How a hotel fire kicked off a campaign against the Iranian government

Pictures of a burning hotel in an Iranian city got a huge reaction - both inside and outside the country

A mysterious sequence of events has become fodder for Iran's opponents abroad.

It started as a very salacious story and the facts are still not fully known. Videos posted online showed a burning hotel in the city of Mahabad, a mid-sized mostly Kurdish city in northwest Iran. The fire was started by protesters angry at the alleged rape and suicide of a woman at the hotel several days before. Rumours swirled around the town. Some blamed Iranian state agents and the hotel manager for her death, and an angry mob descended on the scene where, it was said, the woman had leapt from a balcony after being assaulted.

It might have remained a particularly grim local news event, but then some people outside Iran became interested in the story - and soon a hashtag which translates as 'Iran is on Fire' went big on Twitter. Hundreds of thousands of tweets were sent using the tag but (and here's the twist) most of them weren't in Farsi - Iran's official language - but rather in Arabic. "40 years or more they are killing people … where is the freedom," said one.

"This was very surprising," says BBC Persian's Soroush Pakzad. "We saw a huge wave of pictures with Arabic tweets … for some people it was interesting and exciting seeing the fires in the streets and those protests."

On the first day the hashtag started to trend, more than a third of tweets were sent from users in Saudi Arabia, according to a study by Amir Rashidi, an Iranian researcher in exile. Iran and Saudi Arabia are of course regional rivals grappling for advantage in proxy conflicts across the region - including in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. So were the events in Mahabad being played up outside the country by Iran's opponents?

The Iranian police said 25 people were injured and some were arrested, and there was violence. On the videos online the protests consisted of hundreds of people, and some Kurdish websites said the police used rubber bullets against protesters. But there's no evidence that large-scale disturbances have continued - and the Iranian authorities don't tolerate mass protests against the regime.

Pakzad says that among the pictures of the hotel were images from past protests which claimed to be of Mahabad, and which made the events seem much bigger and more violent than they actually were.

"Some Iranian users were surprised, and some angry and questioned why people were using fake pictures," he says. "Especially at this moment, with the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran over Yemen, they were saying they don't want Arabs getting involved in Iran's politics."

Reporting by India Rakusen

Blog by Mike Wendling

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