Rahim Kalij

Rahim Kalij (Persian: رحیم کلیج; also written Kelij), son of Rajab Ali and Anbia, was born on 18 Bahman 1373 (7 February 1995) in Qaemshahr, Mazandaran Province. He was unmarried and the only son of his family. He held an associate degree in computer software engineering from Mohammad Baqer University in Sari and owned a mobile phone repair shop in Qaemshahr. In his notebook he wrote that one day he would be the best LCD repairman in the city. He loved nature and animals, especially dogs, and had raised many since childhood; his last dog was named Sita. Until about a year before his death he trained in bodybuilding.

A few weeks before he was killed, he posted on Instagram a photo of himself between two wings painted on a wall, with the caption "I have become a phoenix rising from the bright ashes of a burned generation," and he came to be remembered as the "Phoenix of Iran." When the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising reached Mazandaran, his family tried to keep him from the protests, but he told his mother: "If people like me don't go, who will stand up against all this injustice?"

On Wednesday 30 Shahrivar 1401 (21 September 2022) he left his shop in central Qaemshahr to join the protests and, according to people around him, stood in the front line in a white shirt. That night, between about 9 and 11 p.m., he was shot near Juybar Street, close to Police Station No. 11 and the post office. According to the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, security and plainclothes forces hit him at close range with two live rounds in his sides and thigh and beat him on the head, hands and legs; eyewitnesses said his left shoulder was broken. Radio Zamaneh noted that Mohsen (Shaban) Mohammadi Kouchaksaraei was shot dead at almost the same spot. Protesters carried him, bleeding heavily, to Valiasr Hospital, where there was no stretcher; nurses laid him on the floor and resuscitated him before he was taken to the operating room. Around 11 p.m. a man answered his phone and told the family he had been shot; at the hospital, security forces kept them from seeing him and told them he had only been shot in the hand. About two hours later staff asked them for a photograph to identify him, and his body was moved to the morgue.

Without the family's consent, his body was taken to the forensic medicine office in Sari for an autopsy. His death certificate gave the cause as "trauma from hard or sharp objects," while his burial permit cited hemorrhagic shock and perforation of the lungs and pleura by a high-velocity projectile. The body was returned on the afternoon of 31 Shahrivar after the family were made to give pledges of silence and a quiet funeral. He was buried at the Abolhasan Khoshroo cemetery in Sarukola, his mother's home village; although the family were not allowed to announce the time, a large crowd attended under heavy security. Officials later proposed a "condolence" visit and, through acquaintances, offered blood money if he were registered as a state "martyr"; his parents refused. His sister, who ran a memorial page for him, was repeatedly summoned and threatened with arrest.

The Iran Human Rights Society's list of 662 (no. 158) and its consolidated list (age 30), the NCRI's Persian list (no. 297, 30 Mehr) and English list (no. 308, 22 October 2022), Persian Wikipedia's table of the 1401 dead (no. 66, age 27), and English and German Wikipedia (age 25) also record him; Abolfazl Bahou (Bao), 16, was killed in Qaemshahr on the same day.