By Robert Harris
Last week a timely report of the truly sickening origins of the Basij paramilitary force was published at The Iconoclast. The Jerusalem Post was one of many MSM publications that has ignored or whitewashed this deplorable truth despite it having been reported upon in prior decades.
“The civilian cost of the war against the Islamic regime is a tragic but necessary sacrifice that the large majority of Iranians are willing to endure so their children may one day live in freedom. That’s the assessment of Afshin Javid, a former member of the Basij paramilitary force’s execution squad, who later became a devout Christian.
“Iranian people feel they are condemned to three types of deaths,” he said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Monday. The options, he said, were to be killed by the regime; experience a death of the soul by watching Tehran brutalize, rape, and murder their loved ones; or be killed in US or Israeli strikes. The choice for Iranians is simple, he noted, as the airstrikes carry with them hope of regime change and a different future. […]
THE VALUE OF life was not always something understood by Javid. When he was eight, his home in Abadan, Iran, was bombed, and his journey to Islamism began. Told by his grandfather that the West had destroyed everything he owned because he was a Muslim, Javid committed himself entirely to Islam and the Islamic regime’s doctrine of martyrdom.
“We had been completely desensitized to the value of life itself. Life for them [Islamists] doesn’t mean much… What is actually glorified is death, especially for a cause for jihad, for a holy war, to be a martyr,” he said as he explained the mentality among the regime’s supporters and how hard it is for those with a Western mindset to understand this.
“I wanted to be a good Muslim,” Javid shared, recounting how he heard stories from his childhood martyrdom was the way to “serve Allah,” particularly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
After watching videos of children on TV clearing minefields in Iraq, and hearing the religious praise pushed on those killed in the line of duty, Javid forged his parents’ signatures to enlist in the Iranian military at age 14. Carrying a cheap metal key, which the minors were told was a “key to paradise,” and a small Koran, Javid was briefly deployed before his father demanded that authorities return him, furious he had been allowed to be sent to die without parental consent.
Thousands of children were sent to die on the border, and many families were groomed to sacrifice their children by both religious doctrine and the financial benefits offered to those standing behind Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The regime recruited children as young as nine to sweep the minefields, recruiting them from slums and providing families with Bunyad-e Shaheed (Martyrs’ Foundation) payments when their children were killed or maimed, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
The International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that at least 10% of Iranian prisoners taken during the Iran-Iraq War were under 18, though the official number of child soldiers deployed remains unknown.
“We saw on TV how children are becoming soldiers. They’re walking on landmines; children were volunteering to fight and everything, teenagers as early as 13 to 14,” he recounted. “It was all the time, 24/7, on TV. I thought, ‘I don’t know if Allah is pleased with me. I want to do more. I want to do more.’
“I thought, [this is] the only way I know to serve Allah, and he would be pleased with me. Looking back, you realize you have been brainwashed, but at that time, according to the teachings of Islam, it is to be a martyr. So if you are a martyr, then you immediately go to heaven, and you can even vouch for family members to come to heaven,” he explained.
RECALLED FROM the border, Javid began volunteering at a local mosque and joined the Basij paramilitary force, a voluntary militia that worked under the IRGC. He would spend his days ensuring the neighborhood was compliant with the country’s new Islamic foundations, checking whether women were fully covering their bodies, and not listening to music. His dedication and the reputation he developed as a true believer led him to be recruited to the militia’s execution team in the “Sabi l’aw’allah” (“In the cause of Allah”).
The first execution he saw was more brutal than those that are described in Western accounts, he said. The victim was lifted by the neck with a rope, ensuring that they suffocated rather than have the quick death that often results from the broken neck of a drop-hanging.
“As I watched, I felt like something died in me, rather than the person dying. And reality is that the value of life completely dissipated for me,” Javid said. “I remember asking myself, at age 14, ‘Is Allah pleased now with me because I killed somebody? I was part of the team that killed somebody, and they told us he’s an infidel. Now what?’
“I didn’t have some sort of affirmation, confirmation that Allah is pleased with me. And then I thought to myself – and this is a buildup on all the things that you are fed through the media, the school system, everything – that you need to find joy when you’re doing Allah’s will; if you’re killing the infidel, you need to be joyful. There needs to be a celebration.” […]”
The story stands as a testament to the repugnant manipulation of the children of the Revolutionary Iran. The rest of Javid’s fascinating story is found at the link cited above.
One Response
I read this also. Never in a million years would the BBC or Australia’s ABC DARE to interview this guy and publicise his story!! Kudos to the Jerusalem Post for listening to him and publishing his account, including his testimony of a supernatural experience that took him out of Islam altogether…. and made him an advocate for a/ Israel and b/ apostates from Islam.
And would Pope Leo DARE to offer this guy an audience… or indeed, give a private audience to any of the OTHER (quite numerous) Persian apostates from Islam who are now active Christians AND are openly-declared Friends of Zion???