Just over a century ago, Reza Khan—the Persian military chief charged by Shah Ahmad Qajar (r. 1909-1925) with subduing restive tribes and regional leaders—sent 3,000 troops to Muhammara, today’s Khorramshahr, to crush an uprising led by Sheikh Khazal bin Jabir Khan, a local tribal leader who, with British support, sought independence from Persia for his largely Arab emirate. In essence, the British and Sheikh Khazal sought to replicate the strategy they had implemented a quarter-century before when they carved Kuwait out of the Ottoman vilayat of Basra.
Even a century ago, the British understood an Arab emirate in the Persian province of Khuzestan to be a strategic asset. In 1901, Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1896-1907) granted Australian businessman William Knox D’Arcy a concession to explore and develop petroleum in the region. In 1908, he struck commercial quantities at Masjid Soleyman, approximately 150 miles northeast of Muhammara and, the following year, founded the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the predecessor of British Petroleum. In 1912, Persian oil took new strategic importance when Winston Churchill, then a young admiralty officer, switched the British Navy from coal to oil; no longer could Burma alone provide the British Empire’s oil needs.
Both under the shah and then under the Islamic Republic, many Iranian Arabs resented Tehran’s rule.
After Reza Khan put down the Arab uprising, he ultimately declared himself Reza Shah; his son, Mohammed Reza Shah, then ruled Iran from 1941 until his ouster in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Both under the shah and then under the Islamic Republic, many Iranian Arabs resented Tehran’s rule. Persians dominated the state and even though Khuzestan provided a disproportionate amount, if not majority, of income into the Iranian treasury, Arabs felt that the Iranian government shortchanged investment in their region. In truth, such complaints had merit; ethnic discrimination was rife in Iran.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein overestimated such grievances, however, when he invaded Iran in 1980, declaring that he would liberate “Arabistan,” the land of the Arabs, as he called Khuzestan. It was a blatant land and resource grab, much like Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait a decade later. Many Iranian Arabs had no desire to embrace Iraq’s Arab nationalist dictatorship, even if they resented Persian rule. The eight-year Iran-Iraq War that Saddam unleashed heightened Iranian Arab grievance.
Iranian Arabs largely remained loyal to the state, but more than a decade after the war’s end, Iranian Arabs complained that they suffered discrimination in reconstruction despite being the region worst hit by what essentially had become a World War I-like war of attrition across their towns and cities. “They only build mosques but never build hospitals,” one father told me as he brought his 12-year-old daughter to Tehran for cancer treatment. Housing shortages have remained rife, perhaps as the Iranian regime purposely seeks to force Arabs to move to dilute any concentration of Arab population. Twice during the summer and fall of 2000, riots erupted in Khorramshahr and Abadan over the lack of clean drinking water and, five years later, chaos again returned when Vice President Muhammad Ali Abtahi allegedly wrote a letter he subsequently said was a forgery calling for the expulsion of the region’s Arabs.
In subsequent years, Arab communities have been security porous. The regime faced both Islamic State penetration into the region, and Tehran has accused Saudi Arabia of supporting a separatist movement in the region.
This does not mean that Iran’s Arabs are prone to separatism or even desire it; disintegrating Iran or ethnic lines long has been a fantasy of some policymakers, but it misunderstands Iran and sources of nationalism that extend beyond ethnicity. Nor is ethnic composition of Iran entirely clear, as the regime avoids any meaningful census.
As Iran’s proxies fall one by one, it is only a matter of time before Iranians themselves calculate that the odds have shifted to their favor against their oppressors.
What is clear is that there are significant grievances inside Iran, and these are even greater in areas populated by ethnic minorities like the Arabs, Baluch, and Kurds. First the decimation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and then the potential fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria suggest the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are weak and the Iranian regime itself to be vulnerable. Strength is deterrence and weakness invitation. As Iran’s proxies fall one by one, it is only a matter of time before Iranians themselves calculate that the odds have shifted to their favor against their oppressors.
With their deep-seated grievances, both potential Saudi support and tribal backing from within Iraq, the reverberations of Bashar al-Assad’s fall soon may be felt directly inside Iran. Khuzestan may be ground zero. When the uprising comes, the Islamic Republic’s propagandists may say it is separatist; they likely would be wrong. A peripheral rebellion to sweep through Iran has precedent. Tabriz was the epicenter of the 1905-09 Constitutional Revolution, but that movement was about democracy, not Azeri nationalism. A century on, Sheikh Khazal may soon get his revenge, ending an Iranian regime just as a previous Iranian regime ended his rule.
