Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
When flames overtook the hillsides above the Zagros and Hassanabad neighborhoods in the Abidar highlands of Iranian Kurdistan, there was no formal emergency response team. No firebreaks. No protective gear. Only a handful of local environmentalists—among them Hamid Moradi—stepped in, as they had so many times before, to fight the blaze.
Moradi was not a firefighter by training. He was a lawyer by profession, the director of the environmental group Shnay Nawzhin Kurdistan, and a fixture in Sanandaj’s civil society. But in Kurdistan, environmental defense often falls to ordinary citizens. When the fire broke out on July 24, Moradi joined several others to contain it. By the time the flames were extinguished, he was dead. So too were two of his companions: Chiako Yousefinejad, a well-known athlete, and Khabat Amini, another longtime environmentalist.
Their deaths marked a familiar tragedy in a region where environmental work is both essential and perilous. The fires that regularly consume Kurdistan’s forests and rangelands are not always natural. Many are suspected to be deliberately set—by developers seeking land, smugglers carving routes, or military actors asserting control. The state’s response is frequently delayed, sometimes absent, and occasionally hostile. Environmentalists work without support and often without recognition. Official media may refer to them as “activists” or “volunteers.” In truth, they are environmental first responders.
Moradi was among the most committed. Born in Divandareh and based in Sanandaj, he spent years building Shnay Nawzhin Kurdistan into a nimble force for grassroots action. The group organized volunteers, educated residents, and responded—again and again—to the fires no one else would fight. They lacked helmets, fire-retardant suits, or reliable equipment. But they showed up.
His legal background gave him clarity about the stakes. Environmental destruction in the Zagros Mountains, he believed, was not only an ecological concern but a human rights issue—bound up with land ownership, political marginalization, and state neglect. He saw no contradiction between defending forests and defending lives.
That conviction ultimately cost him his own. His funeral, held at Behesht-e Mohammadi Cemetery, drew hundreds. So did those of Yousefinejad and Amini. Mourners chanted that martyrs are immortal. But the state does not confer that title on environmentalists. Their families will receive no formal compensation.
Still, in the mountains above Sanandaj, when the next fire comes, people will remember who stood between the flames and the forest.
Header image: Hamid Moradi. Photo courtesy of the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights.
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