He added that “nobody can say for certain how this will unfold.” The official said that “you have an erosion of the legitimacy of the system, that’s basically hanging on by threats of force.” “There’s an increasing separation between state and society, and it’s widening under (Iranian President) Raisi’s administration,” a senior Biden administration official told NBC News. Demonstrators gather around a burning barricade during a protest for Mahsa Amini, in Tehran on Sept. The country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final word in Iran’s theocratic system, has dismissed the protests as “scattered riots” orchestrated by Iran’s enemies.īut the protests represent the most serious challenge to the theocracy since the 1979 revolution and its aftermath, and could mark the start of an unraveling of the regime - though that process could take months or years to play out, experts and U.S. The regime has survived street protests before, by using violence, imprisonment and censorship to silence dissent. And the government still retains support among a significant section of the population, especially those with ties to the state’s bureaucracy. Iranian authorities last month put the death toll at that point at 41 people, including security officers. The death toll includes more than 20 protesters under the age of 18, according to Amnesty International. The Norway-based group Iran Human Rights and the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said Friday more than 250 protesters have been killed in the six weeks since protests began. Thousands of people have been arrested, including civil society and labor leaders, the rights groups say, and an unknown number have been killed by bullets or beatings. There is a whole network of physicians now that they have and they treat them at home,“ said Ahmadi, who has provided medical advice by phone to the doctors treating the protesters.īut the regime has shown it is ready to unleash lethal force to stifle the protests, using live ammunition, buckshot, pellets, rubber bullets, tear gas and batons to roll back the demonstrators, according to human rights groups. “They don’t even go to the hospital when they get injured. The demonstrators have even set up separate medical care for injured protesters in private homes to try to bypass official clinics, said Ramin Ahmadi, an Iranian-American physician based in the U.S. The security forces have to put down constant pockets of defiance in well-organized neighborhoods where the locals know where to hide and how to outmaneuver the police, human rights groups and Iranians said. The protest are often smaller scale than the mass demonstrations of the past in major cities, but they are more numerous and dispersed across rural as well as urban areas. The protests have no formal leadership or opposition leader, making it difficult for the regime to cut off oxygen to the movement. It seems to have touched every Iranian, in every corner of the country,” he said. Protests in 2019 were shaped by economic hardship and the frustrations of the working class, Ghaemi said. The “Green movement” protests of 2009 focused on an election that demonstrators believed was rigged and lasted months, but the movement was dominated by mostly educated, more affluent people in Tehran. “Every protest we’ve seen before has been limited geographically, or social-economically or related to a particular grievance,” said Hadi Ghaemi of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran. Students protest outside a university in the city of Mashhad, Iran, on Oct. There have been major protests before, but the protests this time are different, Iranians say, because the movement transcends class and geography, and the demands are explicitly political, calling for an end to the regime and not reforms or higher wages. She and other Iranians say the helmeted police flooding the streets resemble an occupying force, unsure of their position and unable to trust the local population. “It’s like a war, the Islamic Republic versus the Iranian people,” said the woman from Tehran. officials and Iranians on the ground all say the protests represent a potentially revolutionary moment, and that Iranian citizens are increasingly ready to risk their lives for the cause. Historians who study Iran, human rights activists, political analysts, U.S. From anti-government graffiti to students heckling government officials, to women walking in the street without headscarves to workers putting down their tools, Iran’s regime looks increasingly bewildered by events.
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