UN says situation ‘critical’ as death toll rises to 416
Group expresses alarm that ‘reports of extreme state brutality continue out of Kurdistan alongside nationwide internet disruptions and shutdown’
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Tuesday that the situation in Iran was “critical,” describing a hardening of the authorities’ response to protests that have resulted in more than 300 deaths in the past two months.
“The rising number of deaths from protests in Iran, including those of two children at the weekend, and the hardening of the response by security forces, underline the critical situation in the country,” said a spokesperson for UN human rights chief Volker Turk at a Geneva news briefing.
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said that more than 300 people had been killed so far, including more than 40 children. These deaths occurred across the country, with deaths reported in 25 of 31 provinces.
In the same briefing, OHCHR spokesperson Jeremy Laurence also voiced concern about the situation in mainly Kurdish cities where it has reports of more than 40 people killed by security forces over the past week.
Separately, a rights group said on Tuesday, Iranian security forces have killed 72 people, including 56 in Kurdish-populated areas, in the past week alone in their crackdown on the protests.
Norway-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR) said in its latest toll on the violence inside Iran that 416 people had been killed by security forces nationwide, including 51 children and 21 women.
The Norway-based Hengaw rights group, which focuses on Iran’s Kurdish areas, has accused Iranian security forces of directly firing on protesters with machine guns and shelling residential areas.
The group said it had confirmed the killing of 42 Kurdish citizens of Iran in nine cities over the last week, almost all killed by direct fire.
Monitor Netblocks said on Tuesday that the mobile internet had now been restored ater a “3.5 hour cellular data blackout” which also coincided with the refusal of Iran’s football team to sing the national anthem in the World Cup.
Freedom of expression group Article 19 expressed alarm that “reports of extreme state brutality continue out of Kurdistan alongside nationwide internet disruptions and shutdown.” Hengaw meanwhile posted a video of protesters trying to remove birdshot pellets from the body of a protester with a knife, saying people were afraid to go to hospital for fear of being arrested.
The New York-based centre for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) on Monday urged the international community to act to prevent a massacre in the area.
“Unless Islamic republic authorities decide the costs of massacring civilians to crush the ongoing protests in Iran are too high, they will continue to slaughter children, women and men with impunity in a desperate atempt to reassert control,” said CHRI director Hadi Ghaemi.
According to figures collated by IHR, over half of those killed by the Iranian security forces in the crackdown have died in provinces populated by ethnic minorities.
It said 126 people had been killed in the southeastern province of Sistan-baluchistan, largely populated by the Sunni Baluch minority, where the protests had a separate spark but fed into the nationwide anger.
Meanwhile 48 people have been killed in Kurdistan, 45 in West Azerbaijan and 23 in Kermanshah regions with a strong Kurdish presence, it said.
“Systematic killing of civilian protesters belonging to the Kurdish and Baluch minorities amounts to crimes against humanity,” said IHR director Mahmood Amiry Moghaddam.
Iran on Tuesday launched a new round of strikes at Iranian Kurdish dissident groups based in Iraq’s northern, semi-autonomous Kurdish region, a spokesman said.
Iranian opposition groups were targeted in two locations, in the areas of Perdi and Degala, according to a tweet by the local government’s spokesman, Lawk Ghafuri.
Earlier on Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al Sudani met Iraqi Kurdish region’s president, Nechirvan Barzani. They discussed “the security issue in the Iraqi border areas,” according to a statement from Sudani’s office.
The two “emphasised cooperation to protect Iraq’s sovereignty, reject repeated violations, and work to prevent the use of Iraqi territory for atacking any neighboring country,” it said.