Iran’s school poisonings expose a chasm between the regime and its people

Sara’s daughter called her from school about a month ago. The 17-year-old was terrified. There had been the smell of noxious gas at her secondary school in the shrine and seminary city of Qom. Her classmates were suffering headaches, dizziness and nausea. Some had collapsed. Sara dispatched a taxi to bring her daughter home. She has not been back to class since, following a nationwide panic over what some are calling the serial poisonings of Iranian schoolgirls.

“She is really scared of going to school, and I am afraid to send her,” Sara, who asked that her full name not be published, says. “We don’t know what this is and who is behind it. Why girls’ schools? Why now?”

Someone or something is making Iran’s schoolgirls sick. A regime that claims to have a mandate from God is struggling to come to the grips with the nationwide uproar. The poisonings have further damaged the already battered legitimacy and authority of Iran’s rulers. The crisis also exposes the gaping mistrust between Iran’s regime and its people.

After weeks of silence, downplaying and even arrests of parents, Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi last week finally acknowledged the crisis and vowed to do something about it.

“Following up and quickly investigating this matter is of utmost importance,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, claiming he had ordered the ministry of health and the regime’s security apparatus to investigate. “We must get to the root of the issue as soon as possible.”

A full three months have already passed since the first incident, reported in Qom on 30 November. Students all over the country have since described a strange odour entering their classrooms, and students falling sick. Incidents have increased nationwide, with more than 1,000 students in 91 schools across 20 separate provinces being hit by the suspected poisonings, according to the latest figures as of 2 March.

Iranian schools are segregated by gender. Some boys’ schools have been afflicted, too, but it has mostly been girls of secondary school age. Students have described the faint, pungent smell of gas, followed by coughing and choking. Their limbs go numb. Some have even become unconscious. At least one has reportedly died.

Videos show teenage girls – the same demographic of young women who led protests against the regime last autumn – being carted away on stretchers and struggling to breathe inside hospital emergency rooms. Tearful, screaming parents lash out against security forces, who can be seen beating them instead of consoling them.

Many of Iran’s greatest scientific minds have fled the regime and its decrepit economic prospects. Regime apparatchiks opine that the young women are suffering from nitrogen poisoning, which experts describe as a scientifically nonsensical explanation.

On Saturday Iran’s interior minister Ahmad Vahidi claimed that “field investigations” uncovered “suspicious samples “ now being assessed at laboratories.

Raisi and Iranian regime apologists have already begun spinning conspiracy theories that Israel or Iran’s enemies are behind the poisonings. Raisi on Friday accused Iran's “enemies” of being behind the poisonings to incite “apprehension and despair” among Iranians.

But many Iranians believe they know who is behind the poisonings and why. Some are referring to the case as serial poisonings; an ominous reference to the gruesome serial murders of political dissidents by pro-regime extremists that gripped the regime in the late 1990s.

Many Iranians believe the same fanatical, violent Islamist groups – often parts of shadowy cult-like clerical organisations rooted in Qom – are poisoning girls in order to prevent women from going to school or as revenge for their role in the uprising that began last summer and continues to re-emerge on occasion. Some of the same fanatical extremists have been accused of using acid to disfigure women wearing garb deemed not properly Islamic enough.

“We believe it is groups that the government has no control over even if they know who they are,” says one mother in Qom, who has prevented her eight-year-old daughter from going to school in recent weeks out of fear of her being targeted.

The macabre poisonings have already caught the attention of the world, and even the White House.

“Little girls going to school should only have to worry about learning. They shouldn’t have to worry about their own physical safety,” US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Thursday. “I think where the president is is ‘we need to know,’ and the world needs to know. Certainly, the families of those little girls need to know.”

Unlike the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Iranian regime has never proposed that women be barred from going to school. Iranian education officials have nixed proposals to return to Covid-era distance learning protocols until the poisoning crisis ends. According to two parents, they have even told principals not to allow teachers or students to pass on assignments to those families who decide to bar their daughters from going to school. They have tried to urge parents to stay quiet about the poisonings, and demanded that they stop speaking to local and international media about their fears.

But parents are fighting back. In recent years, ordinary Iranians have grown savvy about social media and politics, and are day by day growing smarter about ways to fight the regime and its dysfunctions, and manipulate officials into doing their bidding.

“We haven’t seen any advantages in staying quiet,” says one Iranian parent in an interview. “Street protests won’t make any difference in this case. We have seen people go out and protest and it makes no difference. There was no change. But in this case, the spreading of news on news on social media forced them to act. Just that they accepted that something happened is something of a victory.”

If a sick, terror-minded group incubated in the regime’s own state-funded seminaries and religious foundations is behind the attacks, there needs to be harsh accountability and fundamental change.

But in addition to exposing the yawning chasm between Iranians and the regime that lords over them, the crisis also shows the brittleness and weakness of the Islamic Republic. As in its response to protests last year over the mandatory hijab, the regime has repeatedly shown itself to be unresponsive to public demands, and unable to adapt and change. It knows only violence and brutality, and mistrusts compromise and reform.

On Saturday, videos emerged showing masked pro-regime guns brutally arresting parents demanding answers about the poisoning case and stuffing them into vans. The regime’s inflexibility hurts Iranians and poisons their lives, figuratively and literally. But it may also be its downfall.