Iranian schoolgirls give clerical leaders the finger

telegraph:  Iranian youngsters are removing their hijabs and giving portraits of their clerical leaders in classrooms the middle finger as a massive uprising against the regime in Tehran spreads to schools.

Video footage posted online this week showed schoolgirls making the gesture and turning portraits of Iran’s leaders to face against the wall in classrooms. As with older women in Iran, they have also refused to wear headscarves in some schools, protesting rules enforced by the regime’s morality police.

Footage has emerged of a group of schoolchildren in the city of Karaj near Tehran chasing an education official off the premises as they hurled empty water bottles at him and chanted “shame on you”.

It came as the BBC reported that Iranian security forces secretly buried the body of a 16-year-old protester far from her village after she disappeared for ten days. In a last message to her friends, Nika Shakarami had said she was being pursued by security forces.

Her relatives told the BBC that when they went to identify Nika’s body they were only allowed to briefly see her face, raising suspicions that she may have been killed by the authorities.

Security forces then “stole” the body and buried it in a faraway village, relatives said.

Iran has been gripped by unprecedented protests over the past two weeks which began in response to the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody after she was detained for incorrectly wearing a hijab.

The demonstrations quickly evolved into a full-blown campaign to bring down the supreme leader, with protesters engaged in running street battles with riot police across dozens of cities.

Many protesters have chanted “death to the dictator”, among other similar slogans, in a direct reference to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran has launched a brutal crackdown on protesters and heavily restricted access to the internet, but this does not seem to have deterred many Iranians. Over the past few weeks, Iranian women have been cutting off their hair in protest and burning their hijabs on street bonfires.