Security forces intensify crackdown on Iran's Kurdish area, four killed - rights group
DUBAI, (Reuters) - Iran's clerical rulers have stepped up suppression of persistent anti-government protests in the country's Kurdish region, deploying troops and killing at least four demonstrators on Sunday, social media posts and rights groups said.
Nationwide protests, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September in the custody of morality police, have been at their most intense in the areas where the majority of Iran's 10 million Kurds live.
Videos on social media, unverifiable by Reuters, showed a convoy of military vehicles with heavily armed troops, purportedly in the western city of Mahabad. The sounds of heavy weaponry could be heard in several other videos.
The Norway-based human rights group Hengaw said military helicopters carried members of the widely feared Revolutionary Guards to quell the protests in the Sunni-dominated Kurdish city of Mahabad.
Prominent Sunni cleric Molavi Abdolhamid, a powerful dissenting voice in the Shi'ite-ruled Islamic Republic, called on security forces to refrain from shooting at people in Mahabad.
"Disturbing news is emerging from the Kurdish areas, especially from Mahabad ... pressure and crackdown will lead to further dissatisfaction. Officers should refrain from shooting at people," Abdolhamid tweeted.
Hengaw said at least four protesters were killed in the Kurdish area. The widely-followed activist account 1500Tasvir said a 16-year-old student and a school teacher were killed in the Kurdish city of Javanrud. The details could not be independently confirmed.
Confirming the unrest in Kurdish region, Iran's state media said calm had been restored in the area, but activists and Hengaw said on Twitter that "the resistance" continued in several Kurdish cities.