Protests swept across at least 19 cities in Iran on Thursday overnight sparked by the death of a 22-year-old woman detained last month by the country’s morality police, even as security forces targeted demonstrators in the streets, activists said.
Since the country’s 2009 Green Movement, the protests against Mahsa Amini’s passing have grown to be one of the biggest challenges to theocracy in Iran.
Oil workers, high school students, and women marching without the required headscarf, or hijab, have all participated in demonstrations.
According to witnesses and videos, riot police and plainclothes officers were widely deployed around Tehran and other cities in response to calls for protests that started at midday on Wednesday (Iran time). Additionally, witnesses reported issues with their mobile internet services.
NetBlocks, an advocacy group, said that Iran’s internet traffic had dropped to some 25% compared to the peak, even during a working day in which students were in class across the country.
According to NetBlocks, the incident “is expected to significantly restrict the free flow of information amid protests.”
Despite the disturbance, witnesses reported seeing at least one demonstration in Tehran when about 30 women were yelling, “Death to the tyrant,” while removing their headscarves. These cries, which are directed at Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, may result in a trial behind closed doors before the Revolutionary Court of the nation with the possibility of the death penalty.
Despite the warnings of security personnel, passing cars honked in favour of the women.
According to witnesses, other women simply ignored the hijab and carried on with their day. According to YouTube films, protests also took place in Tehran on university campuses.
Lawyers also peacefully demonstrated in front of the Iran Central Bar Association in Tehran, chanting: “Woman, life, freedom” – a slogan of the demonstrations so far.
The movie matched well-known architecture characteristics of the association.
A later video showed them fleeing after security forces fired tear gas at them, the New York-based Centre for Human Rights in Iran said.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that despite internet restrictions and the arrest of at least 40 journalists nationwide, learning more about the protests is still tough to come by.
Iran’s government maintains that Amini was not abused, but according to her family, after she was arrested for disobeying the Islamic Republic’s rigorous clothing code, her body displayed bruises and other symptoms of being beaten.
In later films, security personnel can be seen pushing and punching female protesters, including those who had torn off their hijabs.
Speaking to the nation’s Expediency Council, Khamenei once more asserted that Iran’s foreign adversaries had instigated the protests, which he rejected as being “scattered.”
Even if they are not enemy components, some of these people are moving in their direction, according to Khamenei.
Iranian state media, which has long been dominated by the country’s hardliners, presented footage that it said showed women protesting in favour of the hijab’s requirement across the country. The hijab is only required by law and by force in Afghanistan and Iran.
Given that Amini was a Kurd, anger has been especially intense in western Iran’s Kurdish territories.
The Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights, a Kurdish organisation, displayed pictures of shuttered stores and deserted streets on Wednesday (Tehran time), claiming that shopkeepers were on strike.
The group also shared a video that it claimed was from Saqqez, the city where Amini was born and raised, in which riot police were seen travelling by the truckload.
It remains unclear how many people have been killed or arrested so far in the protests.
Iran Human Rights, an NGO with offices in Oslo, calculated that there have been at least 201 fatalities.
This includes the about 90 individuals who were killed by security forces in Zahedan, an Iranian city in the east, during protests against a police officer who was charged with rape in a different case. Without supplying any information or supporting documentation, Iranian authorities claim that unidentified separatists were involved in the incident in Zahedan.
Iran protests hit 19 cities amid internet outages
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