas. N2 is nitrogen, which comprises 78 percent of the air we breathe. (Oxygen comprises 21 percent.) But nitrogen is odorless. Nitrogen is not poisonous; it’s threat to health is that it can displace oxygen and cause death by asphyxiation. But that would require a lot of nitrogen. No other gas has been identified by name in any of the reporting seen by the Iran Times.
Morteza Khatami, vice chair of the Majlis Health Committee, said the N2 reports were not credible since nitrogen does not cause the kinds of symptoms being reported.
There are no good statistics on the extent of the “poisonings.” Some officials said in early March that more than 1,200 schoolgirls had been sickened. Majlis Deputy Mohammad-Hassan Asafari, a member of the committee assigned to look into the incidents, said 5,000 schoolgirls had been laid low by the “poison.” Human rights groups have reported more than 7,000 girls impacted. The highest number the Iran Times has seen published is 13,000.
Similarly, there are all sorts of figures on the number of schools effected, running from several dozen to hundreds.
Only a few boys’ schools have reported incidents.
There has been speculation that someone has been taking poisonous powders into schools and depositing them on radiators, where the heat turns the powder into a toxic gas.
The government ignored the reported attacks throughout December and January, seemingly attributing the reports to female hysteria-although few said that publicly. The regime had a political problem: to even hint that the problem might be due to female hysteria would risk even more opposition to the regime from women who see the regime as always too eager to demean women.
But the lack of any action by the government prompted critics to say that meant the government knew what was happening and who was doing it and didn’t want to stop it. Some critics said the government had launched the attacks itself in order to punish schoolgirls for protesting against hejab. However, no one has so far linked schools reporting attacks to hotbeds of opposition to the regime.
The government did not take the problem seriously until March 6, when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi ordered the government to launch an investigation. Khamenehi didn’t even wait for the results. Within a day, he blamed the attacks on foreign governments trying to encourage more women to march against the regime. And days later, Masregh News, run by the Pasdaran, claimed British Ambassador Simon Shercliff was “directly involved” in the “poisonings” with the intention of “reigniting the street riots.” The hardline daily Kayhan said the poisonings constituted “a new phase of the hybrid war by the West and its Iranian allies against the Islamic Republic.”
State television carried “confessions” of a man and his daughter saying they threw nitrogen gas cannisters into the courtyards of seven different schools in Fars province. But nitrogen gas released in the open would have no impact; it needs to be released in a closed environment where it can displace oxygen. In her confession, the daughter said she attached wicks to the canisters. But nitrogen is not flammable and will not explode. Furthermore, the Iran Times has not seen any reports of any explosions in any of the schools reporting gas attacks, so the confession sounded hokey.
The Intelligence Ministry announced March 11 that it had arrested 118 people in 11 provinces. It said they fell into two groups: some were “criminals” who were “possibly” linked to the Mojahedin-e Khalq trying “to create skepticism against the system;” others were “mischief-makers” using stink bombs and harmless substances to be disruptive out of a sense of adventure or a desire to escape classes.
But the “investigation” has not pinpointed any substance that was introduced into the schools. It also has not explained how no one ever noticed any strangers invading the schools to deploy the “poison.” Furthermore, it hasn’t explained why no teachers have been felled by the “gas,” only teenagers and pre-teens.
There are, in sum, more questions than answers arising from the Intelligence Ministry “investigation.” What’s more, the security forces have arrested several journalists who have made an effort to investigate the issue. That is a common regime tactic when it doesn’t want any facts presented to the public.
Jamileh Kadivar, who was a Reformist deputy in the Majlis some years ago, is one of the few people to publicly blame the outbreak on “mass hysteria.” Writing in the daily Ettela’at March 4, she noted there had been a series of such outbreaks in girls’ schools in Afghanistan a decade ago. The World Health Organization (WHO) investigated and wrote,” Reports of stench smells preceding the appearance of symptoms have given credence to the theory of mass poisoning. However, investigations into the causes of these outbreaks have yielded no such evidence so far.”
An American medical sociologist, Robert Bartholomew, wrote in Psychology Today an article disparaging the poisoning theory and pointing out that cases of mass hysteria among young girls are nothing new and nothing odd. “What is most likely?” he asked. “That the students have been the target of chemical attacks for which there is no evidence after 3-1/2 months, or that they are suffering from psychogenic symptoms generated by stress-a condition that has been documented for millennia and for which the number one target is young girls under extreme, prolonged stress.”
On March 15, the spokesman for the Law Enforcement Forces, Brig. Gen. Saeed Montazer-al-Mahdi, while announcing the arrests of 118 people, also said that the “majority” of reported poisonings were actually psychogenic or the result of hysteria, the first regime official to state that bluntly. But he didn’t say all were psychogenic. Nor did he say what substance caused those that were not psychogenic.
The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), which tries to treat statistics seriously, reviewed all the claims of poison attacks and came up with the following statistical report as of March 8. It said it found 297 schools from 29 of Iran’s 31 provinces (excluding Khorasan South and Kerman), mostly high schools but including some elementary and middle schools, reporting attacks. It said that in only 103 of the 297 incidents or barely one-third did officials cite the number of students impacted. That total came to 7,168, which would suggest a total triple that number or about 21,000.
Some news reports in Iran cited one girl as having died in an attack. But her father said she had been ill before her death and had not attended school for three weeks. What’s more, he said, the school at which she was registered had not suffered from a “poison” attack.