In Shiraz, a lively street protest led by dancing youths on Tuesday night turned grim after security forces allegedly opened fire, leaving behind at least one dead teen and turning parts of the historic city of poets into a war zone. In Tehran, regime enforcers stormed a metro station, shooting at and beating terrified protesters and passengers, including some who were aboard a subway car.
Across the country, central business districts were turned into ghost towns during the day as businesses adhered to calls for a general strike. Fires burned, and fiery battles between protesters and security forces backed by pro-regime Basij militia fighters raged into the early hours of Wednesday, when the mass uprising in Iran sparked by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini entered its third month.
“Ration-eating Basiji, it’s over! Eat up!” protesters in the northern city of Rasht chanted as they threw rocks and set fires, according to video footage uploaded to the internet.
Though sparked by Amini’s arrest over her alleged violation of dress codes, and her subsequent death, the protests have quickly become a widespread movement aimed at a possible dismantling of the Islamic Republic for its grim human rights record, suppression of political freedoms, economic mismanagement, and marginalisation of women and minorities.
“You’re the wh***. You’re the weed,” said protesters in the small city of Avez, a rural hub of less than 50,000 in Iran’s southwest, hurling insults at regime leaders. “I am a free woman.”
The protests, arguably the most formidable political challenge to the Islamic Republic in its 44 years of rule, have already left at least 344 people dead and led to the arrests of more than 15,000 people, according to Hrana, an Oslo-based human rights monitor.
Tehran officials said three security personnel were also killed on Tuesday. Two Revolutionary Guard members were shot dead in separate incidents in Iran’s persistently volatile Kurdish region, and a member of the pro-regime Basij militia died of his injuries after being allegedly struck by a molotov cocktail in Shiraz.
The ongoing surge of protests this week is taking place exactly three years after a 2019 uprising by mostly poorer Iranians against rising prices, which quickly took on an anti-regime tenor and was violently suppressed by the regime.
Informal leaders of the current protest movement have called for three days of nationwide protests to mark the third anniversary of the Aban protests, named after the Persian calendar month that roughly coincides with November, and a day of solidarity marches across the world, scheduled for Saturday.
“It is clear by now that the protests are not going to die down any time soon,” says Hamidreza Azizi, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. “There have been a lot of ebbs and flows; we’ve seen some days with no major protests, or much more limited ones. Exactly at the moment when people start thinking it’s the end, there’s a call, and people come to the streets in full force.”
The current surge of protests, breaking out in scores of cities and on the campuses of universities and secondary schools, is the most geographically and demographically diverse display of discontent with the regime in years, drawing rich and poor, urban and rural – though it is overwhelmingly led by young people.
“Hit them,” a man can be heard crying out in one video, as men side by side with women pick up and throw rocks at regime gunmen in Eqlid, a city of about 90,000 in southwestern Iran. “Hit the bastards!”
In one leaked video, a regime enforcer named Pooyan Hosseinpour warns a group of Basiji thugs that the protesters taking part in the current uprising are not only more fearless, but more prevalent.
“In the past, we would attack, and they would go. Or maybe they’d throw four rocks, and we’d throw four rocks, and then we’d throw something else, and they would go,” he says, in a clip dated about two weeks ago. “This time they stand firm for an hour and don’t leave. You enter a street, and if there are 30 buildings, they throw rocks at you from 30 buildings. And not just rocks: flower pots, irons, benches.”
Neither the regime nor the protesters appear ready to back down. The regime has upped the stakes by threatening to impose the death penalty on captured protesters, who remain grimly defiant despite the hardships.
Mr Azizi describes a prolonged confrontation, with both sides digging in for a long fight.
“I have no work, and I have almost no money,” one Tehran protester in his early thirties says in a phone interview. “But in some ways I have never been so happy my whole life. The revolution is doing well, and the revolution will continue.”
One resident of Rasht, who sometimes joins the protests, describes a growing sense of affection and kindness among the strangers who gather together on the streets.
“There’s a lot of unity, and when we see each other, we help and support each other,” he says. “There are the Basiji and there are those on the side of the regime; and there are the people, and we are all together.”
