To President Donald J. Trump President of the United States of America

A letter to U.S. President Donald J. Trump placing the question of Ahwaz within a broader approach that goes beyond managing crises linked to the Iranian state and addresses their political and historical roots. The letter argues that any serious long-term approach to the region must take the Ahwazi Arab people and their future into account and must not shape the future of Ahwaz without their freely expressed will.

— Hamid Shayea Al-Ahwazi —

9/25/2026

To President Donald J. Trump President of the United States of America

PRESIDENTIAL CORRESPONDENCE · UNITED STATES · AHWAZ · APPROVED

AHU-COR-PRES-2026-001

25 September 2026

Subject: Ahwaz — A People, a Land, and a Future That Must Be Part of Any Fundamental Approach to the Iran Problem

Mr. President,

I write to you as an Ahwazi Arab, carrying with me the cause of a people, a land, and a future. The passage of time has not relegated this cause to the past, because its consequences remain present in human lives and in the fate of the land. What is left unresolved by justice today does not disappear; it returns tomorrow as a question of rights, security, stability, and the future of an entire region.

I am not writing to ask the United States to tell us who we are.

Nor to grant us rights that are already ours.

Nor to redefine us within a state that, in our understanding, imposed its authority upon our land by force.

I write because a people remains on its land 101 years after 1925 and says clearly to the world:

This is our land.

This is our memory.

This is our wealth.

This is what happened to us.

And we are still here.

We are the Ahwazi Arab people.

We do not define ourselves as an Iranian people seeking better conditions within Iran. Nor do we define ourselves merely as an “ethnic minority” within a larger national question.

Ours is a cause of a people, a land, and the right to self-determination.

From our standpoint as the people of the land, the Iranian military occupation of Ahwaz began in 1925, when the existing Arab rule was brought to an end and the authority of the Iranian state was imposed by force. Since then, we have regarded the Iranian presence imposed upon Ahwaz as an unlawful occupation. Its consequences do not become legitimate merely because a century has passed.

Time does not turn force into right.

Duration does not turn occupation into legitimacy.

And a map produced by force does not become, merely by surviving long enough, the final answer to the question of a land and the people to whom it belongs.

A state that possesses an army, institutions, media, school curricula, and diplomatic representation can make its account of history familiar to the world. But familiarity is not the same as truth. Nor can the weakness of a people’s voice be transformed into consent to what was done to them.

That is why I am not placing two competing narratives before you and asking you to choose the one backed by greater power.

I am placing before you something that precedes both:

the people of the land themselves.

What Happened Did Not End in 1925

If this were merely a disagreement over the interpretation of a distant historical event, this letter would not be necessary today.

But the consequences did not remain in the past.

They have extended into the human being, the land, language, natural resources, water, economic life, identity, freedom, and memory.

And there are facts today that can be independently examined without asking anyone to accept my testimony as their sole source.

Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 states that Ahwazi Arabs, together with Azerbaijani Turks, Baluchis, Kurds, and Turkmen, faced widespread and entrenched discrimination. The same report states that the death penalty disproportionately affected marginalized communities and minorities, particularly Ahwazi Arabs, Kurds, Baluchis, and Afghans.

On 21 January 2026, two United Nations Special Rapporteurs issued a joint communication concerning four individuals at imminent risk of execution following proceedings that raised serious concerns regarding torture, arbitrary detention, and violations of fair-trial guarantees. Among them were Ahwazi Arabs held in Ahwaz. The communication records allegations of physical and psychological torture, coerced confessions, solitary confinement, and denial of access to a lawyer of one’s choosing. It also refers to six Ahwazi political prisoners whose cases had previously been raised by UN experts and who were executed in October 2025.

These cases are not the record of Ahwaz.

They are a small window onto a far wider reality.

No single letter can carry the names of every detainee, every death sentence, everything that has happened inside prisons, or the full history of what the Ahwazi people have endured.

But a letter can do one thing:

it can make it harder, from this point forward, to say that the issue was unknown.

Wealth Cannot Be Separated from the People of the Land

Ahwaz is not a humanitarian question located far from the interests that shape international politics.

It lies at the heart of one of the world’s most strategically important energy regions.

U.S. Energy Information Administration data identify Ahwaz, Marun, and Aghajari among the major oil fields of the southwest. These fields lie in the land I refer to throughout this letter as Ahwaz, today under Iranian authority—an authority we regard as an unlawful occupation.

But the issue is not the number of barrels.

The deeper question is the relationship between the human being, the land, and its wealth.

How can a land enter the strategic calculations of the world while the people living upon it remain outside those calculations?

How can oil become a matter of international security while the rights of the people of the land are treated as secondary?

And how can wealth leave the land and enter the architecture of state power while the relationship of the people to that wealth—and their right to determine their political future—remains indefinitely deferred?

Common Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognizes that all peoples have the right of self-determination, that they may freely determine their political status and pursue their economic, social, and cultural development, and that they may freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.

We do not borrow our rights from this text.

International law does not create a people.

It does not create a land.

It does not give a human being his memory.

But it establishes that the principle at stake here—the right of peoples to determine their future and their relationship to their resources—is not foreign to the international legal order.

The Question the World Has Left Incomplete

For decades, the world has approached the Iran problem through the nuclear program, missiles, military forces, sanctions, financing, oil, the Gulf, maritime routes, and regional policy.

All of these are real issues.

But they do not exhaust the question.

The Iran problem, as I place it before you in this letter, is not only about what the Iranian state does beyond the territory it controls.

It also requires examination of the structure on which that power rests internally: its relationship with peoples, land, and resources; where decision-making power is concentrated; and who is made to bear the consequences of those decisions.

That distinction matters.

Addressing the instruments of power does not necessarily address the structure that reproduces them.

A facility can be disabled.

A weapon can be intercepted.

Sanctions can be imposed.

A financial network can be constrained.

A maritime route can be protected.

But if every crisis ends while the fundamental questions of people, land, resources, and the right to determine the future remain outside serious examination, one crisis may end while the source of another remains intact.

This is where I ask that Ahwaz enter American thinking.

Not as a humanitarian footnote in the Iran file.

But as a question that reaches into the definition of the problem itself.

Ahwaz Is Not the Only Case That Reveals a Wider Problem

I write about Ahwaz because it is my cause and because I speak from within its experience—not because the suffering of others matters less.

Human rights organizations also document discrimination and repression affecting Kurds, Baluchis, Azerbaijani Turks, and Turkmen, alongside Ahwazi Arabs.

Each people and each community has the right to define itself, its cause, and its future in its own voice.

I do not speak on their behalf.

Nor do I attribute to them political positions they have not themselves expressed.

But the existence of these questions side by side makes it legitimate to ask something larger about the relationship between the central state and the non-Persian peoples under its authority, rather than reducing the Iran problem to foreign policy and weapons alone.

As for me, I place before you the cause from within which I have the right to speak:

Ahwaz.

Why I Am Addressing the United States Now

Because Iran is not a peripheral issue in American policy today.

On 22 September 2026, you addressed the United Nations General Assembly and spoke directly about Iran as part of the security challenges facing your Administration. And within the same month, official Administration policy statements addressed congressional measures concerning U.S. Armed Forces and hostilities with Iran.

The question of Iran—and of what follows the crises surrounding it—is therefore not an abstract historical question.

And this is where I make a specific appeal:

Any serious American thinking about the future of Iran and the region should not enter through the same door the world has used for decades, only to leave Ahwaz outside once again.

What Do We Want?

We want peace.

But peace does not mean requiring the holder of a right to remain silent so that others may feel secure.

We want security.

But a security order that must continuously suppress the question on which it rests is not sustainable.

We want prosperity for ourselves, for our neighbors, for the region, and for the wider world.

We do not call for any human being to be killed because of nationality, language, or origin.

We do not call for revenge against another people.

We do not claim another people’s land.

We do not claim another people’s wealth.

We are speaking about what we understand to be ours:

our land,

our people,

our wealth,

our memory,

and our people’s right to determine its own future.

In our view, ending the Iranian occupation of Ahwaz is not a project against Persians or against any other people.

It is the ending of a relationship imposed by force between an authority, a land, and a people.

And the freedom we seek must protect civilians and human dignity. It must not reproduce repression under another name.

What I Ask of Your Administration

I ask your Administration not to treat Ahwaz merely as an “ethnic minority” file within the Islamic Republic, but to consider it as a distinct political, legal, human-rights, and strategic question in its own right.

Specifically, I ask your Administration to consider the following:

Examine and adopt an official U.S. position on the Ahwazi claim of occupation and its illegality.

I ask the United States to examine the case for recognizing the Iranian presence imposed on Ahwaz since 1925 as an unlawful occupation, and to support an independent international examination of the historical, political, and legal status of Ahwaz rather than treating the endurance of the status quo as sufficient proof of its legitimacy.

2. Establish a dedicated U.S. policy review on Ahwaz.

Such a review should examine the people, the land, self-determination, natural resources, the human-rights situation, and the security implications of the present order without beginning from the assumption that the existing political reality automatically settled every question that preceded it.

3. Establish a direct and sustained channel of communication with Ahwazis.

Washington’s understanding of Ahwaz should not depend on Tehran or on administrative and political classifications that Ahwazis themselves reject. The United States should hear directly from Ahwazi individuals, institutions, and representatives who can speak for their own experience and political understanding.

4. Engage the Ahwazi Arab people as a people with a distinct political and rights-based case that warrants consideration in its own right.

The question of Ahwaz should not be reduced in advance to an “ethnic minority” framework when Ahwazis themselves reject that framework as an adequate description of their cause.

5. Include the right to self-determination and the rights of the Ahwazi people in their land and resources in any serious American discussion of the region’s future.

The future of Ahwaz should not be determined in Tehran, Washington, or any other capital without the meaningful participation of Ahwazis themselves.

6. Give priority to cases involving executions, torture, arbitrary detention, and proceedings that fail to meet fair-trial guarantees.

The United States should support investigation and accountability wherever credible legal evidence establishes responsibility for serious abuses.

7. Include the protection of Ahwazi civilians in contingency planning for any major political transition or security breakdown.

Any significant change in the region may create risks of reprisals, chaos, a security vacuum, or the transformation of Ahwaz into an arena in which its people pay the price for conflicts decided by others.

8. Ensure that no future settlement with Iranian authorities addresses weapons, the nuclear program, oil, and maritime security while once again leaving the Ahwazi people outside the determination of their own future.

An agreement with the authority in power should not automatically be treated as having settled every historical and political claim concerning Ahwaz.

Mr. President,

There is a way in which the rights of peoples can be lost without any single decision formally abolishing them.

An imposed reality becomes a habit.

The habit becomes an assumption.

And eventually a new generation discovers that what force imposed at the beginning has become something it is no longer even permitted to question.

We refuse to allow the passage of 101 years to become the argument used against us.

A human being does not lose his rights because injustice has outlived him.

A people does not disappear because a stronger power possesses the institutions that speak in its name before the world.

And a land does not lose its memory because its political map has changed.

We exist.

After 101 years, the Ahwazi people remain on their land.

They speak.

They remember.

They write.

And they continue to tell the world that they have not surrendered themselves.

We do not ask the United States to create our existence.

We exist.

We do not ask it to tell us who we are.

We know who we are.

And we do not ask it to grant us our rights.

We do not borrow our rights from anyone.

What we ask is that the United States—and the international community—not treat the continued existence of imposed power as, by itself, proof of legitimacy.

For decades, the world has asked:

What should be done about Iran?

But that question is not enough.

Another question must no longer remain outside the discussion:

What happened to the peoples, lands, and resources on which this power rests—and what becomes possible for peace when the people of the land themselves take part in determining the future?

For us, the answer begins with Ahwaz.

Not because Ahwaz alone deserves freedom.

But because it is the land from which we speak, the cause for which we bear responsibility, and the people whose future must not once again be decided by others while they remain outside the room.

The peace we seek is not a peace built on full prisons and imposed silence.

Nor is it a peace that buys today’s calm at the price of tomorrow’s crisis.

We seek a peace built to endure:

a peace in which every human being owns his voice,

every people has a meaningful part in determining its own future,

and land and wealth are not severed from the people to whom they belong.

That is why I place the cause of Ahwaz before you.

Not as a plea for sympathy.

Not as a footnote in the Iran file.

But as a question the world has postponed for far too long:

If a political reality was created by force and continues through force, is the passage of time alone enough to make it legitimate?

Our answer is clear: