The 2009 Zahedan Protests: What Have We Learned About the Iran’s Enforced Anti-Government Regime?

Protests in the southeastern city of Zahedan surfaced online on Friday as one of the latest examples. Automatic rifle fire can be heard disrupting prayers at a nearby local mosque, and one video shows a number of apparently injured and bleeding men being tended to outside.

The families of those who were killed by security forces have been kept quiet in the past. Videos from funeral services uploaded online show displays of public mourning, like a woman cutting her hair over a coffin.

Her death touched a nerve with the public and they came out in support of the movement. There have been a range of grievances with the authoritarian regime that have coalesced around the protests.

The courage of Iranians, young and old, risked it all for a chance at freedom, is bucking the predictions of foreign observers. Many have argued that the strength of the protests was more related to a mirage on social media.

In 2009, there was an uprising in Iran and the large number of women leading the protests in so many of the videos that we see. “But here the numbers seem to be much greater.”

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Tuesday appealed for national unity and tried to allay anger against the country’s rulers, even as the anti-government protests that have engulfed the country for weeks continued to spread to universities and high schools.

Raisi acknowledged that the Islamic Republic had “weaknesses and shortcomings,” but repeated the official line that the unrest sparked last month by the death of a 22-year-old woman in the custody of the country’s morality police was nothing short of a plot by Iran’s enemies.

He told a parliament session that the country’s determination was to reduce people’s problems. Our enemy is rendered powerless by unity and national integrity.

The riots were engineered by the US, Israel, and their paid agents with the assistance of traitorous Iranians abroad, said the supreme leader in his address.

Large numbers of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have been participating in the crackdown in addition to local police, say activists in Sanandaj, who accuse authorities of lashing back indiscriminately. A 7-year old boy died in his mother’s arms when security forces fired into a crowd of protesters.

Universities, long considered sanctuaries in times of turmoil, were quickly impacted by the demonstrations as the new academic year began. Videos on social media showed students expressing solidarity with peers who had been arrested and calling for the end of the Islamic Republic. Many universities have moved classes online this week because of the unrest.

Security forces surrounded and fired tear gas at a group of protesters holed up in a parking lot, preventing them from leaving the campus, which is a prestigious university in Tehran. The student union said police arrested hundreds of students.

In a video on Monday, students marched and chanted “Jailed students must be freed!” Tarbiat Modares University is in Tehran. Students streamed through the university in the conservative city of Mashhad, shouting “Sharif University has become a jail!” Iran’s notorious prison in Tehran has been referred to as a university.

The Biden administration condemns the brutality and oppression of the citizens of Iran and will look for ways to impose more sanctions on the Iranian government.

A woman dressed in black raises a framed portrait of her son, Siavash Mahmoudi, in the air as she paces the sidewalk in Iran’s capital, Tehran. “I am not scared of anyone. I was told to be silent. I will not be,” the woman seen in a viral social media video yells, her voice fraught with emotion.

Many Iranians claim the regime tried to silence them while they mourned their loved ones who were killed in the protests.

“The protests transcend social sectarian boundaries, bringing together a much broader strata of Iranian society than we have seen in years,” said Ali Vaez, director of the International Crisis Group’s Iran Project. “But they suffer from the same shortcomings that the previous movements in Iran also suffered from. There is lack of leadership.

Tehran has been convulsing with demonstrations in the wake of the death of Mahsa. Amini was seized by the country’s morality police and eventually died of her injuries.

Protests crop up sporadically in various parts of the capital throughout each day. The chant ” death to the dictator” can be heard at night from the rooftops of buildings. He used to be considered beyond reproach because of his clerical status.

Since the demonstrations began, authorities have unleashed a deadly crackdown, with reports of forced detentions and physical abuse being used to target the country’s Kurdish minority group.

Girls and women have been taking off their headscarves since secondary schools and universities around the country became flashpoints.

The Iranian protests of the revolution are not ours to be the last thing: a journalist’s encounter with a young man at a university

“These terrorists think that our generation is the previous generation. We are not. Let me assure you,” a protester from Tehran’s prestigious Sharif University of Technology told CNN, referring to Iranian police who had violently cracked down on demonstrators on campus, and detained scores of young people.

“If the dust settles and we stop protesting, they are going to kill even more of us. The protester said they were going to turn us to North Korea because they were going to detain more people. This is not the end. I promise you that.”

Last week, Amnesty International said it had obtained a leaked document which appeared to instruct commanders of armed forces in all provinces to “mercilessly confront” protesters, deploying riot police as well as some members of the military’s elite Revolutionary guards, the Basij paramilitary force and plainclothes security agents.

CNN has not seen the leaked documents obtained by Amnesty International and cannot verify the reporting. CNN reached out to Amnesty International about the leaked documents, but didn’t receive a reply.

In a recent CNN investigation, covert testimony revealed sexual violence against protesters, including boys, in Iran’s detention centers since the start of the unrest.

Analysts say the threat to the regime posed by the protests is one of the largest challenges that the Islamic republic has faced in a long time.

The Iranian protests of the September 27 attack: When the revolution came to an end, and when the police had to re-engineer it

“They’re breaking from their previous generation who was seeking to reform the system from within,” Parsi added. This new generation doesn’t seem to have any faith in that.

The current protests may eventually be quashed or simply lose momentum, but analysts say Iran can expect another cycle of nationwide demonstrations in months to come. Similar, but less widespread, protests against the government have taken place in the past.

Vaez believes that it is difficult to maintain and sustain a movement that will bring the regime to its knees.

Still, the protesters appear bolder than ever, sensing a window of opportunity that could quickly close as Iran appears to near development of a nuclear weapon, which would both entrench the regime’s grip on power and deepen its isolation.

“The only thing worse than a regime that kills and represses its own people is a regime with a nuclear weapon and that kills and represses its own people,” he said.

She talked to the protesters who had helped her about the fact that the security forces are hiring Iraqi teens because their ranks are divided and unwilling and that intelligence agents are watching people who buy first-aid supplies at night. The pro-government activists had portrayed Quran-burning protesters as a menace that needed to be supported by the government, but the counterprotesters’ turnout at their rally was a flop.

Even the police, by some accounts, are divided and exhausted. The police force is different from both the Basij militia and the Revolutionary Guards in that it is less politically ideological. After dusk on Sept. 27, I watched as policemen across Tehran simply sat down on the sidewalks in a long line of reluctant, exhausted authority. One said he hadn’t slept for four nights and when he went home, he got an earful from his mother: Don’t you dare beat other people’s children. He didn’t want to, anyway. The policemen have sisters, lovers and friends who are on the other side of these clashes in person. For the first time in its history, the Iranian state is staring a challenge in the face, knowing many of its forces’ sympathies lie with the people.

By life stage and law, what matters more to protesters than the right to dress freely varies. The list of injustices is long: unequal marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance laws; the lack of important protections under new domestic and gender-based violence statutes; unequal access to sports stadiums; employment discrimination; and workplace sexual harassment. I asked a 34-year-old friend who is trying to save up to emigrate to Sweden what mattered most to her. “I’d like to live in a society where when I submit a résumé for a job, I’m not asked to submit a full-length picture of myself and probably expected to sleep with my boss,” she said. To the same question, a 22-year-old told me she wanted to be able to move about in public without any fear or stress.

As women burn headscarves and cut off their hair in nationwide protests, an Iranian official on Tuesday said that school students participating in street protests are being detained and taken to mental health institutions.

“It is possible these students have become ‘anti-social characters’ and we want to reform them,” he told the Shargh newspaper, adding that the students “can return to class after they’ve been reformed.”

The IranWire video of the demonstrations: Battle zones, gunfire, blood and a warning to the world from the Iran-reform-based revolution

Videos obtained by the pro-reform activist outlet IranWire posted on social media on Wednesday showed demonstrations across Tehran and other Iranian cities.

On Tuesday, the United Nations’ children’s agency UNICEF called for the protection of children and adolescents amid public unrest in Iran, which is now in its third week.

Nearly a month after the start of nationwide protests, parts of Iran now bear the hallmarks of battle zones, with flares lighting up skies, gunfire ringing out and bloody scenes recorded in video footage.

One demonstrator wearing a black scarf and dark glasses sent a message to CNN, stating that he was recording a video about the protests in the city of Sanandaj in western Iran.

The security forces fired in the direction of houses. They were using military-grade bullets,” he said. I hadn’t heard them before. People were really afraid.”

Other videos show protesters throwing rocks at police with the officers sometimes travelling in a procession of motorcycles who appeared to be shooting at the crowd.

While it is impossible to independently verify a death toll from such clashes, gruesome images circulating online, and eyewitness testimony collected by CNN as well as rights groups, point to the bloodshed. Video showed a driver in the city lying dead with a large gunshot wound in his face – activists said he was honking his horn in solidarity with protesters.

“In Sanandaj, they shoot the people honking their horns with bullets. One protester spoke to CNN in a video message, saying that they shoot young and old alike. “The injured don’t go to hospitals because if they go there plain-clothes police will arrest them.

Despite the government’s repeated claims of having restored calm, the scenes are being replicated throughout the country to varying degrees, with the Kurdish-majority west of the country appearing to bear the brunt of the crackdown.

Roham Alvandi, associate professor of History at the London School of Economics said that the protest is not a protest for reform. “This is an uprising demanding the end of the Islamic Republic. That is something completely different to what we have seen before.

There are protesters pushing for economic strikes around the country. In Kurdish-majority areas, where the protests are believed to be more organized than elsewhere in the country, social media videos showed lines of shops shuttered. In Tehran’s bazaar, a number of stores have closed in recent days, though many merchants say they did so to protect their shops from the protests and the crackdowns that follow. A general strike, which Iranian activists have called for, has yet to materialize.

The petroleum industry is the lifeline of Iran’s economy, which has been buckling under the strain of US sanctions unleashed by the Trump administration in 2018 and sustained by the Biden administration. US officials have been in indirect negotiations with Iran for a year and a half in a bid to restore a landmark 2015 nuclear deal – which former President Donald Trump withdrew from four years ago – that would see Iran curb its uranium enrichment program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Labor strikes are loaded with historic meaning in Iran. In 1979, oil and gas refineries played a critical role in the popular movement that overthrew the pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and paved the way for the Islamic Republic.

“If there is a nationwide general strike, what can the government do really,” said Alvandi. “That would completely paralyze the state and would show the powerlessness of the state in the face of this movement.”

The violence against protesters is just a drop in the ocean, according to the Kurdish rights group.

An Iranian Prison is on Fire: Shooting at Prisoners with a Fireball in the Early Stages of Unruh-Enacted Protests

Authorities have sporadically shut down the internet across Iran in an apparent bid to quash the protests, with the Kurdish-majority parts of the country experiencing the longest shutdowns, according to activists and the internet watchdog NetBlocks.

At least 23 children have been killed and many more injured by Iran’s security forces, in order to crush the spirit of resistance among the country’s youth and retain their iron grip on power at any cost.

The death toll reported by Amnesty does not include any children killed during protests in October, including a 7-year-old boy who died in his mother’s arms on Sunday after security forces fired into a crowd of protesters, according to a report by Oslo-based Kurdish rights group Hengaw.

CNN cannot independently verify the number of people facing executions in Iran, or the latest arrest figures or death tolls related to the protests, as precise figures are impossible for anyone outside the Iranian government to confirm.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called the protesters “agents of the West” and called for them to be punished, according to state news agency IRNA.

It was the last time they’d see each other. One family searched frantically for their daughter for 10 days, posting desperate appeals for information on social media; the other found out the fate of their daughter within hours of her disappearance.

The grim result was the same. The missing teenagers had been killed by the security forces, their families and human rights groups said. One girl’s skull was smashed, and the other girl’s head was cracked by baton blows. Their bodies were bruised and badly damaged. They were 16 at the time.

One of the teenagers whose bravery and death has become a rallying cry is Nika Shahkarami, a 16-year-old who disappeared last month after waving her hijab in the air at a protest in Tehran, and then setting fire to another headscarf in front of a small crowd.

“Evin’s on fire! They are shooting at prisoners inside as it goes up in flames. This was one of the flurry of messages I received late October 15 from Iranian activists and fellow survivors of the country’s most notorious prison.

The notoriously brutal facility is known for housing political prisoners in the country, which has seen mass protests in recent weeks against the Islamic regime that has ruled it for decades.

The wife of a film director who is among the dissidents jailed at Evin said that guards fired tear gas at inmates.

The wife of a jailed Iranian film director told an interviewer with Radio Farda her husband is in good health, and that he called her from prison to tell her.

On a case of security violation in Iran, the family lawyer Jared Saeedi, says she does not feel guilty about the crimes committed against him

Saeedi added that from the time the fire broke out Saturday night to when she got a call from her husband the next day were the worst hours of her life.

Activist group 1500tasvir reported earlier that, in videos posted on social media, gunshots were heard and Iranian special forces were seen heading to the area where the prison is believed to be located.

Inmates on Ward 8 have no water, gas, or bread and 45 of them were transferred “to an unknown place,” Daemi said. Everyone is okay, but they are worried about being put in solitary confinement, or being subjected to interrogation.

A lawyer who represents a number of prisoners says inmates have been transferred to Rajaei Shahr prison. A bus is taking prisoners away from Evin.

“She told me she didn’t know what had happened at Evin last night but said that she heard the terrifying sounds and thought something terrible happened,” Hosein said his wife told him, adding she was doing well.

The section of Evin where the prisoner is being held is notorious for housing prisoners of conscience and so there is no information about other parts of the prison, according to Hosein.

Iranian-American Siamak Namazi, who has been detained in Iran for seven years and was forced to return to prison on Wednesday after briefly being released on furlough, is also safe, according to the Namazi family lawyer Jared Genser.

Speaking earlier to state broadcaster IRIB, Tehran’s prosecutor Ali Salehi said the “conflict” at the prison was not linked to the protests that have swept the country following the death of a young woman in police custody.

The two years I spent in Evin were the most harrowing of my life. A sham trial led to me being convicted of espionage, after I was arrested at Tehran airport on my way back from an academic conference. I was freed from prison in a prisoner swap deal, after serving two years and three months.

The UN was urged to hold Iran’s leaders accountable by the secretary general and former UN Special Rapporteur.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards confronted with a “violating government kickdown”: Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye” song

WASHINGTON — Chanting crowd marched in the streets of Berlin, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles on Saturday in a show of international support for demonstrators facing a violent government CRACKDOWN IN ISRAEL.

Thousands of people wearing green, white, and red shouted in unison on the National Mall as Iran’s flag was being displayed. Don’t be afraid. Be scared. We are one in this,” demonstrators yelled, before marching to the White House. “Say her name! Mahsa!”

Iran was attracted by the demonstrations, which were put together by grassroots organizers from all over the United States.

Shooka was born in the U.S. and was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ” Women, Life, Freedom” in English and Farsi. In Iran, women are sick of being a second-class citizen.

The protesters in D.C. singing Persian music that was written after the 1979 revolution in Iran were protesting against religious oppression in the country. The song they sang was called “Baraye”, which has become the unofficial anthem of the Iran protests. The artist of that song, Shervin Hajipour, was arrested shortly after posting the song to his Instagram in late September. It had more than 40 million views.

An Australian-British scholar is interested in the Middle East and Islamic studies. In November 2020 she was freed in a prisoner exchange, after spending more than a year in Iran over espionage allegations. Moore-Gilbert was imprisoned in an Iranian prison for over 800 days. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. The opinion on CNN can be found here.

One by one, the families of political prisoners held in Evin got word out that their loved ones were OK. Massud Mossaheb, a dual Austrian and Austrian citizen, was suffering from tear gas and smoke inhalation when he died. High-value hostages Siamak Namazi and Emad Sharghi, who were American, were removed from the public wards and placed away from the flames.

In addition to the battles in wards 7, 8 and 9 between prisoners and security, there were also more serious disagreements between prison management and the Revolutionary Guards who were using live fire and tear gas to quash them.

Iran’s prison system contains former hostages, and other victims of the system, as well as family members of current prisoners, frantically exchanging information and checking on one another after the fire.

The Iranian human rights lawyer Amirsalar Davoudi got word out that he and his cellmates in Ward 4 had survived — likewise the recently arrested activist Arash Sadeghi. The people connected to the prison were relieved when they received their welfare checks.

Entering via the prison’s imposing front gates involves passing an elaborate series of checkpoint while blindfolded and handcuffed, crammed into the back of a vehicle, alongside prison transfer guards. A prisoner could count how many checkpoints had been passed by how many times the vehicle’s trunk was opened and inspected.

The inside of the fortress is made up of several administrative buildings and judiciary offices, with a few of the prison wards located on top of each other.

The Iran’s Prison Authority is supposed to safeguard prisoner rights but these black sites are not included in the oversight. These various competing groups would routinely clash with one another over everything, from the granting of prisoner furloughs to the provision of medical treatment to inmates.

I knew the courageous lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was said to have been recently rearrested, along with a number of other activists I had known in prison, such as Golrokh Iraee.

The women’s ward of a prison in Iran, the fate of maximum security, is a lossy place for prisoners and their families

As the situation stabilized, crowds massed on the streets outside Evin, and family members desperately tried to gather information about their loved ones inside.

The women’s ward is not affected by this. I heard from someone who had spoken with emergency services outside the prison gates. Two more sources from prisoners’ families confirmed the news. The women are shaking, but everyone is okay.

I can not imagine what it must have felt like to hear gunfire just meters from the locked doors. I am sure he found a conscience that day, but I am happy that he did. He is part of a cruel and repressive system that puts innocent people in jail. The very lives of my precious friends may have depended on it.

It is not hard to imagine that Iranian prisoners, many of them innocent of any crime, would want to show their support for their countrymen protesting.

If the regime cannot control its most sensitive maximum security prison, it is likely also losing its grip over the country more broadly. Many of us are now hoping for a day in which there will be no need for an Evin prison at all.

The 2011 September 11 Amini Protests in Saqqez, Iran: Why the U.S. can’t rejoin the nuclear deal

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. She has her own views in this commentary. View more opinion on CNN.

In Amini’s birthplace of Saqqez, where the 22-year-old also known as Zhina is now buried, thousands of people defied the police and turned out to mark an important day in the mourning process, even as security forces fired live bullets and tear gas to stop them.

The protests are going on. Seven weeks in, they have lasted longer than any uprising since the 1979 revolution toppled the Pahlavi regime and brought to power today’s theocracy. These protests are different from the other ones. In 2009, the Green Movement supported a reformist candidate. Protesters called out harsh economic conditions.

This time, women, and the men who have joined them, are crying out, “Death to the dictator.” This is not about reform. It is about fundamental change.

That is a good start. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps should be barred from entering the US because of their role in crushing the protests. There should be others that follow suit.

Germany said this week that Iran can’t have business as usual and that it would launch a wide-ranging diplomatic response that included support for nongovernmental organizations monitoring crimes against protestors and expanded protections for vulnerable Iranians.

Biden had said he was willing to have the U.S. rejoin the nuclear deal, but talks have broken down. Since the protests began in September, the American position seems to have hardened and officials say restoring the deal is not a priority.

The United States and its allies want to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon. But restarting the deal could bring hundreds of billions of dollars to the regime that is currently killing peaceful protesters, arming Russia with killer drones used to slaughter innocent Ukrainians and continuing to support terrorist groups across the Middle East. At the very least, the wisdom of reviving the nuclear deal must be reevaluated.

The 1979 Takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran: “We Are Obedient To The Leader” and “Death to Israel”

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran on Friday marked the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran as its theocracy faces nationwide protests after the September death of a 22-year-old woman who was arrested by the country’s morality police.

The Iranian state-run television broadcasts live feeds of various commemorations around the country, with some Iranians waving placards in protest of the war between Russia and Iran. But while crowds in Tehran looked large with chador-wearing women waving the Islamic Republic’s flag, other commemorations in the country appeared smaller, with only a few dozen people taking part.

Iran’s hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi, speaking to people gathered in front of the former U.S. Embassy building, criticized those protesting the theocracy.

“Anyone taking the smallest step in the direction of breaching security and riots, must know that they are stepping in the direction of enemies of the Islamic Revolution,” he said. Americans believe they can execute the plan they carried out in Libya and Syria. It was a false dream.

Those at the commemoration also waved effigies of French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The signs and chants were from the crowd. Death to Israel!

Students, government workers, and others have been bussed into a Nov. 4 demonstration on Taleqani Street in downtown Tehran.

This year, however, it remained clear Iran’s theocracy hopes to energize its hard-line base. The signs referred to 83-year-old Supreme Leader of the country as “We are Obedient To The Leader.” The weekslong demonstrations have included cries calling for Khamenei’s death and the overthrow of the government.

The annual commemoration marks when student demonstrators climbed over the fence at the embassy to protest Jimmy Carter’s treatment of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The students soon took over the entire, leafy compound. A few staffers fled and hid in the home of the Canadian ambassador to Iran before escaping the country with the help of the CIA, a story dramatized in the 2012 film “Argo.”

The 444-day crisis transfixed America, as nightly images of blindfolded hostages played on television sets across the nation. Iran finally let all the captives go the day Carter left office on Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day in 1981.

That enmity between Iran and the U.S. has ebbed and surged over the decades since. The U.S. and world powers reached a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015 that drastically curtailed its program in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions. However, then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018, sparking years of tensions since.

Late Thursday in California at a rally before the U.S. midterm elections, President Joe Biden also stopped his speech to address a crowd that held up cellphones displaying the message “FREE IRAN.”

“Maybe he said this because of a lack of concentration. … Raisi said that he said they aim to liberate Iran. “Mr. President! Iran was liberated 43 years ago, and it’s determined not to become your captive again. We won’t become a cow.

On Friday, some protesters waved giant placards of atoms as a reminder that Iran now enriches uranium to its closer than ever to weapons-grade levels. If Iran wanted a nuclear weapon, it would have enough enriched gold to make one, according to experts.

Tehran’s anti-government protests have a condemned death in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s death, a human-rights activist

Several Iranians have been sentenced to death by execution during the nationwide protests, which were sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was apprehended by the state’s morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly.

They were convicted on the charge of “disturbing public order and peace, community, and colluding to commit a crime against national security, war and corruption on Earth, war through arson, and intentional destruction,” according to state news agency IRNA on Sunday.

Five others who took part in the protests and were convicted of colluding to commit a crime against national security received sentences of 5 to 10 years in prison.

IRNA added that these decisions are preliminary and can be appealed. The protester who received a death sentence was not named and no details were given of when or where they committed the crime.

In an update to its death toll on Saturday, the group said that its published number was an “absolute minimum” and included 43 children and 25 women.

Despite the threat of arrest and harsher punishments for those involved, Iranian athletes and celebrities have stepped forward to support the anti-government protests.

The execution comes as other demonstrators face the possibility of death penalty for participating in protests that began in mid-September, first as an outrage against Iran’s morality police. One of the most serious challenges to Iran’s theocracy has arisen due to the protests.

The first known execution linked to protests in the country took place on Thursday, when Iran executed a man for injuries to a paramilitary officer.

Shekari’s sentence to death for “waging war against God” was commuted to the death penalty after the three student murders in Iran

Mizan said Shekari had been arrested on Sept. 25, then convicted on Nov. 20 on the charge of “moharebeh,” a Farsi word meaning “waging war against God.” That charge has been levied against others in the decades since 1979 and carries the death penalty. Mizan said that her client’s lawyer had failed in his effort to have the sentence reconsidered.

Shekari was sentenced to death on October 23, and executed by hanging on Thursday morning, according to Mizan Online. State media reported it was the first execution connected to the protests.

“His execution must be met with the strongest possible terms and international reactions. Otherwise, we will be facing daily executions of protesters who are protesting for their fundamental human rights,” the group’s director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam told CNN.

The anniversary of the murder of the three university students by Iranian police under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is on December 7 and the former leader said that it was time for the government to listen to the demonstrators.

Prominent Iranian Sunni cleric Molavi Abdolhamid Ismaeelzahi on Tuesday called on the country’s judiciary to investigate and prosecute individuals abusing women in prisons.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme Leader has praised the Basij – a wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – for its role in the crackdown, describing the protest movement as “rioters” and “thugs” backed by foreign forces.

Several people have received death sentences for their role in the demonstrations, and activists are worried that others could be put to death as well.

Iran’s Revolutionary Court punishes Shekari for committing crimes against a religious and ethnic minority in protests of the 1979 Iranian revolution

Shekari was alleged to have told Mizan that he was offered money to attack security forces. Iran’s government has alleged for months that foreign nations have fomented the unrest in the country rather than the Iranians who are angry about the nation’s finances, heavy-handed policing and other troubles.

Shekari was sentenced to death in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, which has been criticized for not allowing those on trial to choose their lawyers or even see the evidence against them.

A heavily edited package of the courtroom and parts of the trial of Shekari was aired by Iranian state television after his execution.

Salavati is under sanctions for overseeing cases where members of Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, lashes and even execution for exercising their freedom of expression.

The execution less than a month after he was accused of killing two security officials shows the government’s ability to put down demonstrations quickly.

According to the country’s Judiciary, two security force members were stabbed to death and four others were wounded by Rahnavard.

Footage aired on state TV showed a man chasing another around a street corner, then standing over him and stabbing him after he fell against a parked motorbike. The assailant, which state TV alleged was Rahnavard, then fled.

The Mizan report identified the dead as “student” Basij, paramilitary volunteers under Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The Basij deployed in major cities, attacking and detaining protesters who fought back.

Rahnavard had been convicted on the charge of “moharebeh,” a Farsi word meaning “waging war against God.” Since 1979 others have been charged with the charge and face the death penalty.

Iran executed the first prisoner detained during demonstrations Thursday. Amid the unrest, Iran has seen its rial currency drop to new lows against the U.S. dollar.

A well-known actor has been arrested days after she criticized the execution of a man who was involved in the nationwide protests that have swept the country.

The committee to counter violence against women in Iranian cinema said that it wasn’t certain which department had taken Alidoosti into custody.

Known as a feminist activist, Alidoosti last month published a picture of herself on Instagram without the Islamic hijab and holding a sign reading “Women, Life, Freedom” to show support for the protest movement.

After Shekari’s execution, she said in another post: “Your silence means supporting tyranny and tyrants,” adding that “every international organization who is watching this bloodshed and not taking action, is a disgrace to humanity.”

“I will stand by the families of prisoners and the killed and will demand justice for them. I will fight for my home and I will pay any cost to stand for my rights,” she wrote.

Iran executions-protests-mahsa-amini: a reference to the Basij militia members Rahnavard and his wife Farzaneh Hassanlou

A pro-government TV channel aired audio that was described as Rahnavard’s confession to police. The authenticity of the audio was not immediately confirmed by NPR.

“Unfortunately, my own arrow hit my brother,” the recording says — seen as a reference to the Basij militia members Rahnavard was convicted of fatally stabbing.

The deputy head of Allameh University in Tehran told the news agency that twenty students were banned from classes after they participated in the Dec. 7 rally.

The university official said that the students were people who insisted on continuing their path and did not appreciate our tolerant behavior.

The prison population is much larger. Rights groups estimate at least 18,000 people have been detained, with at least 39 seen as at risk of receiving a death sentence or being executed.

One of those sentenced to death is a doctor. His wife Farzaneh Ghareh Hassanlou has been sentenced to 25 years’ solitary confinement. The two people were arrested in a protest.

Hassanlou was tortured and did not have access to his own lawyer, anti-regime activists say. The attorney appointed by the government reportedly mounted no defense, instead advising his client to accept the charges of crimes against God.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/1144206320/iran-executions-protests-mahsa-amini

Remembering the Martynna (Moody), when I Was a Daddy for the X-ray, I Was Alive and Well

He says there’s no violence at all. On the personality level, I’m very opinionated. And on something he believed in, he could be as stubborn as hell.”

“I’m proud of you,” he says. “Because I’m sure I am.” I miss him but I’m very proud of him. I never asked in my thoughts, ‘Why did you do this?’ It was huge for him, his family, and all the people around him. I’m still proud of him.