DUBAI: Protesters in Iran marched through the streets of several cities overnight in what was the most widespread demonstration in weeks amid months of unrest sweeping the Middle Eastern country, online video showed on Friday.
The demonstrations reflect ongoing anger in the country, 40 days after Iran executed two people on charges related to the demonstrations. The protests, triggered by the September 16 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini following her arrest by the country’s morality police, have become one of the most serious challenges to Iran’s theocracy since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Videos showed demonstrations in Iran’s capital Tehran as well as in the cities of Arak, Isfahan, Izeh and Karaj in Khuzestan province, said the human rights activist group in Iran. The Associated Press could not immediately verify the videos, many of which were blurred or showed night-time scenes.
Videos shared online by the Hengav Organization for Human Rights showed streets burning in Sanandaj, in Iran’s western Kurdish regions, which has seen repeated demonstrations since Amini’s death.
Hengao shared a video in which digitally altered voices were seen shouting: “Death to the dictator!” That call has been heard repeatedly at demonstrations targeting Iran’s 83-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Other videos, reportedly shot in Tehran, featured similar chanting as well as scenes of heavily guarded riot police in the streets.
Iranian state media did not immediately acknowledge the demonstrations.
According to human rights activists in Iran, at least 529 people have been killed in the demonstrations since they began. More than 19,700 others have been detained by authorities amid a violent crackdown trying to quell dissent. For months Iran has not offered a total casualty count, although the government earlier this month appeared to acknowledge “tens of thousands” of arrests.
The pace of the demonstrations had appeared to slow in recent weeks, partly due to hangings and crackdowns, although chants of protest could still be heard at night in some cities.
Forty-day commemorations for the dead are common in Iran and the wider Middle East. But they can also turn into cyclical conflicts between an increasingly disillusioned public and security forces who turn to more violence to quell them, as they did in the chaos leading up to Iran’s 1979 revolution.
Iran’s hardline government has alleged, without offering evidence, that the protests are a foreign conspiracy, rather than domestic anger.
The country’s riyal currency has come down to a new low against the US dollar. Iran has continued to enrich uranium to near weapons-grade levels following the collapse of its nuclear deal with world powers and has enough stockpiles to build “several” nuclear bombs if it so chooses. Meanwhile, Tehran has armed Russia with bomb-carrying drones that Moscow is using in the war in Ukraine.