Ahwaz Human Rights Organization(AHRO) is an international human rights advocacy NGO. Our goal is to support and to advocate for the Ahwazi Arabs in the Southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan (also called Al-Ahwaz or Arabistan). Ahwazi Arabs, a national and linguistic minority in Iran, are an oppressed and persecuted ethnic groups.

AHRO was registered in the Virginia State in the United States in 1998 to defend the national, religious, linguistic and gender minorities with the focus on the human rights violation of the Ahwazi Arabs in Iran. AHRO was the first human rights organization that was registered to defend the rights of the Ahwazi Arabs. The founders of AHRO were Karim and Angela Maryam Abdian and the Hamidi brothers including Abed, Ahmad and Mohammad Hamidi.

Residing mainly in the south-west of Iran, the Ahwazi Arabs are one of the Middle East’s most disadvantaged and persecuted ethnic groups. The overwhelming majority of the Ahwazi Arabs live in Iran’s Khuzestan province (accounting for some 67% of the province’s population), which occupies a geo strategically crucial position. Not only is it the gateway between the Arab world and Asia, but it also accounts for up to 90% of Iran’s oil resources. This ‘accident of natural geography’, far from being to the benefit of the local population, though, has been the source of much hardship. Whilst Khuzestan’s oil forms the backbone of the Iranian economy, its people have been viewed, at best, as an inconvenience, or, at worst, a threat, by the Iranian government. In order to eradicate their threat to the Iranian establishment, Ahwazi Arabs are subjected to a mixture of Persianisation, forced migration, violent political repression and economic exclusion.