Women, schoolgirls said in forefront as Iranian protesters again pour into streets

Demonstrators took to streets across Iran again Saturday over Mahsa Amini despite internet cuts, as the protest movement sparked by outrage over her death in custody enters a fifth week.

Amini’s death on September 16, three days after she was arrested by Iran’s notorious morality police, has fuelled the biggest wave of street protests and violence seen in the country for years.

Young women have been at the forefront of the demonstrations, shouting anti-government slogans, removing and burning their headscarves, and standing up to security forces on the streets.

“Guns, tanks, fireworks; the mullahs must get lost,” women without hijabs chanted at a gathering at Tehran’s Shariati Technical and Vocational College, in a video widely shared online.

Scores of jeering and whistling protesters hurled projectiles at security forces near a landmark roundabout in Hamedan city, west of Tehran, in footage verified by AFP.

Defying a warning from Iran’s supreme leader and despite what online monitor NetBlocks called a “major disruption to internet traffic,” protesters were seen pouring onto the streets of the northwestern city of Ardabil, in videos shared on Twitter.

Shopkeepers went on strike in Amini’s hometown Saqez, in Kurdistan province, and Mahabad in West Azerbaijan, according to the 1500tasvir social media channel that monitors protests and police violations.

“Freedom, freedom, freedom,” young women at Shariati Technical and Vocational College in Tehran chanted as they waved their headscarves in the air, 1500tasvir said.

“Schoolgirls in Ney village in Marivan began the protests by setting fires on the ground and yelling anti-government chants,” said Hengaw, an Oslo-based rights group.

This is not an armed rubbery in daylight. This is not arresting a criminal. These are the thugs of the regime who are violently arresting a woman who is not wearing a headscarf. The Islamic Republic rule by terror. #MahsaAmini #مهسا_امینی #IranProtests2022 pic.twitter.com/LCoT1VxfhK

— Omid Memarian (@Omid_M) October 15, 2022

Youths were also seen demonstrating at universities in Tehran, Isfahan and Kermanshah, in footage widely shared online.

They were responding to an appeal for a huge turnout for protests on Saturday under the catchcry, “The beginning of the end!”

“We have to be present in the squares, because the best VPN these days is the street,” activists declared, referring to virtual private networks used to skirt internet restrictions.

This is Ardabil where security forces killed a school girl on Wednesday for chanting “Woman Life Freedom.” people protesting against her tragic death. Many Iranian students relate to#MahsaAmini. So they took the street to protest. Regime killed them too.pic.twitter.com/3EmpLPV7yM

— Masih Alinejad ????️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 15, 2022

In response to the call for fresh protests, one of the Iranian regime’s main revolutionary bodies, the Islamic Development Coordination Council, has urged people to “express their revolutionary anger against sedition and rioters.”

A call also went out this week for “retirees” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to gather on Saturday given “the current sensitive situation,” according to a journalist at the Shargh newspaper.

‘Brave women of Iran’

The women-led protests have won support from the US president.

“I want you to know that we stand with the citizens, the brave women of Iran,” Joe Biden said late Friday.

“It stunned me what it awakened in Iran. It awakened something that I don’t think will be quieted for a long, long time,” he said.

Iran “has to end the violence against its own citizens simply exercising their fundamental rights,” he added.

At least 108 people have been killed in the Amini protests, and at least 93 more have died in separate clashes in Zahedan, the capital of the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights.

The unrest has continued despite what Amnesty International called an “unrelenting brutal crackdown” that included an “all-out attack on child protesters” — leading to the deaths of at least 23 minors.

The crackdown has drawn international condemnation and sanctions on Iran from Britain, Canada and the United States.

Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has accused the country’s enemies, including the US and Israel, of fomenting the “riots.”

He issued a warning to protesters in an address on state television Friday: “That seedling [of the Islamic Republic] is a mighty tree now and no one should dare think they can uproot it,” he said.

‘Great moment in history’

His foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, has called on the European Union to adopt a “realistic approach” over the Amini protests as the bloc prepares to impose new sanctions on the Islamic republic.

“Who would believe that the death of one girl is so important to Westerners?” he said in a statement on Friday.

“If it is so, what did they do regarding the hundreds of thousands of martyrs and deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon?” he added.

EU countries agreed this week to level new sanctions, and the move is due to be endorsed at the bloc’s foreign ministers’ meeting in Luxembourg on Monday.

In response to the protests, the clerical state’s security forces have also launched a campaign of mass arrests of artists, dissidents, journalists and athletes.

Schoolchildren have been arrested inside classrooms and ended up in “psychological centers,” Iranian Education Minister Yousef Nouri said this week, quoted by Shargh.

Iranian filmmaker Mani Haghighi said the authorities barred him from traveling to the London Film Festival over his support for the protests.

The British Film Institute said Haghighi had been due to attend the festival for his latest film “Subtraction,” but the Iranian authorities “confiscated his passport.”

“I cannot put into words the joy and the honor of being able to witness first-hand this great moment in history,” said Haghighi.

“So if this is a punishment for what I’ve done, then by all means, bring it on.”

Assault on the streets

In a rare show of accountability, the Tehran police department said Friday that it would investigate the conduct of an officer following allegations of harassment during the arrest of a woman protesting against Amini’s death.

It came after a video showed a male officer appearing to grope the woman from behind while arresting her before she was eventually allowed to leave.

Activists say that the public assault points to the fact that even worse abuses by Iranian forces are taking place behind closed doors.