Hundreds of people are feared to have been killed as the Iranian regime launched a fierce crackdown in response to the biggest wave of protests it has faced in years.
Security forces loyal to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, appear to have used the cover of a country-wide internet and phone blackout, which has been in place since Thursday, to open fire on opponents, leaving medical facilities overwhelmed.
On Saturday evening President Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!”
In some areas regime forces are said to have entered hospitals to arrest injured protesters and to order medical staff not to treat the wounded. One doctor, who did not want to be identified, said six hospitals in the capital, Tehran, had collectively recorded at least 217 deaths on Thursday night alone. The figure could not be independently verified.
The Washington-based Human Rights Activist News Agency put the protest death toll at 116 on Saturday night. That tally only included victims who had been officially identified.
‘Covering up a massacre’
Protesters on Friday in Mashhad, northeast Iran
UGC/AFP
Masih Alinejad, a US-based opposition activist who has survived repeated kidnap and assassination attempts, said sources inside Iran had told her that “hundreds of protesters have been killed by security forces”.
Calling on Trump to intervene, Alinejad added: “The regime has shut down the internet to cover up a massacre.”
Trump had warned Tehran on Friday, saying: “You better not start shooting because we’ll start shooting too.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump administration officials had held preliminary discussions about how to carry out an attack on Iran if needed to follow through on the president’s threats, including what sites might be targeted, but that no military equipment or personnel had been moved.
According to the New York Times the president was briefed with a series of different options for strikes against Iran, including on non-military sites in the capital Tehran.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, spoke over the phone with the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Saturday and discussed the possibility of US intervention, a US official told Reuters.
Iran vowed to retaliate if attacked. Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the parliamentary speaker, said on Sunday morning that Israel and US regional bases would be regarded as “legitimate targets”.
President Trump boards Air Force One on Friday
NATHAN HOWARD/REUTERS
Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, said: “It takes real courage to speak up in an authoritarian system, especially for young women, but it should not require courage just to make your voice heard. These are fundamental rights — free speech, peaceful assembly — and the exercise of those rights should never come with the threat of violence or reprisals.”
‘A hundred corpses’
Speaking via a Starlink satellite connection to circumvent the internet blackout, a Tehran resident described a country gripped by violence and fear.
“It’s horrific,” she said. “Every night, the protests go on until after midnight. They are shooting at people. They’re firing huge amounts of tear gas. The brother of one of our friends in Tehran was killed. When his family went to the Kahrizak mortuary to look for his body, they [said they] were shown around a hundred corpses.”
The government, she said, was blocking communications to hide the scale of the crackdown. “They cut the internet because they are carrying out a massacre. There is no way to communicate; even phone lines are down. We are only online because we are staying at a friend’s house that has Starlink.”
The violence has spread well beyond the capital, and protests are now believed to have reached all of Iran’s 31 provinces. “Three relatives have been killed in Kermanshah,” the source in Tehran said. “In the city of Qom one of our relatives was killed. The situation is catastrophic. It’s full-scale street warfare there.”
Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets in the past fortnight in the biggest show of dissent since the disputed outcome of the 2009 presidential election.
Beyond its borders, members of the Iranian diaspora expressed solidarity. In London, police attended the Iranian embassy in Kensington where a protester scaled the building to briefly replace the flag of the Islamic Republic with a pre-revolutionary banner associated with the Shah.
Officers arrested two people on suspicion of aggravated trespass and assault of an emergency worker.
The protests began on December 28 in response to the economy going into freefall. However, they quickly turned into calls for the overthrow of the theocracy, which has been in power since the 1979 Islamic revolution. In some cases protesters have been heard boldly chanting, “Death to the dictator”, a reference to Khamenei, 86.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
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“The regime has embarked on a massive crackdown on the protests,” said Shahin Gobadi of the MEK group, an opposition organisation whose members mostly live in exile. The group is considered controversial by some and is not an official national opposition.
“In some cities, including Abdanan [in the southeast], regime forces have even entered hospitals to arrest injured protesters,” Gobadi said. “We know of many cases where injured protesters, to avoid being arrested, do not go to hospitals and are being treated in private houses.” He said teenagers, including a 14-year-old, were among those who had been killed.
In a state television broadcast on Saturday the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps referred to the protesters as “terrorists” and accused them of targeting military and law enforcement bases. It said preserving national security was a “red line”.
Iran’s prosecutor-general said all protesters would be charged as “enemies of god”, a sentence that carries the death penalty according to the country’s religious laws.