DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran’s Islamic Republic is a “mighty tree” that no one can uproot, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Revolution, warned on Friday as anger sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini.
Four weeks after the death in custody of this young woman arrested by the police for wearing a veil deemed illegal, Iranians continue to demonstrate against the religious authorities despite increasingly deadly repression.
Iranian security forces deployed in numbers on Friday in Dezful, in the province of Khuzestan (southwest), a new hotbed of dispute near the border with Iraq, reported a witness.
“There are dozens of bassidji (militiamen), who push back the demonstrators, who beat them. Men, women chant: ‘We are Kurdistan, we are Lorestan’,” he said, alluding to to provinces with Iranian ethnic minorities.
Target of the demonstrators, Ali Khamenei deplored on Friday the “divisions in the ranks of Muslims”, before comparing the Islamic Republic to a “young plant that has become a powerful tree”. “No one should dare to think they can uproot it,” he said.
The ayatollah earlier this week reduced the protests to “sporadic riots” orchestrated by Iran’s enemies abroad.
According to human rights organizations, the repression by the security forces left more than 200 dead, including several teenage girls who have become symbols of the struggle. According to state television, 26 members of the security forces were killed.
The violence has particularly affected the peripheral regions of Iran where minorities who say they have long been marginalized live, such as the Kurds in the north-west of the country, where Mahsa Amini came from, where Sistan and Balochistan in the south East, near the border with Pakistan.
According to Amnesty International, 66 people were killed in Zahedan, capital of Sistan and Balochistan, in a single day, September 30 after the great Friday prayer.
Authorities accused protesters of attacking a police station and killing five Revolutionary Guards and Basij militiamen, which they said sparked a shooting.
Police and militiamen are now massively deployed in the main squares of the city, reported two witnesses.
Two other members of the security forces were killed by “rioters” on Friday in the southern province of Fars, state television reported.
(Written by Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, French version Tangi Salaün and Jean-Stéphane Brosse)