Iran's brutality: Women and children first

by James Zumwalt

Source: Human Events

Following World War II, much was written about Western democracies ignoring the aggression of rogue states Germany and Japan—opting for appeasement—until such aggression could no longer be tolerated. The question repeatedly asked is why warning signs went unheeded. At some future time, historians of another generation will ask the same question in the aftermath of a nuclear attack by a 21st Century rogue state.

While timing is in question, it is clear Iran eventually will possess a nuclear weapon. If allowed to do so, there is no doubt in this historian’s mind that Iran’s president and resident madman, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will use it.
There are warning signs we have received and, like our pre-World War II leaders, have ignored. But even more telling is evidence of violence perpetrated upon two groups of his own people—groups Western culture has long regarded as deserving special protection: women and children.

During the eight year Iran-Iraq war, Tehran very quickly learned its army was no match for Iraq’s. When Iraqi minefields began claiming Iranian soldiers, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini concocted a scheme to reduce these losses. He encouraged Iranian children to volunteer for a special force known as the Basiji. Lightly armed but more often unarmed to avoid the loss of weapons, the Basiji were trained to form human waves to march through Iraqi minefields towards the enemy. This process—through the sheer loss of numbers of children—eventually cleared a minefield, providing Iran’s professional soldiers an unencumbered approach route to Iraqi defenses.

Most of these children were illiterate and from poor families in the countryside. Often, their only asset prior to enthusiastically sacrificing their lives was a plastic key given to each young martyr—told by his Basiji trainer, it was to open the gates of paradise in the afterlife.

Khomeini ordered 500,000 plastic keys from Taiwan for this purpose. During the war, he sent 450,000 children to the front. This “man of the cloth” undoubtedly found it more wasteful to have ordered 50,000 extra keys than to have ordered tens of thousands of innocent children to their deaths.

Islamic extremist logic came into play during the war when some believers became concerned the childrens’ bodies were either being vaporized by the mines or body parts were being strewn about the battlefield. Not to be deterred by these concerns, the logic applied was the children were instructed to wrap themselves in blankets beforehand so their bodies would remain intact!
One of the Basiji trainers was a young Islamic extremist now serving as Iran’s president.

Because of this special relationship between the Basiji and Ahmadinejad, the former was brought in by the latter to take an aggressive role in suppressing protests in Iran following Ahmadinejad’s theft of office in the rigged 2009 election.

It is Ahmadinejad who now oversees another egregious policy—this one aimed at unmarried women he seeks to execute. Under Islam, it is forbidden to execute female virgins. The arrests, trials and ordered executions of female reform activists has created a problem. Due to Islam’s prohibition against executing virgins, if a woman is unmarried, steps have to be taken to cure this—but without violating Islam’s prohibition against unmarried sex. To circumvent both prohibitions, the female convict is drugged and a sham marriage performed with a prison guard who then brutally rapes her. A witness to this brutal act sneared, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning.” Video evidence of this atrocity has recently been smuggled out of Iran.

President Obama expressed confidence he would succeed in enticing Iran’s leadership away from their nuclear arms ambitions by extending an olive branch. IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN—for this regime is incapable of reason! An unabated Iran will only result in a future generation of historians one day asking how Obama could have been so naïve about Ahmadinejad’s intentions. They will wonder, aware of Ahmadinejad’s brutality towards Iranian women and children, how Americans could have failed to have foreseen the fate awaiting them once he acquired nuclear weapons.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------James Zumwalt, a Marine veteran of the Vietnam and Gulf wars who writes often on national security and defense issues, is the author of "Bare Feet, Iron Will: Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam's Battlefields" (found at: http://www.jgzumwalt.com/).