Montreal protesters want terrorist designation for Islamic military group

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Protesters in downtown Montreal Sunday afternoon called on the Canadian government to declare Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization.

Chants including “IRGC is terrorist,” “Femmes! Vie! Liberté!,” “Justice, justice for Iran” and “Stand and fight for human rights” were called out by the demonstrators gathered in Phillips Square. They handed out flyers illustrated with a dove and the messages “Say no to war” and “Iran is not Islamic Republic.”

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“Canadians can act,” said Ava Afrashteh, who was among the several dozen protesters at Sunday’s rally, “and demand, as we are, that the IRGC be named a terrorist organization.”

The event was organized by the Iranian Youth Circle to protest Iran’s military attack on Israel this month in which more than 300 missiles and drones were unleashed, said Negin Sepehri, one of the organizers.

The attack occurred overnight on April 13 and was reported to be retaliation for an airstrike in Damascus on April 1, widely blamed on Israel, in which two generals with the IRGC were killed. Israel said nearly all the drones and missiles were shot down by its anti-missile defence system, with backing from its allies. After six days of weighing its response, Israel launched a limited airstrike near military bases in Isfahan in central Iran on Friday in which a major air-defence radar system was destroyed.

“We want people to know that Iran is not the Islamic Republic,” said Afrashteh, 21.  “We are here for the people of Iran. We just want peace.”

Said Sepehri: “The majority of people with brains in their head don’t have any problem with Israel. We are a peace-loving people. … We have been trying to tell the world that Iranian people are separate from the mullahs.”

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The mullahs have been in power in Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Their regime “flouts human rights and oppresses its people,” stated the flyer that was handed out on Sunday. The statement added that the past 45 years have been marked by “crimes, repression, torture, executions, assassinations and warmongering. … Human life and dignity are the most expendable commodities on the altar of power of the Islamic Republic.”

“Innocent prisoners have been subjected to abuse and torture in the regime’s dreaded prisons” and “women have been victims of the regime’s institutionalized gender discrimination,” the flyer also stated.

In 2022, a wave of protests in Iran followed the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not wearing her hijab properly and died in custody. Many Iranians, particularly the young, came to see Amini’s death as part of the Islamic Republic’s heavy-handed policing of dissent and increasingly violent treatment of young women.

“There are two types of political parties in Iran: the ones who are really fanatic and the ones pretending that they want to make the country better,” said Sepehri, 47. “Just the name is different. Khamenei is on top.”

Ali Khamenei, who has been leader of Iran since 1989, is the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East.

Among demands of the Iranian Youth Circle are that Canada place leaders of the Islamic Republic and their families on the list of terrorist groups, that the citizenship and permanent residency of IRGC members residing in Canada be revoked and that they be forced to leave the country.

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