Erfan Rezaei was a young man killed in Amol during the most contested phase of the Mahsa Movement, and one of multiple Amol victims documented by international human rights monitors.
He was shot in central Amol on 21 October 2022 during a street demonstration. The state coroner returned the body under conditions of a quiet burial. The family later confirmed the death publicly despite security pressure. The fortieth-day commemoration (chehelom), a key Iranian mourning ritual, became its own protest.
The fortieth-day cycle is what kept the 2022 uprising in motion through the winter: each killing seeded another protest forty days later. The regime responded by deploying security forces to cemeteries. Naming Erfan is part of the same forty-day clock that named dozens of others. Iran International was among the diaspora outlets that covered the Amol protest deaths continuously.
Amol is one of the cities the foreign press never named. Persian-language memory has to do its own naming.
What it is
Erfan Rezaei (عرفان رضایی) was a 21-year-old killed by security forces in Amol, Mazandaran province, on 21 October 2022 during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. Amol was one of the most contested cities of the protest cycle in northern Iran. He was shot during a street demonstration. Amnesty International and the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran included his death among unlawful killings of protesters by Iranian security forces. His family faced pressure not to hold a public funeral and not to grant interviews; a memorial gathering at his graveside on the fortieth day after his death was met with security force presence.
Sources
- Amnesty International, deaths of protesters by security forces (December 2022)
- UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran (A/HRC/55/67, March 2024)
- Iran Human Rights, Mahsa Movement victims registry
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