Nearly a month after protests began across Iran, parts of the country now bear the marks of battle zones, with flares lighting the skies, gunfire rang out and bloody scenes captured on video footage.
“I am recording this video about the situation in Sanandaj,” said one protester, his face covered by a black scarf and sunglasses, in a message to the public. CNN from the Kurdish-majority city in western Iran, where some of the most dramatic images emerged from the protests, despite a near-total internet shutdown in the area.
“Last night, security forces were shooting in the direction of the houses. They were using military-grade bullets,” he said. “Until now, I hadn’t heard these bullets. People were very scared.”
Video apparently filmed from rooftops showed what appeared to be clashes between young protesters and heavily armed security forces. Bullets and flares streaked across the night sky and a cloud of dust and smoke covered city blocks.
At street level, other videos showed protesters throwing stones at police, with the officers sometimes traveling in a procession of motorcycles, which appeared to be firing into the crowd.
A large number of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have participated in the crackdown, in addition to local police, say activists in Sanandaj, who accuse the authorities of attacking indiscriminately. According to the Oslo-based Kurdish human rights group Hengaw, a 7-year-old boy died in his mother’s arms on Sunday after security forces fired on a crowd of protesters.
While it is impossible to independently verify the death toll from such clashes, gruesome images circulating online and eyewitness testimonies collected by the CNN and by human rights groups point to bloodshed. The video showed a driver in the city dead with a large gunshot wound to his face – activists said he was honking in solidarity with protesters.
“In Sanandaj, they shoot people who honk with bullets. And they shoot young and old alike,” another protester said in a video message to CNN . “The wounded do not go to hospitals because if they go there the plainclothes police will arrest them.
“We are protesting for freedom in Iran. For the prisoners and convicts, for the people of Iran calling for the regime’s departure. Everyone wants this regime to end.”
Despite the government’s repeated claims to have restored calm, the scenes are being replicated across the country to varying degrees, with the Kurdish majority in the west of the country appearing to bear the brunt of the crackdown.
In a remarkable challenge, the Iranian people continue to take to the streets across the country. The protests began over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini (aka Zhina), who died nearly a month ago after being detained by the country’s morality police, but protesters have since rallied around a series of grievances with the regime. Increasingly, activists and experts are characterizing the protests as a national uprising.
“This is not a protest for reform,” Roham Alvandi, associate professor of history at the London School of Economics, told CNN . “This is a revolt demanding the end of the Islamic Republic. And this is something completely different than what we’ve seen before.”
Last month, Iranian protesters attacked the regime’s economic and political centers. Videos showed people throwing stones at police in central Tehran. In the capital’s bazaar, security forces were seen fleeing protesters. Even in the conservative cities of Mashhad and Qom – the heart of the regime’s power base – protesters emerge frequently.
Some oil and gas refineries have also become sites of protests, which are rapidly spreading across the country’s southwest. The country’s Workers’ Council of Oil Contractors said it could call a strike and stop oil production.
The oil industry is the lifeline of Iran’s economy, which has been buckling under pressure from US sanctions unleashed by the Trump administration in 2018 and sustained by the Biden administration. U.S. officials have been in indirect talks with Iran for a year and a half in a bid to restore a landmark 2015 nuclear deal — which former President Donald Trump withdrew four years ago — that would make Iran curb its enrichment program. uranium in exchange for sanctions relief.
The video suggested that the demonstrations at the refineries started as protests against wages but later turned into protests against the regime, with workers chanting “death to the dictator” – a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Across the country, protesters are pushing for economic strikes with some success. In Kurdish-majority areas, where protests are believed to be more organized than in other parts of the country, social media videos showed rows of closed shops. In Tehran’s bazaar, several stores have closed in recent days, although many traders say they did so to protect their stores from the protests and crackdowns that followed. A general strike, called for by Iranian activists, has yet to materialize.
Labor strikes are fraught with historical significance in Iran. In 1979, oil and gas refineries played a critical role in the popular movement that toppled the pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and paved the way for the Islamic Republic.
Tip of the iceberg
More widespread protest actions by workers and traders, experts say, could mark another escalation in the protests.
“If there is a national general strike, what can the government really do,” Alvandi said. “This would completely paralyze the state and show the state’s impotence in the face of this movement.”
Meanwhile, crackdowns continue to intensify in several parts of Iran, notably in the Kurdish-majority north and northwest, where allegations of mistreatment of the ethnic minority were already widespread.
Hengaw, the Kurdish human rights group, believes the violence against protesters reported in the region “is just a drop in the bucket”, with only partial information emerging about the crackdown.
Authorities have sporadically shut down the internet across Iran in an apparent attempt to quell protests, with Kurdish-majority parts of the country facing the longest shutdowns, according to activists and internet watchdog NetBlocks.
A “major outage” in internet access has occurred since 9:30 am in Iran (2 am ET) on Wednesday, according to NetBlocks. Kurdish activists say authorities have also shut down the area’s landline network, arguing that the bloodshed seen in the videos may be just the tip of the iceberg.
“The Iranian regime and its security apparatus have no limits,” said Ramyar Hassani of Hengaw. “They know no limits.”
*Celine Alkhaldi and Mostafa Salem, from CNN contributed to this text
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
