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Iran Focus
 Tehran, Iran, Jul. 11 - With the arrival of a
top commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as the
country’s new police chief, Iran’s state-run media announced a new
summer-long crackdown on “social vice” in Tehran targeting in particular young
women and runaway girls.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appointed on
Saturday Brigadier General Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, the number
two in the paramilitary Bassij and commander of the
force in Greater Tehran, as Iran’s new chief of police.
A senior security official told one of Iran’s state-run news agencies, ISNA,
that “mal-veiled or unveiled individuals inside and outside of cars” would be
the target of arrests by Iran’s State Security Forces, the
paramilitary police force.
SSF in Tehran would also be on the lookout for “open
examples of corruption in tourist and recreation resorts”.
The top official said the police would embark on a systematic clampdown on
“shops and public places where public chastity and Islamic values are
ignored”. Loud music will no longer be tolerated, he said.
Runaway girls and homeless young women would also be the target of arrests,
and Tehran’s police force would also identify and crack
down on places where “corrupt people gather”, the report added.
The appointment of Ahmadi Moghaddam,
who is among the top commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)
and a protégé of IRGC Commandant General Rahim Safavi, brings the country’s police force under the
complete domination of the Revolutionary Guards and signals a readiness to
crack down harder on what the ultra-conservatives see as “deviation” from the
country’s rigid religious laws.
Moghaddam was quoted by the state-run daily Kayhan as saying in November 2004, “A country where
liberal ideas rule will get no where”.
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