The Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has acknowledged for the first
time that thousands of people were killed during the protests that rocked Iran
over the last two weeks.
In a speech on Thursday, Khamenei said
that thousands of people had been killed, “some in an inhuman, savage manner”,
and blamed the US for the death toll. The supreme leader railed against the US
president, Donald Trump, whom he called a “criminal” for his support of
demonstrations, and called for strict punishment of protesters.
Khamenei said: “By God’s grace, the
Iranian nation must break the back of the seditionists just as it broke the
back of the sedition.”
Iranian authorities also released a
compilation of footage on Saturday that purported to show armed individuals
carrying guns and knives alongside regular protesters – evidence, they said, of
foreign saboteurs.
Another senior Iranian cleric demanded
the execution of protesters, demanding that “armed hypocrites should be put to
death”.
He described protesters as “butlers” and “soldiers” of Israel and the US, vowing that neither country should “expect peace”.
The speech was in striking contrast to
statements from Trump, this week, who appeared to postpone a military strike in
Iran, telling reporters that Iranian authorities had agreed to halt the
executions of protesters.
On Friday night, Trump thanked Iran
for stopping the execution of what he said was 800 protesters, though it was
unclear where he was drawing those figures from.
Rights groups have said the repression
of protesters is continuing, with more than 3,090 people killed in the unrest
and nearly 4,000 more cases still waiting to be reviewed, according to the Human Rights Activists news agency.
More than 22,100 people have been arrested in protests, leading to fears of
mistreatment of detainees.
The two-and-a-half weeks of protests
started on 28 December when traders took to the streets in Tehran in response
to a sudden dip in the value of the rial. Protests spread and demands expanded
to include calls for an end to the country’s government, creating the most
serious, and deadliest unrest the country has seen since the 1979 revolution.
The brutal quashing of demonstrations by authorities, which Human Rights Watch said on Friday included the “mass killings of protesters”, has largely driven people off the streets.
With the immediate unrest addressed,
authorities were making a public show of punishing those involved in the
action, which they had styled as a foreign-backed plot to destabilise the
country.
Khatami, in his Friday sermon, claimed
350 mosques, 126 prayer halls and 20 other places of worship had been damaged
by protesters. He also said 400 hospitals, 106 ambulances, 71 fire trucks and
50 other emergency vehicles had been damaged.
It was unclear what the fallout of the
protest movement will be, or if it will reignite in the coming days. Iran
continues to be cut off from the rest of the world, as authorities maintain the
more than week-long internet shutdown.
Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah
of Iran who had become a prominent opposition voice during the protests,
continued to call for the overthrow of the government on Friday and
urged Trump to intervene.
“I believe the president is a man of
his word,” Pahlavi said, adding that “regardless of whether action is taken or
not, we as Iranians have no choice to carry on the fight”.
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