The Islamic Republic of Iran is the scene of a protest movement sparked on September 16 by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd who was arrested by the morality police for allegedly breaking the dress code. strict for women in the country.
Iranian authorities say they are cracking down on “riots” encouraged by the West. According to NGOs based outside Iran, hundreds of protesters died in the crackdown and more than 10,000 were arrested.
The first demonstrations had broken out in Kurdish localities in the northwest, especially in Saghez, the birthplace of Mahsa Amini, before spreading to other cities.
Armed forces were sent as reinforcements to the Kurdish-populated city of Mahabad on Saturday, the Iranian Kurdish rights group Hengaw said on Twitter on Sunday. “Several shots were heard in residential areas.”
The NGO based in Norway has posted images on social networks showing, according to it, a helicopter flying over Mahabad with on board members of the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological army of Iran.
Also according to Hengaw, traders observed a strike on Sunday in protest against the repression.
– “Electricity cut” –
Authorities have “cut off electricity in Mahabad and automatic gunfire is heard,” Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Oslo-based NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR), wrote on Saturday evening, citing “ possible demonstrators killed or injured”.
He shared on Twitter an audio clip presented as taken in Mahabad on which screams and the sound of gunfire can be made out.
According to Hengaw, several explosions were heard on Sunday at dawn in several towns in the province of Kurdistan (north-west), including Marivan, Boukan and Saghez. The situation is also “critical” in Divandarreh, where security forces killed three protesters on Saturday, the NGO added.
In Iran, the Tasnim news agency, approved by the authorities, claimed that “rioters attacked, looted and burned houses in Mahabad, in particular those belonging to police and soldiers”.
“Security has now been restored there and businesses have reopened,” she added, adding that no casualties were to be deplored and that “most of the elements involved in the riots have been arrested”.
The Kurds represent one of the main ethnic minorities in Iran — about 10 million out of a population of 83 million — and adhere mainly to Sunni Islam and not to the dominant Shiism in the Islamic Republic.
Since the anger triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini on September 16, the demonstrations have multiplied and then transformed into a vast movement against power.
At least 378 people have been killed in the repression of demonstrations in Iran, according to a latest report released on Saturday by the IHR: 255 died during protests linked to the death of Mahsa Amini and 123 in Sistan-Balochistan, including more than 90 September 30 in the provincial capital Zahedan, during separate protests against the rape of a teenage girl blamed on a police officer.
Among the victims are 47 children according to the IHR.
While Iranian authorities continue to blame the protest on “rioters”, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei promised on Saturday to “punish” the “perpetrators of murder and vandalism”.
The court imposed the death penalty on five demonstrators.
And on Saturday, she summoned eight personalities from cinema, politics and sport, accused of having published “provocative” content in support of the protest.
Outside Iran, demonstrations of solidarity with the protests continue, with protests in London, New York and Nicosia on Saturday.
