NAccording to an announcement by the public prosecutor’s office in Tehran, trials against demonstrators will begin before the revolutionary courts this week. In Tehran alone, around 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the protests. They would be accused of sabotage, attacks against security forces and destruction of public property.
Meanwhile, the nationwide protests that began on September 16 continue despite threats from military leaders. In the past few days, protests and rallies have again been reported from at least twenty cities and more than fifty universities. The most violent clashes appear to have taken place at the University of Mashhad. Recently, new slogans have been added to the previously known ones. The demonstrators are now chanting “We don’t want either a sheikh or a mullah, damn the Ayatollah” and “We hate their religion, we detest their faith”.
Threat of the Revolutionary Guards
The supreme commander of the Revolutionary Guard, General Hossein Salami, had unsuccessfully called for an end to the protests on Saturday. “This is the last day of the unrest, don’t come out on the streets anymore,” he said, according to the state news agency IRNA. The demonstrators should not overtax the patience of the system. Since then it has been feared that the Revolutionary Guard could be used to put down the protests. Also on Saturday, Parliament President Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who himself was General of the Revolutionary Guard, showed accommodation. He called on the demonstrators to stop the protests. But he also said: “The political system accepts the protests and is ready for reforms.” On Saturday, parliament increased the salaries of the armed forces and police by 20 percent in an urgent procedure.
This video, which was circulated on social media on Sunday, is said to show protests at North Tehran University in the Iranian capital.
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Image: AFP
However, the Bureau of Islamic Conduct firmly rejects a relaxation of the obligation to obscure. The vice squad is currently being reorganized in order to reintroduce the code of conduct to the general public, the office said. you have to be “smarter” about it. The situation remains most tense in the Kurdish regions and in Zahedan, the capital of Balochistan province. The military presence in the city has been increased significantly in recent days in order to bring the population in Zahedan, who had been enraged after the September 30 massacre, under control again. After Friday prayers, more than 100,000 Sunnis are said to have passed through Zahedan last week.
They receive support from the Kurds, who are also Sunni. The two main Kurdish clerics, Abdollah Kurd and Abdoghaffar Naghshbandi, support the protests. In a fatwa, they describe any participation in a state rally as a betrayal of the youth of Zahedan. The Revolutionary Guards have once again detained a foreign oil tanker in the Persian Gulf on charges of smuggling cheap fuel. The tanker had loaded eleven million liters and transported them illegally, the public prosecutor’s office for the province of Hormuzgan, Modschtaba Ghahremani, announced on Monday, without giving any information on the tanker’s origin. Most recently, on September 10, Iran detained an oil tanker for the same reason.
Iran suffers as oil products, which are among the cheapest in the world due to subsidies and the collapse of the Iranian rial, are illegally smuggled into other markets. To put a stop to this, the Revolutionary Guard monitors the shipping routes near the coast.
