TWO separate civil wars are in full swing in Iran, says the “News of the World” special correspondent, Richard Wyndham, cabling from Khaniqin on the Frontier of Iraq, reports Reuter from London. “Travelling down from a main road from Teheran, I found two quite separate civil wars going on. In the Province of Hamadan, ‘Democrats’ army was blasting Loyalist peasants out of their mud villages with Russian supplied mortars and shooting them up with heavy and light machine-guns captured when Tabriz surrendered in December.”

They had already reached a point 20 miles in a direct line from the main road and 100 miles south of the accepted frontier of ‘autonomous province’ of Azerbaijan.

This dispatch which appears on Sunday’s [April 21] front-page of the paper says: “This week the Teheran Government, not satisfied with suppressing Iranian newspapers with contrary views, imposed censorship on outgoing cables of the Foreign Press. I am able to tell this story only by crossing the frontier into Iraq.”

He continued: “Peasants armed with old-fashioned rifles by their land-lords were ineffectually fighting to return to work on land, this being a critical season for sowing crops.

In spite of poor equipment they captured 17 prisoners….

Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2021