For the second day in a row, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has carried out intense shelling, causing extensive environmental damage in the Shaho mountainous region near the villages of Tangivar and Palangan in Kamyaran, Kurdistan Province.
The Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) has learned that IRGC forces stationed around the villages of Tangivar and Palangan carried out aggressive shelling on 29 January, causing significant damage to the protected mountain area.
According to local residents, the IRGC has restricted access to the mountainous region since yesterday, citing military security exercises as the reason.
These military exercises are believed to be manoeuvres to instil fear and create a sense of terror in the region following Iran’s recent execution of four Kurdish political prisoners – Pezhman Fatehi, Mohsen Mazloum, Mohammad Faramarzi, and Vafa Azarbar.
According to Kurdish environmental activists, the IRGC has been building several military bases in the Shaho and Kusalan protected areas since 2007 under the pretext of countering the presence of armed forces of Kurdish opposition parties.
Despite objections from environmental activists, much of the pastureland and forests in these areas have been destroyed in the construction of the military bases and the roads leading to them.
The IRGC has also deliberately burned the pastures and forests around the military bases in what it calls an act to ‘prevent the Kurdish opposition parties from using the vegetation cover for attacks’.
The Shaho and Kusalan protected areas, covering 57,236 hectares, are located between the towns of Sarvabad, Ravansar, Paveh, Marivan and Kamyaran, on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan.
In 2009, these mountainous areas were designated as protected areas under the management of the Department of Environment by Resolution No. 303 of the Supreme Environmental Council (Government Infrastructure Commission).
