Iran: Living rough on the streets of Tehran

NCRI - At least 20,000 homeless Iranians are living in cardboard boxes on the streets of Tehran, a senior official of the regime has acknowledged, even as the real number of homeless people in the Iranian capital is believed to be several times the official figure. Click here to see a related photo report.

“Ten percent of those who sleep in cardboard boxes suffer from contagious illnesses and another 10 percent are affected by aids,” the official state news agency IRNA quoted the spokesperson of the Social Services Organization of the Tehran Municipality as saying on Monday. Farzad Hoshyar Parsian added that these problems have “complicated” the situation in the Iranian capital.

One of the vice presidents in the cabinet of Hassan Rouhani said last month that women make up a third of homeless people living on the streets in Iran.

"Our research indicates that there are 15,000 people sleeping in cardboard boxes in the country, of who 5,000 are women," Shahindokht Mollavardi said.

The 20,000 figure provided by the Tehran Municipality of the number of homeless people in Tehran alone dwarfs the national figures provided by Mollavardi.

The true number of Iranians living on the streets is substantially higher than official records.

"In order to get a better understanding of the scope of the tragedy, one has to keep in mind that we are talking about a nation that is sitting on an ocean of oil. Yet as a result of the mullahs' policies Iranian people from all strata are facing destitution, poverty and misery. That explains why Iranian society is in such an explosive stage and why the mullahs are so paranoid," said Shahin Gobadi, spokesperson for the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, PMOI (Mujahedin-e Khalq, MEK).

Last year, a deputy director of the Tehran municipality’s Welfare Organization announced that the average age of homeless women in Iran’s capital is 32.

The head of the Social Committee in Tehran’s city council, Fatemeh Daneshvar, said in June that the number of pregnant women and children living on the streets in the city is increasing.

Homeless women and street children live in dire conditions where they survive in abandoned buildings, containers, automobiles, parks, or even on the street itself.

Street children experience many social and psychological traumas on the streets on a daily basis.

Determining the numbers of street children in Iran is virtually impossible. In a 2005 report by the U.S. State Department, by the Iranian government’s own admission, 60,000 street children were accounted for in Iran.

Numerous child rights organizations suspect that the number is substantially higher, citing figures of 200,000 or more. Of this number, about 55 percent are the children of Afghan refugees.

The Iranian regime's supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his family have amassed a huge fortune, amounting to billions of dollars, even as the people of Iran including a majority of the working class have been living in poverty and destitution.

Much of Khamenei's personal wealth is in the hands of his sons and daughters, large amounts of which are held in banks in the United Kingdom, Syria and Venezuela. Read the full report here.