Iran International
Five months after Iran's women footballers sought asylum in Australia, the football federation has called the squad back into camp, not to train but to film a documentary about what happened there. Some of the players it wants on camera are the ones who came home under pressure.
While two of those players are building new lives in Australia, thousands of kilometers from their families, having received citizenship there, the Islamic Republic's football federation has summoned their former teammates to record the state's account of the same events.
Farideh Shojaei, the federation's vice-president for women's football, has confirmed that a documentary about Iran's participation in the AFC Women's Asian Cup will be filmed at the camp. She described the purpose as completing the tournament archive and setting down part of the history of Iranian women's football.
The outlet Football 360 had reported earlier that the project belongs to a body outside football, and that most of the players who returned from Australia have no wish to sit in front of the federation's camera and recount what happened on that trip.
A camp that does not add up
The camp has pushed back the start of Iran's women's premier league by a week, and the federation's explanations for holding it have not been consistent.
According to Iranian media, when club coaches objected to the timing, Shojaei assured them the players would not be put under any football training load, because the point of the camp was to film the documentary. Later, explaining why a camp was being held outside a FIFA international window with no fixture ahead of the national team, she said it had been convened at the request of Marzieh Jafari, the national coach, to prepare the players.
Jafari does not currently hold an active contract with the federation. She is head coach of Khatoon Bam, the club that supplies the core of the national squad, which has just come through Asian Champions League qualifying and now needs to prepare for a new league season.
So a camp that has forced clubs to rearrange their calendars is attributed to a coach with no active federation contract, and was described to the objecting coaches as not being about training at all.
The version the state told first
The documentary is being made several months after Iranian officials gave their own account of what happened in Australia.
In the team's final days there, federation president Mehdi Taj claimed Australian police had separated the women from the men in the delegation and pressured the players into staying and claiming asylum. Esmail Baghaei, the foreign ministry spokesman, went further on television, accusing the Australian government of "taking members of the team hostage."
While those claims were being made in public, according to one club executive, money was being raised inside Iranian football to encourage the players to come home.
Alireza Babaei, chief executive of Chadormalou Ardakan, told a Football 360 live program that while the federation was working to bring the whole delegation back, its general secretary Hedayat Mombeini asked Chadormalou to pay 30 billion rials, about $15,000, for the women's national team. Chadormalou does not have a women's team.
According to Babaei, Mombeini also mentioned a payment of 50 billion rials, roughly $25,000, from the Gol Gohar club, and named Sepahan of Isfahan, a club that at that moment was weighing whether to continue fielding teams at all because of war damage to the steel industry.
In Iranian women's football, 50 billion rials from a single club is not a sum to be waved away. Afsaneh Chatrenoor, the national team forward who plays for Gol Gohar, was the premier league's leading scorer last season. She is also the player who sat across from Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei a few months ago and asked the head of the judiciary to help her find work for when her football career ends. At the top level of the Iranian women's game, the contracts of prominent players are still measured in a few billion rials.
What the tournament was always about
For the Islamic Republic's officials, the Women's Asian Cup in Australia was never only a football tournament.
Several members of the delegation applied for humanitarian protection from the Australian government during the war and after the killing of Ali Khamenei. Some later abandoned their asylum applications and returned to Iran under pressure from security forces on their families.
In those same days, Iranian officials were assembling their own version of events. They spoke of hostage-taking and of players being deceived, while simultaneously turning to threats, intimidation and financial inducements to get the asylum seekers back.
Now some of the same players who returned after that pressure are to sit in front of a camera, in a project belonging to a body outside football, and describe those days again.
It looks less like archiving history than like producing a state edition of it.
This time the Islamic Republic is not only constructing its own account of Australia. It wants the players inside the rewriting.
Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei has threatened an even harsher crackdown on another uprising. Leaked Basij audio has exposed anxiety inside the security establishment, while authorities have identified gasoline, unemployment and livelihoods as potential triggers.
Security forces have already opened fire on people protesting over jobs in southwestern Iran this week.
“The economic crisis in itself is turning Iran into a powder keg,” Khosro Isfahani, research director at the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI), told Iran International.
Fixing the conditions driving the anger would require the state to change into “something that is fundamentally not the Islamic Republic,” he said, adding that Iran’s rulers are willing to “kill as many as it takes to stay in power.”
At least 950 people have been executed since the beginning of the year. Not all were political prisoners, but the accelerating use of capital punishment has added to a wider climate of fear.
The same pattern can be seen in a renewed crackdown on compulsory hijab, cafe closures, pressure on workers and pensioners and the deployment of police onto the streets.
‘Damaged fruit’
And there is little economic relief in sight, with fewer and fewer families able to afford meat, fruit or even dairy products.
Economist Ali Dadpay points to damaged fruit, once sold cheaply to the poorest or left for the homeless, as an increasingly common measure of what many families can afford.
For decades, the Islamic Republic has sought to blame economic hardship on sanctions, foreign powers, merchants or individual officials. But Dadpay says it is becoming harder to separate what Iranians experience in the supermarket from the decisions made by the state.
Inflation, he said, has become “the perfect indirect taxation.”
Instead of openly raising the money needed to finance its policies, Tehran prints it. The rial loses value and ordinary Iranians pay the difference every time they buy food, medicine or other necessities.
They have been made “poorer and poorer and poorer,” Dadpay said, and are now in danger of being “permanently impoverished.”
Middle class no more
The deterioration is reaching people who once considered themselves middle class. Pensioners are protesting. Even some government-linked companies are struggling to pay wages that barely cover basic living costs.
“Even the middle class cannot afford,” Dadpay said.
And winter threatens to tighten the squeeze.
Gasoline is already in short supply. Mahdi Ghodsi, senior economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, estimates Iran has lost 15% to 30% of its energy-production capacity through war damage and depreciation.
As temperatures fall, factories may have to shut down so scarce gas can be redirected to households.
Transport workers would be among those hit by worsening fuel shortages, with disruptions potentially spreading quickly through the wider economy.
‘Fragile calm’
Miad Maleki, a former senior US Treasury sanctions strategist and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), says the regime is looking at the same deteriorating numbers as everyone else.
“To keep paying salaries and pensions to roughly eight million state payees, including its own security forces, the regime has been printing rials and borrowing directly from the central bank,” Maleki said.
“Ejei’s threat tells you they know how fragile that is.”
Dadpay points to Venezuela and Zimbabwe as reminders that governments can survive extraordinary economic deterioration. Money can be printed, salaries can be deposited and the machinery of the state can continue operating even as the population becomes dramatically poorer.
“Yes, it works,” Dadpay said. But what it produces is “a miserable impoverished situation.”
Iran’s rulers learned in November 2019, however, how quickly the calculation can change. A sudden gasoline price increase led to spontaneous protests that Tehran crushed with lethal force.
‘Revolutions are not advertised’
Inflation is easier to disperse. It quietly takes purchasing power from millions of people without creating a single moment around which they can mobilize.
The danger for Tehran comes when that diffuse suffering suddenly becomes concrete: an empty gas station, a bread shortage, a missed salary, a delayed pension or another sudden price decree.
That is when, Maleki said, scattered grievances can acquire “a single address and a single date.”
But there is another calculation now: fear.
Iranians have seen what happens when they confront the state. Ghodsi said the expected cost of taking to the streets has become enormous because people know they could be shot or killed.
And yet, he said, “society is boiling.”
What changes that calculation may ultimately be impossible to forecast. Ghodsi believes it could take an unpredictable shock. Isfahani looks for something even less measurable: the image, death or act of defiance that suddenly turns private anger into a collective cause.
Mahsa Amini became such a moment in 2022. Isfahani said he has not seen an equivalent tipping point yet. “It’s never about number,” he said.
He quoted his late father: “Revolutions don’t advertise their time of arrival. They arrive.”
The Islamic Republic may not know when, or whether, scattered economic grievances will converge into another uprising. But its threats, preparations and response to smaller protests are already showing how it intends to confront one.
Saeed Golsorkhi, an athlete and powerlifter, was shot in the knee during protests on January 9 and taken to hospital, the sources said. Concerned he could be arrested there, Golsorkhi discharged himself and returned home to continue treatment.
Security forces and Revolutionary Guards intelligence agents raided the family home on January 11, assaulted relatives and used pepper spray against Golsorkhi’s mother, according to the sources.
The forces bound Golsorkhi’s hands while his wounded knee was still bleeding and took him outside, the sources said. They blocked both ends of the alley before shooting him at close range in the head and abdomen.
Golsorkhi’s mother and his young niece witnessed the shooting, and he died in his mother’s arms, according to the sources.
Iran International previously reported on January 28 that Revolutionary Guards intelligence agents raided Golsorkhi’s home and shot him dead in front of his mother after he chanted “Death to Khamenei.”
Killings in Shahroud
Golsorkhi’s death forms part of a broader picture of the January crackdown in Shahroud documented by Iran International.
Eyewitnesses previously told that security forces killed at least 200 people in the city on January 8 and 9. The deaths of 22 women were recorded at Bahar Hospital alone, according to those accounts.
Other accounts from Shahroud have described security forces firing directly at protesters and authorities imposing restrictions on the families of those killed.
Iran International previously reported that Hossein Gharib, a 32-year-old athlete from Shahroud, was shot dead by security forces on January 9. His body was released only after his family agreed not to publicize his death and to hold a burial attended by no more than 10 people.
Brother detained, family barred from public mourning
Golsorkhi’s brother, Navid Golsorkhi, was arrested after the killing and held in temporary detention for about a month.
The family was able to retrieve Golsorkhi’s body several days later after agreeing to hold his burial without a gathering or public ceremony. Golsorkhi was buried on January 15 under tight security.
Security forces also blocked both ends of the street outside his mother’s home to prevent people from visiting the family to offer condolences, sources close to the family said. The family was not permitted to hold a public memorial.
The restrictions were not limited to Golsorkhi’s relatives. Iran International documented similar measures following the January crackdown, including bodies being returned at night, families being required to hold restricted burials and authorities preventing public mourning ceremonies.
Golsorkhi was a powerlifter and owned a clothing store in Shahroud.
People close to him said he admired the Pahlavi family and had an image of Reza Shah Pahlavi tattooed on his arm.
