When Control Reaches the Woman’s Womb
This article examines a grave question emerging from Ahwazi testimonies concerning women’s reproductive health: what happens when control extends beyond land and resources into the conditions that shape whether a people can continue into the future? Distinguishing testimony from proof and legal allegation from established fact, it develops the concept of the “occupation of possibilities” and calls for independent investigation into women’s and children’s health, medical records, resource distribution, and any patterns that may affect the future of the Ahwazi Arab people.
Ahwaz and the Most Dangerous Question: Who Owns the Conditions for the Continuation of the Human Being?
There is an occupation that takes the land.
An occupation that plunders wealth.
An occupation that changes the name.
But what do we call control when it reaches the body of the woman, and her ability to carry life again?
Here, the question is no longer about the land alone.
It becomes a question about the continuation of the human being himself.
We are not writing about women we have heard about from a distance.
We are writing about our own society; about living Ahwazi testimonies whose owners say that women entered the hospital to give birth, in some cases from the first childbirth, and later discovered that their ability to have children had been touched by procedures they did not know about and did not choose with free and informed consent.
According to those who gave these testimonies, they were not born today; some go back nearly fifteen years.
If this happened to one woman, it is a grave violation of her sovereignty over her body.
But if it has been repeated independently across several women, places, and times, then the question changes:
Are we facing separate incidents, or are we facing a pattern?
Testimony alone is not a final judgment.
But serious testimony creates a duty to investigate.
And its repetition makes burying the question itself something that requires explanation.
When the First Birth Becomes a Question About the Future
A woman enters the delivery room thinking about her child.
She does not enter it surrendering her right to be a mother again.
She does not hand the future of her body to the state.
And the hospital does not become the owner of her fertility because it owns her medical file.
A woman’s body belongs to her.
Any permanent intervention in her ability to have children without her free and informed consent does not touch only an organ in her body.
It takes from her a decision that would have shaped part of her future.
For the human being does not live in his body only today.
Through it, he also carries some of tomorrow’s possibilities.
From here, the first law appears:
The body is the last frontier of personal sovereignty; when power extends to the decision that determines the possibility of life continuing through it, it does not intervene only in the human being’s present, but in the future that could have been born from him.
Here, the issue becomes larger than a medical error.
An error may happen once.
But a pattern must be investigated as a pattern.
The Word We Must Not Fear
Here we reach the word that must not be used lightly, and must not be escaped from if the evidence leads to it:
Genocide.
International law does not confine genocide to the killing of members of a group.
Among the acts included in its definition, when linked to the special intent required by law to destroy a protected group in whole or in part, is imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
Therefore, if it is established that women of the Ahwazi Arab people were deliberately subjected to measures preventing childbirth without their consent, and that targeting them was connected to their group belonging and to an intent to prevent births within the group, then we would not be facing “poor healthcare.”
Nor would we be facing “medical overreach.”
Nor merely a violation of women’s rights.
We would be facing an act that enters the core legal definition of the crime of genocide.
This is not a word we use to raise the temperature of the text.
It is a legal threshold to which the evidence must either lead, or from which the evidence must exclude us.
That is why we do not announce the conclusion before proving its elements.
But we will also not accept fear of the word becoming a means to bury the question.
If there is no pattern, let the data show that.
If the procedures were not deliberate, let the investigation reveal that.
But to close the road to proof, and then use the absence of evidence available to the victim as evidence of innocence, is not an investigation.
The Crime Does Not Begin in the Hospital
The Ahwazi woman does not arrive at the delivery room separated from the land upon which she has lived.
Her body carries the water she drank.
The air she breathed.
The environment in which she lived.
The care that reached her, or from which she was deprived.
That is why the greatest mistake is to look at land, water, environment, health, migration, and fertility as separate files.
The human being is the place where they all meet.
The body is the map upon which, in the end, the results of decisions that do not appear on the political map become visible.
Here, we must distinguish between an assault on the human being who exists, and an assault on the conditions that make the human being possible.
The first strikes the life that has already come into being.
The second narrows the paths through which life can continue:
Water.
Health.
Environment.
Land.
Care.
The ability to remain.
And the ability to reach the next generation.
From here, we reach the concept that gathers the entire issue:
The Occupation of Possibilities
The known occupation controls place.
But the occupation of possibilities reshapes what the human being can do inside that place.
The possibility of staying.
The possibility of finding safe water.
The possibility of being treated.
The possibility that his child will live.
The possibility that a woman may found her family as she chooses.
And the possibility that a people may reach the next generation while preserving its land, name, and memory.
This does not mean that every illness, death, or migration is the result of one single plan.
But science imposes another question:
What happens when persistent disruptions accumulate upon the same group, on the same land, touching the conditions of survival one after another?
At that point, it is not enough to count the facts.
We must search for the relationships among them.
Control does not always need a single order issued from a single room.
It may operate through accumulated decisions that make some futures easier, some harder, and some almost impossible.
From here, the law appears:
Occupation does not reach its furthest limit when it controls the land of a people, but when it becomes able to reshape the field of the possible before the owners of that land.
441 Children Died
Here, we do not possess testimonies only.
We also have a published medical record that deserves to be read.
An academic study that relied on medical records at Abu Zar Hospital in Ahwaz documented 441 neonatal deaths during 2020 and 2021 alone: 224 deaths in 2020 and 217 in 2021.
Among the recorded causes were 153 cases of respiratory failure, 75 cases of sepsis, 66 cases of congenital heart anomalies, and 38 cases of birth asphyxia.
Let us stop before the number:
Four hundred and forty-one newborn children died in one hospital over two years.
This study does not prove sterilization.
It does not, on its own, prove the existence of a policy of genocide.
And we must not make it say what it did not say.
But it does prove that the health of children and newborns in Ahwaz is not an imagined question, and that there is a published medical base that requires research into care, deaths, asphyxia, respiratory failure, sepsis, speed of access to treatment, and the ability of health institutions to respond.
Here the question becomes:
What happened after 2021?
What will the data from the following years say?
Are the more recent testimonies concerning the health of women and children isolated facts, or will the data reveal an extension of older points of weakness?
The number is not a judgment on intent. But it is a warning that the world has no right to ignore.
A Land That Produces Wealth… While Its Owner Asks About the Conditions of Life
Ahwaz is not a poor land.
That makes the contradiction even harsher.
Wealth comes out.
But the real question is not how much the land produces.
The question is:
How much of what it produces is transformed into the ability of its owner to live?
How many hospitals?
How many doctors?
How much safe care for the mother?
How many children can be saved?
How much safe water?
And how much of an environment in which the human being can live without his body paying its price?
For the budget is a decision.
Allocation is a decision.
And health infrastructure is the result of accumulated decisions.
Therefore:
Wealth that leaves the land of the human being and does not return to him as an ability to live reveals, before it reveals the scale of wealth, the scale of the distance between the owner of the land and the owner of the decision.
The distribution of health is not merely the distribution of devices.
It is the distribution of the possibilities of illness and recovery, and in some cases, the possibilities of life and death.
Whoever Monopolizes the Evidence Has No Right to Turn That Monopoly Into Innocence
The question will be asked:
Where is the document?
It is a legitimate question.
But another question must stand beside it:
Who owns the document?
What happens when the record is inside the institution around which suspicion revolves?
When the data, archives, and files are under the authority of the very party whose practices must be investigated?
The absence of the document from the victim’s hand does not prove the crime.
But it does not prove innocence either.
That is why the answer is not speculation, but the convergence of evidence:
Independent testimonies.
Medical records where access is possible.
Dates.
Hospitals.
Types of procedures.
Repeated institutions.
Data on the health of women and children.
And the distribution of services and resources.
Then all of this must be placed beside one another, not so that we may manufacture the conclusion we want, but so that we may know the conclusion imposed by the evidence.
Here is the law:
Whoever monopolizes the evidence has no right to turn that monopoly into innocence.
And when the archive is closed before the owners of the experience, preserving testimony, record, place, time, and trace becomes part of recovering their right to know what happened to them.
Hear Us First… Then Investigate to the End
We are the Ahwazi Arab people.
We are the owners of the land we are speaking about.
The women and children we speak of are from our society.
That is why we do not accept that knowledge of Ahwaz should begin by excluding the Ahwazi.
But being the owners of the experience does not mean that we ask to be believed without examination.
We say something stronger:
Hear us first. Then investigate to the end.
Ask the women.
Examine the files.
Compare the cases.
Reveal the data.
And enter the place where the testimony occurred, instead of demanding that the woman who testified bring to you what the institution monopolizes.
We are not afraid of the truth.
We want it whole.
Even if it brings down some of what we believe, and even if it reveals something more dangerous than what we know.
Because a cause that wants to live beyond its owners cannot be afraid of truth.
When Memory Becomes Evidence
A crime that is not documented may remain a wound inside one family.
But when testimonies are preserved, facts compared, and records examined, pain begins to turn into knowledge.
A preserved testimony may become evidence.
Converging evidence may reveal a pattern.
And a proven pattern opens the door to accountability.
In this way, the human being no longer remains only the bearer of what happened to him.
He becomes capable of knowing how it happened, where it was repeated, and what links one incident to another.
Here, memory moves from being a place that preserves tragedy into a capacity that prevents tragedy from hiding.
Who Owns Tomorrow?
Ahwaz is not an oil well.
It is not a river.
It is not a space on a map.
Ahwaz is the human being.
And the human being is not only his existence today.
He is also the field of the possible through which he can reach tomorrow.
That is why sovereignty is not merely that a people owns land.
Sovereignty is that the people owns the conditions that allow it to continue upon its land as itself.
That the woman is the owner of her body.
That the child finds the conditions of life.
That the water and wealth of the land become life for its people.
That the human being can remain without his remaining upon his homeland becoming a permanent test of his body’s ability to endure.
And that language, memory, and name reach a generation not yet born.
Here we understand why the question that began with land eventually reaches the womb.
Because when control reaches the ability to have children, it does not touch only a woman in her present.
It touches a future that could have existed.
If an investigation establishes the existence of deliberate measures intended to prevent births, targeting women of the Ahwazi Arab people because of their group belonging and with the special intent required by law, then the possible legal name must not be escaped from:
Genocide.
We do not use this word because we want it to be true.
We use its standard in order to know whether the evidence leads to it.
But there is a truth broader than the legal term itself:
The human being is not erased only when he is killed.
He can also be attacked in the water he needs.
In the environment he inhabits.
In the health that protects him.
In the land upon which he remains.
And in the body that carries his future.
Here, the deeper battle appears:
Not only that the human being remains alive.
But that he remains able to produce his tomorrow by himself.
The owner of the decision over his body.
The owner of the right to his land.
The owner of the wealth upon which his life stands.
The owner of the memory that determines who he is.
The owner of the future that will come after him.
The Ahwazi Arab people.
This is the truth that must remain after the article ends:
Killing a human being cuts off a life that already exists.
But targeting the conditions for the continuation of the human being extends the hand of control toward the life that has not yet come.
When power reaches this point, the issue is no longer about the land alone.
Nor about the hospital alone.
Nor about water alone.
Nor even about the womb alone.
It becomes about the question that stands behind them all:
Who has the right to determine the future of the human being?
Our answer needs no permission:
The owner of the body is the owner of his body.
The owner of the land is the owner of his land.
The owner of memory is the owner of his narrative.
And the people is the owner of its right to reach the future.
Because the most dangerous occupation is not only the one that decides where the human being lives, but the one that begins to determine the cost of his remaining and the limits of his choices, then extends its hand into the field of the possible itself: into the paths through which the human being can carry his existence into the future.
— Hamid Shayea Al-Ahwazi —
24.8.2026
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