Three-minute read
In the arid plains of Baluchistan, where the wind carries more dust than hope, a small boy in Karimabad whispers into a phone camera: “I wish I had a birth certificate so I could go to school.” His words, posted on social media on October 3, 2025, slice through the static of official silence. For a moment, the country pauses—and then looks away. The boy’s voice joins thousands more, echoing from Zahedan to Saravan, from Mirjaveh to Zabol, where childhood ends at the gates of bureaucracy.
Children without names
They are not orphans of war; they are orphans of the state. Born in Iran yet denied the single document that proves they exist, thousands of Baluch children are turned away from school doors each morning because they cannot produce a birth certificate. For years, local councils issued provisional attestations so these children could learn to read, write, and dream. But a new directive from the Education Department of Sistan and Baluchestan, imposed at the start of the 2025–2026 school year, slammed those doors shut.
Teachers now whisper apologies instead of lessons. Classrooms that once rang with recitations are silent; the same children who sat at wooden desks last spring now wander dirt alleys, not from joy but from exile. Schools, fearing disciplinary punishment, obey the order. “No ID, no entry,” say the signs. In the clerical regime’s calculus, the absence of a piece of paper outweighs the right to a future.
Stats Tell Why #Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan Province Proved Regime’s Crackdown Uselesshttps://t.co/uwtND5xX7S
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) October 7, 2023
The policy of erasure
According to figures reluctantly cited by regime media, over one million people across Iran lack identity documents, with more than 400,000 of them children—nearly 4,500 in Baluchistan alone. The regime’s own newspaper Etemad admitted on October 4 that “after the twelve-day war,” authorities intensified scrutiny of undocumented families, using “special security conditions” as a pretext. This is not merely red tape; it is policy. The bureaucracy functions as a weapon of exclusion, aimed at silencing an ethnic minority long treated as disposable.
Each denied enrollment is a quiet execution of potential. A girl in Khash who can no longer attend school will marry early, live poor, and die invisible. A boy in Saravan will learn to labor, not to read. Their parents plead for mercy, but letters and petitions vanish in the administrative void. In the words of one teacher: “We were told to teach loyalty, not literacy.”
#Iran News: Regime Expands Security Apparatus in Sistan and Baluchestan Amid Resistance and Repressionhttps://t.co/xRGwChwFD0
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) April 22, 2025
Two Irans, divided by wealth and birth
The cruelty is sharpened by contrast. In Tehran’s wealthy northern districts, Etemad Online reports, elementary school tuition now exceeds 260 million tomans—roughly the cost of a small home in Zahedan. Education has become a luxury for the children of officials, merchants, and military elites, while in the southeast, it has become a forbidden dream. The same regime that boasts of “scientific progress” builds an empire of ignorance on its periphery.
In the regime’s hierarchy, privilege begins with a surname and ends with silence. The children of the powerful are groomed for foreign universities; the children of Baluchestan cannot even write their own names. The geography of injustice has never been so precise.
Irony-a-la #Iran: Impoverished Baluchis Reside Near Resource-Rich Kohnuj #Titanium Minehttps://t.co/MsxNgFgm05
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) April 18, 2024
Beyond neglect—deliberate deprivation
This is not the accident of a broken system; it is the outcome of deliberate design. A state that fears knowledge cannot afford to educate the marginalized. For Tehran’s rulers, every educated Baluch child is a potential question, a future protest, a conscience in motion. Denying them school is an act of preemptive control—a method to ensure that obedience outlives oppression.
Education, in the regime’s logic, must serve power, not liberation. It rewards loyalty in Qom and Tehran but punishes identity in Zahedan and Sarbaz. The denial of documents becomes a denial of belonging; the state says, in effect, You are here, but you do not count.
Baluch #Women Stand Tall Against Regime Brutality in Southeastern Gunich Villagehttps://t.co/Lcu6IELti7
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) July 2, 2025
The cost of silence
Baluchistan’s crisis unfolds far from the cameras, but its moral weight presses on the entire nation. Every classroom closed to a child is another wound on Iran’s conscience. The regime claims to defend the oppressed abroad while manufacturing its own stateless generation at home. The tragedy of these children exposes a government at war with its own people—one that sees enlightenment as a threat and poverty as a tool of rule.
The boy from Karimabad still waits. He has no papers, but he has words. His wish—to study, to belong, to matter—remains the most subversive demand in today’s Iran. The wind will carry his voice across the desert, past the barbed bureaucracies and empty promises, until someone listens.
Until the day every Iranian child can hold a book instead of proof of obedience, the country itself will remain unregistered in the ledger of justice.