Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East by Jared Cohen Page B

came to the surface. With the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the regime lost its charismatic leader and architect of the Islamic Republic, and his original successor, Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, was a dissenter against the continuation of the war. By this time, Iran’s economy was in shambles, its infrastructure destroyed, and the regime’s efforts to export its Islamic Revolution had been rebuffed at every attempt. What was left was a population that was traumatized by a war that had been raging for nearly decade, a nation suffering under a dire economy, and a population growing tired of waiting for the “better life” promised by the regime since 1979.
    Because of the mass casualties of war and high birth rates, the next generation of Iranian youth emerged as the new majority. With the Iranian voting age set at fifteen, the mid-1990s saw an entirely new majority of young voters who began to express their frustrations with the regime. Unlike their parents, this generation had not lived through the shah’s government. They did not remember the notorious secret police known as the SAVAK; they didn’t remember all of the corruption. What they did know was that the regime they had been born under was failing to meet their needs and seemed unable to provide them with the life they deserved.
    And in 1997 they voted for change and the reformist president Mohammad Khatami won an unexpected yet overwhelming victory. Since the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, the country had not seen any leader like Khatami actually win such a high elected office. Throughout the 1980s Iran’s presidents had all been hard-line conservatives. In 1989, Iran saw the ascension of pragmatist president Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, but his promises for economic change and progress proved ineffective and instead revealed more about his corrupt tendencies than any patriotic commitment. Instead of presiding over a recovering economy, Rafsanjani, who was already extremely wealthy when he took office, moved onto the Forbes 400, the list of the wealthiest people in the world.
    President Khatami, however, was of a different breed. He had come to the presidency promising reform, relaxation of restrictions on civil liberties, and economic change. He did not have his predecessor’s history of corruption. He owed his surprise victory over the conservative candidates to the widespread participation of the Iranian youth in the 1997 presidential election. Young Iranians had taken his victory as a green light to embrace what the new president pledged to be new freedoms. In the first years of his presidency, students protested over everything from clothes to censorship. Initially, they gained small victories as Iran became more relaxed than it had been since the days of the shah. For the first few years of Khatami’s presidency, it seemed that the voices of youth were louder than ever. This hope was short-lived.
    In July 1999, more than twenty-five thousand students staged a riot at the University of Tehran after conservative hard-liners shut down a popular reformist newspaper. The response was harsh. Members of Tehran’s police force stormed into the student dormitories and fired on crowds of Iranian students who were chanting, “Khamanei must quit,” and “Ansar-e Hezbollah commits crimes and the leaders back them.” In fact, the worst phase of the crackdown did not come from the police; it came from Ansar-e Hezbollah, the regime’s quasi-official paramilitary organization tasked with punishing those who violate or disrespect the fundamental principles of Islam.
    Within hours, the riots had spread to eight major cities outside of Tehran. In what is cited by Iranians as their version of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, Ansar-e Hezbollah entered the university, where they undertook a violent suppression of the riots. Numerous students were injured, hundreds were arrested, and one student was even killed. The most