TEHRAN – A 16-year-old girl losing consciousness inside a metro cabin on Sunday while on her way to school has turned into a new tool for anti-Iran campaigners and Western politicians seeking to spark a furor inside Iran, a year after riots occurred inside the country following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

CCTV footage released by the official IRNA news agency shows the student named Armita Geravand being pulled out of the train by her female accompaniers a few seconds after entering it. Apart from Armita’s friends and a female adult, who was later revealed to have been a nurse, surrounding her nonresponsive body on the ground, other passengers can be seen rushing towards the cabin in a hurry to reach their destination.

After innumerable failures at trying to make Iran insecure in the past year, foreign media outlets sponsored by Israel, the U.S., and other Western states are in full swing to make the most of what an unexpected incident can bring for them. Once again, anti-Iran campaigners and Western politicians seem to have found a common ground. The mission is to spark the riots they failed to revive this September. The means don’t matter; similar to “the lie of Nayireh” any lie and deceit can be used to reach the end. It doesn’t matter that evidence shows otherwise, an innocent teenager needs to be transformed into a victim so that the West’s political goals can be fulfilled. According to Western propaganda, Armita was “beaten to death” just like Mahsa. No amount of sustainable evidence, eyewitness accounts and security footage seems to be able to prove the proponents of the Western narrative wrong.  More blood should be spilled and more lives should be wrecked in order to ensure Western interests. 
 

Armita’s family, friends speak to media

The student’s parents have done interviews with Iranian media confirming that their daughter lost blood pressure and hit her head on the metro platform on the way to school. The couple asked for prayers stressing there was no point in creating controversy about the state of their teenager. The friends accompanying Armita in the metro have also repeated the same narrative.
 

official account on what really happened

The CEO of Tehran’s Metro Operating Company and a worker present on the day of the incident have both spoken up about the incident and strongly rejected any claims that Armita was hurt during a physical dispute with police forces. “Today based on my moral and organizational duty I visited Armita. The medical staff is doing its best and Armita’s condition seems to be improving,” said the CEO when visiting the student in the hospital.

But what seems to be an unfortunate incident happening to a young girl has now turned into another opportunity for anti-Iran media and Western politicians who are not happy with the current stable condition of the country.

Anti-Iran opposition’s cheers of delight

Hearing that a young girl is in an infirm condition and struggling to regain health is sure to sadden any person. But for hawkish oppositionists wishing to see Iran in ruins any unfortunate incident can be considered a blessing. With not a single piece of evidence, oppositionists residing in the West have begun to claim the student lost consciousness after a confrontation with police. Some of the figures appearing on anti-Iran broadcasts even went as far as declaring the student dead. "We lost Mahsa Amini exactly a year ago in the same way. It is obvious that they killed another young girl because of hijab,” said an analyst on Iran International on Monday. 
 

oppositionists smell money

All of the notorious figures of the Iranian opposition were also quick to take to social media in an attempt to once again incentivize violence in the country. “My heart is broken. Right on the first anniversary of the murder of Mahsa Amini in the hand of morality police, this horrifying images, emerging of Armita Geravand, the 16-year-old girl who is in a coma in Iran after a reported confrontation with the morality police in Tehran. I’m crying…,” said Masih Alinejad on X while posting an alleged image of Armita lying in a hospital bed. It was later revealed that the picture now circulating online belongs to a different person. 
 

West bent on repeating Mahsa Amini saga 

Western politicians were quick to enter the game and bring up accusations which hark back to the remarks they continuously made last year.
"Once again a young woman in Iran is fighting for her life. Just because she showed her hair on the subway," wrote German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Tuesday. 
Washington’s special envoy for Iran was next to jump on the hype train and point the finger of blame at Iranian authorities. Speaking on X, Abram Paley claimed he was “concerned” and “worried” about the unsupported claims that Armita was involved in a confrontation with police. “We continue to stand with the brave people of Iran,” he wrote while perhaps forgetting about the crippling sanctions the U.S. has imposed against Iran which continue to saddle the lives of millions of Iranians every day. 

 Speaking to “eyewitnesses” from London

The Guardian has also decided to sidestep the explanations of Armita’s friends and some other passengers who saw her the day she passed out and come up with its own lies. The newspaper claims it has spoken to two eyewitnesses who say the student was pushed by a female “hijab enforcer”. “The chador-clad woman screamed at her asking her why she was not covered. Their argument then turned violent. The hijab enforcer started physically attacking Armita and … violently pushed her,” the Guardian quoted an unidentified eyewitness referring to the three-second time period Armita spent in the metro cabin which was not captured by CCTV cameras. 

What about dying patients in the West?

Instead of making interventionist remarks and expressing “insincere concern” about women in Iran, Tehran on Thursday urged the Western nations to be concerned about a wave of strikes that would harm their health sector.

Nasser Kanaani, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said the United States, Britain, and Germany had better be concerned about strikes by their medical professionals, Nasser Kanaani, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said in an X post on Thursday.

“Instead of interventionist & biased remarks & expressing insincere concern over Iranian women & girls, you’d better be concerned about US, German and UK healthcare personnel, patients & tackle their situation,” Kanaani said in an X post.

In addition, Kanaani included a Reuters news report with its message, which said that on Wednesday more than 75,000 union workers at Kaiser Permanente began the largest three-day healthcare worker walkout in U.S. history. The strike could have an effect on over 13 million people.

In Britain, it was reported that more than 120,000 people died while on waiting lists last year. A similar situation is also unfolding in Germany. But the heads of these Western countries have instead decided to focus on taking advantage from the unfortunate incident that happened to a girl miles away, in Tehran. 

Will Iran be convulsed with another wave of riots?

Armita is reportedly in coma. Apart from the sad reality of what’s happened to the young girl, the current positioning of anti-Iran media outlets and some Western politicians working in tandem with them was in fact, to be expected. 

President Ebrahim Raisi’s administration has managed to take much of the sting out of 2022’s riots. The insecurity that was briefly created inside the country last year proved to also be extremely baleful for the economy. Prices went soaring as the value of the Iranian currency, rial, began to drop. Raisi managed to bring down the chaos-driven inflation by acquiring several fiscal measures helping the country experience a few months of relative economic calm. 

After failing to revive the 2022 September riots this year, the West is desperate to create a new point of tension in Iran. Iran’s flurry of diplomacy and its repeated diplomatic gains in the past year are also a source of worry for Western politicians. They have opened the throttle in their push to make Iran insecure and it seems unlikely for them to back off anytime soon.

But Iran here seems to have learnt great lessons from the difficult days it had last year. This time, the government was quick to provide people with evidence on what’s really happened. The Iranian people have also got to know the real colors of the so-called journalists and human rights activists living abroad, whose only wish seems to be able to revel in dresses stained by the blood of innocent Iranian lives.