A recent article in the Middle East Forum titled “Destroy Iran’s Ethnic Azeri Revolutionary Guard Units” presents a deeply troubling narrative that is both factually erroneous and morally hazardous. It makes sweeping generalizations about Iran’s Azerbaijani population, proposing what amounts to ethnic targeting under the guise of policy analysis. As a South Azerbaijani activist committed to justice and coexistence, I am compelled to respond to the dangerous claims made therein.
Ethnicity Is Not Complicity
The core assumption of the article—that ethnic Azeris overwhelmingly staff the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and constitute a critical pillar of the Islamic Republic—is both empirically unfounded and morally and analytically irresponsible. The IRGC is a regime’s oppressive mechanism dependent on ideological allegiance to the Islamic Republic, not ethnic affinity. It is a hierarchically organized organization subordinated to the Supreme Leader, with members representing different ethnicities and social strata in Iran. Like many Iranians, some Azerbaijanis are drafted into the IRGC or join the force for economic reasons, out of a dearth of prospects, or, in some instances, social coercion. This is not ethnic loyalty or ideological affiliation but structural coercion or systemic inequality. Research on IRGC recruitment practices demonstrates this tendency, in which such socioeconomically marginal places, such as heavily Azerbaijani-populated regions like West Azerbaijan and Ardabil, are important sources of rank-and-file recruits simply because they are places of high unemployment and low economic mobility. Further disproving the claim that Azerbaijanis dominate the IRGC, recent data shows that over 75% of IRGC and Artesh leadership are ethnic Persians, not Azerbaijanis (Rasanah, 2023). This clarifies that power within the military-security apparatus is neither ethnically representative nor inclusive of Azerbaijanis in command positions. On the contrary, IRGC units have been involved in anti-Azerbaijani operations and rhetoric, including veiled threats against Azerbaijan’s northern neighbor (i24NEWS, 2023).
It is intellectually and ethically dishonest to collectively hang a people based on their participation in a state institution under duress. Collective guilt is a grimy, sticky morality wad that clogs up the hard-earned principles of personal responsibility and due process. Would one make the argument that Persians are responsible for the repression of the state because, after all, its leadership, whether the Supreme Leader or former Presidents Ahmadinejad or Rouhani, are Persian? Or that global Shi’a populations are somehow responsible for the actions of a regime that claims Shi’ism as its ideological framework? Clearly not.
To deploy this invalid argument against Azerbaijanis alone is classic ethnic scapegoating, an ideological ploy that has historically justified the marginalization and even the massacre of a minority group. Furthermore, scholarly interpretation continuously warned about the equation of ethnicity and political loyalty in multiethnic systems. Scholars have turned their attention to how, in Iran, state institutions may incorporate ethnic minorities, yet these are subjected to greater surveillance and cultural erasure, to structural barriers to social mobility. In this case, participation cannot be condemned as complicity; rather, it has to be understood as a form of survival.
The Azerbaijani Struggle: Suppressed, Not Submissive
Despite the dominant narrative of an Azerbaijani population in Iran that is either supportive of the Islamic Republic or indifferent to politics, the truth is far from it. Azerbaijani Turks in Iran have long been at the forefront of civil resistance, protesting for cultural rights, language recognition, environmental justice, and democratic reform, often facing deep-rooted state repression in return. From the large crowds at Babak Castle—a Turkic heritage site and bastion of historical autonomy—to the football stadium refrains such as “Haray Haray Men Türkem” (Shout, shout, I am a Turk!), the Azerbaijani community has employed nonviolent and highly visible forms of protest to assert its identity. These protests are not isolated. Such factors have included large-scale protests that erupted over the draining of Lake Urmia and government failure to address the environmental disaster, the 2006 outrage over a racist cartoon in an Iranian newspaper depicting the Azerbaijanis as cockroaches, and the 2015 Fitileh TV program scandal, in which the state media made fun of Azerbaijani children. Protests followed these in cities like Tabriz, Urmia, Ardabil, and others, strengthening the community’s resolve and solidarity.
As others suggest, these are not actions the regime supports or undertakes. Instead, they’re threatened, detained, surveilled, and thrown in jail. Azerbaijan activism is one of the most consistently oppressed in Iran. Cultural workers, poets, teachers, and student leaders who have engaged in peaceful activities, such as conducting Turkish language courses, publishing literature in their mother tongue, or celebrating International Mother Language Day, have been arrested or forced into exile.And on top of these instances of abuse, Azerbaijani children are occasionally made stateless by being deprived of documents that are essential to prove nationality, such as national ID cards – access to education and healthcare is blocked. This promotes a process of structural exclusion and creates a generational deprivation. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and UN special rapporteurs have all reported consistently on the Iranian state’s systematic attempts to suppress Azerbaijani voices and to criminalize even the most pacific forms of cultural expression. But this resistance isn’t new. It intersects with a continuum of federalist and democratic ideas implemented as far back as the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the 1945–46 Azerbaijani Democratic Government, as well as subsequent cultural rights movements in the 1990s and 2000s, which have sought to transform the state approach to the Kurdish question.
The cycles of protest defined for cities such as Tabriz, Urmia, Zanjan, and Ardabil, resulting from an act of cultural erasure, environmental negligence, or ethnic insult, are evidence of a methodical and formalized civil movement. This is a community that rejects the fake binary that you must either assimilate or live in violent separation.
Instead, they call for democracy on their terms. According to international law, the right to self-determination—including independence or other forms of self-governance—is a legitimate right if chosen freely and peacefully by the people. What Azerbaijani Turks are demanding is not secession, but justice, dignity, and equality within a system that continues to deny them all three.
Manufactured Ethnic Tensions: The Regime’s Tool, Not the People’s Will
The article further insinuates that ethnic Azerbaijanis in Iran are especially savage toward the country’s Kurds, suggesting some inborn and unique form of ethnic antipathy. This is not only pure speculation but dangerous stuff. Those are the kinds of claims that serve to obfuscate the more complicated dynamics of interethnic relations in Iran and to dangerously assign the blame for state repression from the regime to entire communities.
True, there are periodic eruptions of ethnic tension in West Azerbaijan and in other mixed territories, but we must understand these flare-ups in context: as scholars of Iranian ethnic politics have observed, such conflicts are often the product of conscious central manipulation; the central state has long relied on a divide-and-rule strategy to undermine unity among non-Persian nations. The Islamic Republic of Iran has consistently weaponized identity to splinter opposition and set oppressed communities against one another—a tactic employed in various forms by other authoritarian states confronted with crises of legitimacy.
There’s no substantial proof for the claim that Azerbaijanis, in their entirety, are hostile to Kurds. Contrary to this, extensive social mixing and coexistence are documented in field and civil society accounts. Millions of Kurds and Azerbaijanis live side by side, attending the same schools, sharing the same marketplaces, and, through intermarriage, in some cases, the same families. Shared sufferings—imposed cultural hegemony, economic exploitation, and political exclusion—unite them rather than any state-constructed discourse of rupture.
The suggestion that Azerbaijanis “enjoy” hurting Kurds is not only false but is a form of incitement. This is a language that alienates a large segment of the population and heightens anti-regime sentiment, pitting communities against one another, justifying profiling, and eroding the foundation of interethnic solidarity in a future democratic Iran. Kurdish and Azerbaijani civil rights activists have frequently backed each other’s political demands, particularly language rights, political decentralization, and opposition to military presence in their provinces.
The majority of politicians of those political classes are those who find a fragmented, polarized society to be the most beneficial. Any viable democratic formation in Iran has to be based on interethnic collaboration and acknowledgment. Unity politics—not suspicion—is the enemy of the authoritarian state.
A Dangerous Precedent: Advocating Ethnic Strikes
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the article is its policy prescription: to carry out targeted military strikes on so-called “ethnic Azeri” IRGC units. This is blatant ethnic profiling disguised as war tactics. The idea that we should militarily punish people on consideration of their group identity rather than their conduct is not only dangerous; it is at odds with bedrock principles of international law and human rights. Ethnically based targeting of individuals or groups amounts to collective punishment, which is explicitly prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949). It may also set a dangerous precedent for ethnic cleansing—an atrocity that is, per se, condemned by the UN and international courts.
Would any serious policy analyst today advocate bombing “Sunni Arab police units” in Iraq or “Pashtun battalions” in Afghanistan based on their ethnic affiliation? Such logic would provoke global outrage—and rightly so. These proposals would be classified not only as unethical but as violations of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, particularly under provisions regarding crimes against humanity and persecution on ethnic grounds.
Even in war, the principle of individual criminal responsibility is paramount. Contemporary international humanitarian law prohibits military operations aimed at combatants because of their identity rather than their conduct. To argue otherwise is a reversion to pre-modern, tribal thinking—and a repudiation of decades of international efforts to limit armed conflict, to stop atrocities, and to shield minorities from genocide and ethnic violence.
In the Iranian setting, these pleas to ethnicity-based attacks directly play into the same logic the Islamic Republic itself has used to suppress those who oppose it and to punish entire groups for the presumed sins of the few. This tactic undermines democratic opposition movements and weakens cross-ethnic alliances vital for the post-authoritarian period.
Ethnic profiling as a military doctrine is not a strategic innovation. It is a moral and legal regression.
Azerbaijanis: Neither Regime Pawns nor Separatist Threats
Chronic aspects of the image of Iran’s Azerbaijani population as either loyal regime enforcers or potential secessionists are less a matter of fact than one of political ease. This narrative of duality has been promoted by both the Islamic Republic and some of the country’s outside enemies who want to divide Iran along its ethnic fault lines. In truth, the majority of South Azerbaijanis—citizens of Turkic heritage living predominantly in northwestern Iran—occupy a much more nuanced political space: opposing the regime’s authoritarianism while advocating for linguistic and cultural rights within a federal, democratic Iran.
What the Islamic Republic truly fears is not Azerbaijani loyalty but their mobilized demands for identity recognition, decentralization, and federalism. One wave of protests after another—from the annual Babak Castle rallies and protests across Tabriz and Urmia to chants of “Haray Haray Men Türkem” in the stadiums—has demonstrated that Azerbaijanis are not simply passive players in Iranian politics. On the contrary, they have served as a vanguard in the civil and nonviolent opposition against state assimilationist policies.
Arrest, beatings, and incarceration frequently punish such cultural expressions as reciting in the Turkic language during public events.
According to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur, dozens of Azerbaijani civil society activists and cultural figures have been arbitrarily detained or harassed by Iranian authorities for peaceful activities, including advocating for mother-tongue education and protesting ethnic discrimination.
To call these acts of defiance “state-sanctioned” is not just incorrect—it echoes the regime’s disinformation. The Islamic Republic only selectively and temporarily allows for public expressions of Turkic identity if the alternative is to agitate for greater turmoil in Azerbaijan or if it contradicts a continuously changing international context. Crackdowns quickly ensue on the heels of any prolonged action threatening national unity, especially autonomous politics based on an ethnic line.
Secondly, the assertion that Azerbaijani identity is inherently separatist would ignore a legion of academic research and on-the-ground reportage. The evidence indicates that most Iranian Azerbaijanis are in search of cultural and linguistic rights—such as Azerbaijani Turkish-speaking education and official identity recognition—and not separation or ethnonationalist chauvinism. And even claims of independence—or, much more frequently, for federalism or regional autonomy—can theoretically be based on international norms when people are systematically repressed politically and culturally. Under international law, the right to self-determination implies a right to internal self-determination (internal autonomy) and external self-determination (independence) in case of discrimination. No such demand has any whiff of a threat to Iran’s territorial integrity but is a reflection of the use of legitimate constitutional rights and international law mechanisms on the territory of Iran, not spying or foreign meddling.
Reducing this dynamic community of expression into “pawns” or “threats” is not just an affront to millions of human beings; it is an erasure of their essential role in the Iranian quest for freedom and risks contributing to the legitimization of selective repression. This narrative also conceals a more uncomfortable truth for Tehran’s defenders: Azerbaijanis are not given the means to fully integrate, even if they wanted to. From systematic linguistic discrimination and cultural marginalization to political exclusion, they face a deeply embedded state policy of ethnic erasure.
Toward a United, Democratic Future
Iran one day will have to be a democratic state; that is, its many peoples, from Azerbaijanis and Kurds to Persians, Arabs, Baloch, Turkmen, and others, will need to see themselves not as opponents but as co-authors of the new political narrative that has yet to be authored. This means combating the hateful, exclusive narratives that spin on the ethnic, confessional, sectarian, linguistic, and other levels, and recommitting to constructing a common state based on justice, equality, and democratic pluralism. Authoritarian regimes feed on division by stoking animosities between ethnic groups that might otherwise unite in opposition. Iran is no exception. In its history of about three decades, non-Persian communities have been ruled by the Islamic Republic through strategies of ethnic demonization, targeted repressive measures, and symbolic gestures with no policy change on the ground. Political reform and a joint commitment to interethnic solidarity will be needed to overcome this legacy. There is research on democratic transitions in multiethnic states that shows that cross-ethnic coalitions are necessary for overthrowing authoritarianism and avoiding post-regime disintegration. Federalism, linguistic rights, and equitable representation are not threats to national unity—they are tools to preserve it under democratic rule.
That’s the direction many Iranian Azerbaijanis are calling for—not secession, but a federal, multilingual, inclusive Iran where none of the identities under the umbrella require subjugation to any others. Demonizing Azeri Turks, Kurds, or any other minority is simply playing directly into the regime’s hands. It detracts from the universal end of political freedom for all. Instead of pushing each other to the margins, Iran’s oppressed nationalities should come to mutual recognition of each other’s grievances, resistance strategies, and a new constitutional vision that protects individual rights as much as collective identities. Between Zahedan-Ahvaz and Sanandaj-Tabriz, a more just and democratic Iran is only achievable when every voice is heard and every identity is respected.