South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Iran anti-regime protests spread to dozens of cities
Kurdish town taken over as authorities escalate crackdown
The largest anti-government protests in Iran since 2009 gathered strength Saturday, spreading to as many as 80 cities, even as authorities escalated a crackdown that has reportedly killed dozens of people and brought the arrests of prominent activists and journalists, according to rights groups and media reports.
Internet access — especially on cellphone apps — continued to be disrupted or blocked, affecting Iranians’ ability to communicate with one another and the outside world.
News from Iran has trickled out with many hours of delay.
While the 2009 protests erupted over an election widely condemned as fraudulent, the current demonstrations seemed focused on the Iranian security forces, with reports of beatings of security officers and firebombings of the local headquarters of the morality police.
In many cities, including Tehran, the capital, security forces responded by opening fire on crowds.
Iranian state media said Friday that at least 35 people had been killed in the unrest, but human rights groups said Saturday that the number is likely to be much higher.
The videos posted online and the scale of the response from the authorities are difficult to independently verify, but video and photographs sent by witnesses known to The New York Times were broadly in line with the images being posted widely online.
Deep resentments and anger have been building for months, analysts say, particularly among young Iranians, in response to a crackdown ordered by the country’s hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, that has targeted women.
That comes on top of a litany of complaints over the years over corruption, mismanagement of the economy, inept handling of COVID-19 and widespread political repression. The problems have persisted under Raisi, who came to power in an election in which any potential contenders were eliminated before the vote, particularly those from the reformist faction.
Iran’s powerful supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, engineered the ascent of Raisi, eliminating an important outlet for the frustrations of Iran’s younger generation.
Those frustrations are now boiling over.
The small Kurdish city of Oshnavieh, in West Azerbaijan province, reportedly fell to protesters when local security forces retreated after days of intense fighting, the editor of a Kurdish news site said.
“Since last night, Oshnavieh has been governed by the people,” a Kurdish official, Hussein Yazdanpana, said, adding that women had thrown off their mandatory headscarves in celebration.
“The liberation has far-reaching consequences for other cities,” he said, describing the town as a gateway to other Kurdish areas of Iran.
Ammar Golie, an Iranian Kurd based in Germany who edits the news site NNS Roj, has been in regular contact with residents of Oshnavieh, which has a population of 40,000 ethnic Kurds. He said the residents had set up roadblocks at the gateway to the city’s only two roads.
Golie said local contacts had told him that an army battalion and a unit of the Revolutionary Guard from the nearest city, Oroumiyeh, had been deployed to crush the protests and take Oshnavieh back.
“We are expecting blood to be spilled,” Golie said. “It’s an extremely tense situation.”
The nationwide uprising was ignited by the death of a
22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, in the custody of the morality police Sept. 16.
Amini was arrested on accusations of violating the hijab mandate.
For seven days and nights, Iranians have taken to the streets, facing bullets, tear gas, beatings and arrests to send a message to the clerics who have led the nation for
43 years. They have chanted for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule, according to witnesses and videos shared on social media.
Raisi, upon returning to Iran from New York, where he addressed the U.N. General Assembly, warned Friday in a speech at Tehran’s airport that the government would “not allow, under any circumstances, for the security of the country and public to be jeopardized.”
The Ministry of Intelligence sent a text message to all cellphone users warning that anyone participating in the demonstrations, which it said were organized by Iran’s enemies, would be punished according to Shariah law.
Copies of the texts were shared with the Times and also posted on social media.