Iran allows women to attend international football match

Iranian authorities on Thursday allowed women to attend a friendly international football match, seven months after women were last seen in the stands of a stadium in the country.

Hundreds of women supported Team Melli, as the Iranian club is known, against Russia at the Azadi Stadium in Tehran, which ended in a goalless draw.

State television briefly showed the club’s supporters with flags and hats in the national colors in a women-only area, as is customary in an Islamic country where some public events are gender-segregated.

For 40 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has not allowed women to enter stadiums, a taboo was broken in 2019 in an Iran-Cambodia match attended by 3,500 women, under pressure from FIFA – the International Football Federation.

But the covid-19 pandemic ended with the public entering the stadiums and there were no women in the stadiums until 2022.

In January 2022, for the second time in four decades, around 2,000 fans were able to watch the Iran-Iraq match in Tehran, in which the Iranians sealed their qualification for the World Cup in Qatar.

But in March of that year, women were banned from participating in the Iran-Lebanon World Cup qualifier in Qatar after they bought tickets, drawing criticism.

The presence of women this Thursday in the stands of the Azadi Stadium comes after months of protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini after being arrested by the vice police for not wearing the hijab properly.

The Islamic Republic has used force and repression to stop the protests, which have already resulted in nearly 500 deaths, arrests of tens of thousands (of which 22,000 were pardoned) and in which four demonstrators were hanged, one of them on a public road. .