Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/DUBAI: Protesters in Iran marched through the streets of different cities overnight in the most widespread demonstration in weeks amid the months-long unrest that gripped the Mideastern country, online videos showed on Friday.
The demonstrations, marking 40 days since Iran executed two men on charges related to the protests, show the continuing anger in Iran. The Iranian protests, which began over the Sept 16 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after her arrested by the Iran morality police, have since morphed into one of the biggest challenges to Iran’s theocracy since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Videos showed demonstrations in Tehran, and in the different cities of Arak, Isfahan, Izeh in Khuzestan province, and Karaj, group Human Rights Activists in Iran said. The Associated Press couldn’t immediately verify the videos, many of which had been blurred or showed grainy nighttime scenes.
Iran’s western Kurdish cities
In Iran’s western Kurdish regions, online protest videos shared by the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights showed burning roadblocks in Sanandaj, which has seen repeated demonstrations since Amini’s death.
Hengaw shared a video that included digitally altered voices shouting: “Death to the Dictator!” That call has been heard in the demonstrations, targeting Iran’s 83-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Other videos purportedly shot in Iran had similar chants, as well as scenes of heavily protected riot police in the street
Iranian state media didn’t immediately acknowledge the demonstrations.
Since they began, at least 529 citizens have been killed in demonstrations, according to Human Rights Activists in Tehran. Over 19,700 have been detained by authorities amid the violent crackdown trying to suppress the dissent. Iran for months hasn’t offered any overall casualty figures, though the government seemed to acknowledge making “tens of thousands” arrests earlier this month.
The demonstrations appeared to slow in recent weeks, in part due to the crackdown and executions through protest cries that would still be heard at night in many cities.
Forty-day commemorations for the dead are common in Iran and the Middle East. But they can turn into cyclical confrontations between the increasingly disillusioned security forces that turn to greater violence to suppress them, as they had in chaos leading up to Iran’s 1979 revolution.
Iran’s hard-line government alleged without offering evidence that the demonstrations were a foreign plot rather than homegrown anger.
Iran’s rial currency collapsed to new lows against the United States (US) dollar. The country continues to enrich uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels after the collapse of its atomic deal with global powers and has enough of a stockpile to build “many” atomic bombs if it chooses. Tehran weapons Russia with the bomb-carrying drones Moscow has been using in the war in Ukraine.
