The July 2021 Khuzestan water protests began on the evening of 15 July 2021 (24 Tir 1400) in a province that holds much of Iran's oil and water and still had no reliable drinking water in midsummer heat above 50 degrees C. Wetlands and five rivers had been emptied. Livestock died. Crops failed. State transfer schemes moved water out of Khuzestan. People in Hamidiyeh, Mahshahr, Susangerd, Shush, Shadegan, Hoveyzeh, Kut Sheikh, Izeh, Dezful, Abadan, Khorramshahr, and the Ahvaz neighborhoods of Kianpars and Ein-e Do came out. The demand was water. The chants, IranWire's Farsi witnesses said, went to the government's competence and to forced migration. This archive keeps July 2021 separate from the May 2022 food-price protests. The two notes can be read together.¹

Force and deaths

By the sixth night, IranWire reported live fire in Ahvaz, Darkhovin, Kut Sheikh, Izeh, and Dezful, and a near-total cut of internet and mobile lines in Shadegan and Ahvaz. Special-unit forces were flown into Ahvaz. The provincial governor had already called films of the protests fake. Independent sources named Mostafa Naimavi and Qasem Khozeiri among the first dead by security fire. On the sixth night, local sources put the named dead at least at three, with dozens wounded and mass arrests. Officials later spoke of a police death in Mahshahr. Those figures should not be averaged into one official total.²³

Khuzestan is Iranian. The water crisis is a state project of dams, transfers, and neglect, not a story about a "traditional" or foreign people. Arab-speaking cities in the province were among the first in the street. They were not a side ethnic file.

This archive holds July 2021 Khuzestan water protests.

This archive

"July 2021 Khuzestan water protests" is gathered here. Later Izeh titles that do not name July 2021 stay on their own pages, because Izeh also appears in later protest years.