Overnight protests rock Iranian cities
Protests rocked Iran again overnight after a seeming slowdown in recent weeks, with marchers calling for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, online video posts purportedly showed on Friday.
The marches in numerous cities including Tehran that began on Thursday evening and went on into the night marked 40 days since the execution of two protesters last month. Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini were hanged on Jan. 8. Two others were executed in December.
The protests that have swept across Iran began last September after the death in custody of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini for flouting the hijab policy, which requires women to entirely cover their hair and bodies.
Videos on Friday showed overnight demonstrations in several neighbourhoods in Tehran as well as in the cities of Karaj, Isfahan, Qazvin, Rasht, Arak, Mashhad, Sanandaj, Qorveh, and Izeh in Khuzestan province. An online video purportedly from the holy Shi’ite city of Mashhad in the northeast showed protesters chanting, “My martyred brother, we shall avenge your blood.”
The long wave of unrest has posed one of the strongest challenges to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution. Openly defying the hijab rules, women have waved and burnt their scarves or cut their hair. While the unrest appeared to have tapered off in recent weeks, likely because of the executions or the brutal crackdown, acts of civil disobedience have continued unabated. Nightly anti-regime chants reverberate across Tehran and other cities.
Iranian state media did not immediately acknowledge the demonstrations. Since they began, at least 529 people have been killed in demonstrations, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran. Over 19,700 others have been detained by authorities amid a violent crackdown trying to suppress the dissent.
