Analysis by PMOI/MEK
Iran, May 07, 2020—The Iranian regime has announced 130 cities as white areas where mosques will reopen and Friday prayers resume. Some say the government of regime president Hassan Rouhani is also trying to indirectly suggest that the decision was made under pressure from religious authorities in Qom who are worried about losing their businesses during the month of Ramadan.
But are the white areas real? Remarks made by regime officials, including members of the Coronavirus Task Force, shows the opposite.
Although Iraj Harrirchi, Deputy Health Minister, is one the proponents of the reopening plan, he acknowledged that 70 cities, including all provincial capitals and the most important cities in each province, are red and at high-risk.
One Health Ministry official emphasized: “Coloring does not matter and does not mean that the situation is normal.”
Also, the Health Ministry Committee on Epidemiology stipulated: “Coronavirus is on the rise in 15 provinces.”
Mohammad Reza Mahboubfar, member of Corona Prevention Committee, said, “The division of the country's geography into white, yellow and red areas to confront coronavirus… has no scientific basis and is just playing with words.”
He implicitly called Rouhani a liar, adding that there is no point in the country that is a white area or coronavirus-free, and said, “The president's remarks that some areas are white are due to misinformation handed over to him."
So, it is a big lie to declare some cities as white areas while the whole country and all the provincial capitals are red and the traffic between the cities has returned to normal level. Therefore, when Rouhani spoke about this issue, he acknowledged to have been warned to use the word "low-risk" instead of "white." Therefore, there are no white areas, and even if today one the cities is white or low-risk, it is not clear that it will not turn red tomorrow. And regarding the rising trend of coronavirus in most parts of the country, this is not a possibility but a certainty.
In a May 6 article titled, “the whites getting red,” the state-run daily Resalat quoted an official as saying, “Due to the high freedom of travel and traffic between cities, a so-called white and low-risk city may be among the red cities tomorrow and face a new wave of epidemics.”
The regime can't cover up the reality by playing with words and replacing them to justify its criminal policy of sending people back to work during the pandemic. The reopening of businesses, mosques, and Friday prayers has purely an economic and political purpose and is a prelude to end all the restrictions.
The Islamic Development Organization said in this regard: “Under any circumstances, the Quds Day ceremony must be held even in the red areas,” referring to pro-regime rallies held on the last Friday of Ramadan. This clearly shows that the first to last consideration in regime’s decisions are economic interests and political goals—human lives have absolutely no value. This is the regime that has built its reputation on hundreds of thousands of executions, massacring political prisoners, and sending hundreds of thousands of young teenagers to the Iran-Iraq war. Ruhollah Khomeini, the regime’s founder had explicitly said that he was willing to fight to the last brick in Tehran and see the whole nation die to preserve his regime.
Now, the regime’s president, who has been involved in all these crimes, says with the same line of reasoning: “If two or three million people get killed, is better than 30 million hungry people who come to the streets.”
In this regard, regime analyst Qassem Shole Saadi said, “My fear is that those 3.2 million will be killed and those 30 million would come to the streets.”
In fact, this is the most probable and realistic picture, and the Iranian people, who have repeatedly shown their will to overthrow the corrupt and criminal mullahs, will never watch the death of their children and compatriots.
