On 9 July 1999 students of
Tehran University staged a peaceful demonstration against the closure of the reformist newspaper,
Salam, by the Iranian press court. That evening, "about 400 plainclothes paramilitaries descended on a university dormitory, whispering into short-wave radios and wielding green sticks." The paramilitaries, thought to be
Ansar-e-Hezbollah and
Basij, began
attacking students, kicking down doors and smashing through halls, grabbing female students by the hair and setting fire to rooms. Several students were thrown off of third story balconies "onto pavement below, their bones crushed," and one student paralyzed. According to students' accounts, uniformed police stood by and did nothing. "Witnesses reported that at least one student was killed, 300 wounded, and thousands detained in the days that followed." During the
2009 protests over irregularities in the presidential election, a blog website (
Lebasshakhs) was set up to attempt to identify plainclothes by posting photos of them Crowds of demonstrators were so large during that protest movement that IRGC General
Hossein Hamadani told reporters he resorted to using convicted violent criminals to control dissent (who could not be accurately called vigilantes but neither could they be called uniformed): In 2014, a concert by a traditional Iranian singer, Vahid Taj, was disrupted and shut down by several dozen vigilantes who alleged that Taj was "promoting sedition". Police guarding the event did nothing to stop the disruption, despite the fact that the singer "was fully vetted and the concert state-sanctioned". In October 2014, conservatives in the
Iranian parliament voted to place volunteer groups that “promote virtue and prevent vice” on the street, under the jurisdiction of the
Basij, paramilitary units who are in turn controlled by the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran. According to
Ehsan Mehrabi, the exiled Iranian journalist, this was part of an effort by “radical parliamentarians ... to empower the vigilantes.” In a 7 June 2017 speech,
Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei told listeners, This was "widely interpreted" (according to
Radio Farda) as an invitation to his supporters to attack the non-hardline government of
Hassan Rouhani. Journalist
Azadeh Moaveni describes permission to fire at will, (
atash be-ekhtiyar), as "extrajudicial powers" given by the government to supporters. In March 2019 vigilante/plainclothes (working together with morality police) were said to have aggressively confronted or attacked women (insulting and threatening them) who had defied the compulsory hijab laws of the Islamic Republic, in the name of defending “public decency”. Several years later in 2023, during the
Mahsa Amini protests, when vigilantes were again active against protesters, Moaveni tells of a video circulated online of "a
chador-wearing woman" in
Ramsar threatening "naked" (i.e. bare-headed) women in violation of compulsory
hijab that, "if the state didn’t act, 'we will fire at will'". Moaveni writes that as of mid-2023, vigilantism was said to be "on the rise" with reports of "armed men on motorbikes roamed the streets" in the city of Rasht, ordering unveiled women to cover up. ==Operation==