Ashraf Dehghani

In 1949, Ashraf Dehghani was born into a working-class family in Iranian Azerbaijan.[1] She was brought up in a politically progressive household, where from an early age, her parents told her stories of the short-lived Azerbaijan People's Government. In school, she developed a reputation as a political agitator, being reported to the SAVAK by her own teacher for writing an essay that criticised the Imperial State.[2] After graduating from school, she became a teacher in a poor Azeri village.[3]

Although she had promised the SAVAK that she would cease political activities,[2] she continued her political agitation under the wing of her older brother Behrouz and his friend, the Iranian social critic Samad Behrangi.[4] During the late 1960s, Dehghani joined her brother in the Organization of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas (OIPFG),[5] becoming the only woman on its Central Committee.[6]

On 8 February 1970, the OIPFG launched its first attack against the Imperial State, with an assault against the gendarmerie at Siahkal. In the wake of the attack, revolutionary actions surged in Iran, to which the SAVAK responded with violent repression. Dehghani herself continued her activities, and on 13 May 1971, she was arrested by the SAVAK and sentenced to ten years in prison.[2] During her time in Evin Prison, she reported to have been regularly tortured and raped by the SAVAK.[7] She refused to cooperate with her interrogators, always remaining silent.[8] On one occasion, they attempted to torture her by releasing a snake onto her body,[9] expecting her to be frightened,[10] but this elicited no reaction from her.[11] She later concluded of the experience that her torturers believed women to be weak,[12] "but they didn't understand why and what type of women are weak."[11]

Throughout her sentence, she held to her historical materialist belief in the inevitability of social revolution. She also developed an analysis of the Imperial State's authoritarianism, concluding that the system was inherently weak as it couldn't suppress dissent even through torture.[13] She also noted the class discrimination with which the SAVAK treated women of different social classes — sex workers were abused by the guards, while upper-class dissidents received fully-furnished private cells — and reported the hatred that imprisoned women displayed for Ashraf Pahlavi during her visit.[14] While she concluded that working-class women were "dually exploited", she also suggested that women that had attained class consciousness needed class conscious male partners, in order to together build a classless society.[15] Dehghani thus contrasted "reactionary women" against "human beings", claiming the latter to be women engaged in class struggle with the aim of achieving freedom and social equality.[16]

On 13 March 1973, she escaped prison dressed in a chador and returned to work with the OIPFG.[17] Her memoirs of her struggles in prison, Torture and Resistance In Iran, were published the following year in London and banned from publication in Iran until the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution.[18] Having fled the country after her prison escape, Dehghani remained in exile until the Revolution broke out.[3]

Following the Revolution, the Tudeh Party and the majority of OIPFG members deviated from the program of armed struggle, claiming the tactic to be outdated and accusing its proponents of ultra-leftism.[19] Dehghani was of the OIPFG leaders that continued to advocate for guerrilla warfare.[20] She was expelled from the OIPFG over the issue.[21] She in turn denounced the OIPFG's new leadership for revisionism and anti-communism, accusing them of having abandoned the organisation's political prisoners.[22] She considered the Khomeini government to have constituted a new bourgeois regime, little different from the Shah. She thus felt that armed struggle was still a valid tactic, in order to prepare the masses for a social revolution and to build resistance to imperialist intervention in the country.[23]

Dehghani led a minority of the organisation's members away and established the Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas (IPFG), which committed itself to continued armed struggle against the new Iranian government.[24] At the time, the IPFG was the only revolutionary organisation in which women served on the central committee.[25] Although the government understood the IPFG and OIPFG to be separate, the IPFG's continued advocacy of armed struggle was used as pretext to suppress both, with their centres being raided by Khomeinists.[26]

When the 1979 Kurdish rebellion broke out, Dehghani's faction decided to join it,[27] declaring their support for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and fighting alongside them against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).[28] In June 1981, the IPFG and KDP were joined by the People's Mojahedin Organisation (MEK), who had decided to take up armed struggle against the Islamic Republic.[29] After the MEK, Dehghani's IPFG would become one of the most effective guerrilla groups. IPFG members accounted for 20% of arrests and executions by the authorities.[30]

By July 1981, the MEK and IPFG were facing harsh repression by the authorities.[31] Many of the group's leading members were killed and factional disputes broke out within its nucleus in Kurdistan, causing it to lose hundreds of supporters over the subsequent years. This would eventually lead to the group's effective elimination, with its surviving members fleeing to Europe.[32] Little is known of Dehghani's life after this point, although she is believed to be living clandestinely in Germany.[10]