On Thursday, December 31, 2020, State Security Force deputy commander, Brig. Gen. Qassem Rezaei issued an order to his subordinates stating: “If you arrest those who ‘wield machetes’, you must do something to drop (the machete) on the ground…that is he no longer should have an arm to (hold the machete.”

He went on to say: “If he was wielding a machete on the scene, then I must see him with a broken arm…if he held a machete in his hand and caused terror, you should have broken his leg on the scene so that I could have seen it.”

Following these hideous remarks, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) has described the call for repressive measures and explicit violence against citizens on bogus charges of being thugs and bandits as “a reflection of the state of the regime being engulfed by crises and staying in fear of an uprising by enraged people who will not be satisfied with anything less than the overthrow of the regime”.

While humiliating and insulting a blindfolded detainee held as a ‘thug’, the deputy commander responded to a question as to whether the detainee enjoyed any rights, saying: “That he is still alive is what the law stipulates; he must stay alive… The law says that if someone is screaming and causing fear and horror, this is an act of terror and he is waging a war with God”

Maryam Rajavi has called on the United Nations and the European Union and their member states to impose international sanctions on the clerical regime for its systematic human rights abuses.

She said that silence and inaction with regards to the mullahs, whose constitution and practice violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international laws and conventions, has encouraged them to continue executions, the torture of detainees, and other crimes against humanity.

In another statement, Maryam Rajavi, in her New Year message, reached out to the people of Iran and expressed her hopes for 2021.

She said: “I wish my compatriots in Iran and all the people of the world permanent relief from the Coronavirus pandemic, and I wish you all the very best in the New Year 2021. May the New Year be a year of health and of defeating the virus, as well as the year of ultimate defeat of the clerical dictatorship in Iran.”

Maryam Rajavi urged the world to support the Iranian Resistance and the Iranian people’s uprisings against “the greatest enemy of freedom and peace in the world today”, which is the mullahs’ criminal dictatorship.

She said: “It is time to recognize the Iranian Resistance that seeks to overthrow the regime as well as the struggle of Iran’s courageous youths against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). I wish for Iran to be liberated from religious tyranny, and for the region and the world to be peaceful and prosperous. May you all be victorious.”

Let this be the year that we support the Iranian people in their quest for freedom.