Jabar Dastbaz, who is from Divandarreh and a resident of Sanandaj, capital of the Iranian province of Kurdistan, is one of the well-known civil activists and active journalists in Kurdistan who has published field reports about the kolbars (cross-border workers who are employed to carry goods on their backs across the borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey legally or illegally), landmine victims, and women victims of family violence and has been summoned and threatened with many times by the security agencies.

According to Kurdish human rights organization, Jabar Dastbaz was severely beaten and arrested in Sanandaj on September 22, 2022, during protests over the death of Mahsa Amini in the hands of Morality Police. There is yet no information about his situation and whereabouts.

In 2012, when Dastbaz was a student activist, he was banned from studying for a master’s degree in political science at Azad University in the Kurdish city of Saghez even though had succeeded in passing the entrance exam because his name was “asterisked”, meaning that he was considered politically unacceptable by security agencies of the Islamic Republic.