Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian on Wednesday ordered security forces not to crack down on economic protests, drawing a distinction between peaceful demonstrators and armed “rioters”.
Here are the latest developments on the 11th day of a wave of protests in Iranian cities against economic hardship triggered by price rises and currency collapse:
– President urges restraint –
Iran’s president is not the most senior figure in the Islamic republic’s government, with that role falling to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
But the fact that Pezeshkian felt compelled on Wednesday to order security forces to show restraint will be read as a sign the government is concerned the crisis is slipping out of control.
In a video released by the news agency Mehr after a cabinet meeting, Vice President Mohammad Jafar Ghaempanah said Pezeshkian had “ordered that no security measures be taken against the demonstrators”.
“Those who carry firearms, knives and machetes and who attack police stations and military sites are rioters, and we must distinguish protesters from rioters,” Ghaempanah added.
Security forces have now killed at least 27 protesters, including five people under the age of 18, the Norway-based NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR) said on Tuesday.
Iranian media outlets, relaying official announcements, have reported 15 deaths, including members of the security forces and a policeman who was shot dead on Tuesday.
– Two dead in southwest –
Clashes in southwest Iran on Wednesday killed two people and wounded 30, the Fars news agency said.
Fars reported that shopkeepers were protesting in Lordergan when “rioters began throwing stones at the police”.
“Among them, there were individuals with military and hunting weapons who suddenly opened fire on the police,” the agency added, without specifying whether those killed were police officers or protesters.
In the northeastern city of Bojnurd, a group of rioters threw stones and broke windows at a mosque, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported. They also set fire to a store selling religious books, the agency said.
– Army boss warns Iran foes –
General Amir Hatami, commander of the Iranian army and one of its most senior military officers, warned Tehran would not tolerate outside threats “without responding”.
According to Fars, Hatami said “if the enemy makes a mistake” Iran’s response would be more robust than during last June’s 12-day war with Israel.
In recent days, US President Donald Trump has threatened to intervene in Iran if demonstrators were killed, while Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed support for the protests.
The demonstrations have yet to reach the scale of a 2022 to 2023 movement, let alone that of the mass 2009 street protests that followed disputed elections.
But the economic protests have attracted international attention, including from the leaders of the Islamic republic’s international foes.
“We’re watching it very closely. If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States,” Trump told reporters on Sunday.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, told Israel’s cabinet: “We stand in solidarity with the struggle of the Iranian people and with their aspirations for freedom, liberty and justice.”
The war in June began with an unprecedented Israeli attack on Iranian military and nuclear facilities.
The United States launched its own set of strikes, hitting three major Iranian nuclear sites.
– Tear gas in Grand Bazaar –
Iran’s latest protest movement began on December 28 with a strike by traders in a Tehran market for mobile phones.
Since then, demonstrations have spread to the heart of the economy, the capital’s Grand Bazaar, and several more towns and cities, especially in the west of the country.
On Tuesday, clashes erupted in the Grand Bazaar for the first time since the protests began, with police using tear gas to disperse crowds. In one case, gas drifted into a hospital.
To disperse a crowd, “tear gas was used in the alley adjacent to the Sina Hospital”, the ISNA news agency reported, citing a statement from the Tehran University of Medical Sciences.
The Sina Hospital is affiliated with the university and is about two kilometres (about one mile) from the Grand Bazaar.
The university denied claims that tear gas had been deliberately fired at the hospital.
Elsewhere in the Iranian capital, calm appeared to have returned on Wednesday.
AFP reporters saw residents conducting business as normal in the shops of Vali-Asr, the grand thoroughfare that crosses the city from north to south.
Australia’s government told its citizens to leave Iran “as soon as possible” due to the protests. An updated travel advisory said “the security situation is volatile”.
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