School Project Sparks Controversy in Ahwaz for Serving Settlers

Mohammad Saeedi Pour, Director General of Reconstruction, Development, and School Equipment in Ahwaz, announced that the school whose foundation stone was laid by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian during his recent visit to Ahwaz has reached 65% completion, and is scheduled to open in October.

The project, built on a 3,200-square-meter plot with a construction area of 1,500 square meters, is presented by Iranian authorities as a model of educational development in Ahwaz. Officials claim it follows the latest architectural standards and is expected to represent a “qualitative leap” in the educational infrastructure.

However, Ahwazi activists stress that such projects, despite their media noise, are primarily designed to serve Persian settlers brought by Iran to Ahwaz under a demographic change policy, while the local Ahwazi population is marginalized and deprived of benefiting from them.

Residents point out that dozens of schools in Ahwazi towns and villages suffer from collapsing infrastructure and a shortage of teaching staff, while Iranian authorities spend millions of tomans on projects dedicated to settlers in specially planned neighborhoods and districts.

This school is noted to be the first project within a plan launched by the president under the slogan of “developing educational justice,” which includes the construction and renovation of 656 schools in Ahwaz. Critics, however, argue that the announced figures do not reflect reality, as most of these projects are implemented in settler areas or major cities, while Arab villages and neighborhoods in Ahwaz remain deprived of even the most basic educational services.

Observers fear that even if these projects are completed, they will not change the systemic discrimination against Ahwazi students, whether through the imposition of the Persian language and the exclusion of Arabic from curricula, or through resource distribution that serves Iran’s policies of consolidating its presence while marginalizing the indigenous population.