TEHRAN, Iran (Washington Insider Magazine)– There was a significant disruption in internet service in Iran. An advocacy organization said that the 22-year-old woman who had been held by the nation’s morality police died on Wednesday after calls for more demonstrations. This fired up protest several parts of the country.
Since the nation’s 2009 Green Movement protests, the demonstrations over Mahsa Amini’s death have grown to be one of the biggest threats to theocracy in Iran. High school students, oil workers, and women walking without the mandated headscarf, or hijab, have all participated in demonstrations.
Witnesses said riot police and plainclothes officials were widely stationed around Tehran in response to calls for protests that started at midday on Wednesday. They also talked about issues with their mobile internet services being disrupted.
An advocacy group named NetBlocks said that, even on a working day when students were enrolled in classes all around the nation, Iran’s internet traffic had decreased to about 25% from its high.
Amidst the disruption, witnesses reported seeing at least one protest in Tehran when around 30 women who were without hijab chanted, “Death to the dictator.” Despite the threats from the security officers, passing vehicles honked in solidarity. Others simply carried on with their days while abstaining from wearing the hijab as a silent protest, according to ABC NEWS.
Videos reportedly captured protests on Wednesday in Baharestan, a region to the southeast of Isfahan, as well as Shiraz in the south and Rasht on the Caspian Sea in the north.
Iran’s government maintains that Amini was not assaulted, but according to her family, when she was arrested for violating the Islamic Republic’s stringent dress code, her body had bruises and other indicators of being tortured. In later videos, security personnel can be seen pushing and abusing female demonstrators, including those who had torn off their hijabs.
Given that Amini was a Kurd, anger has been especially intense in western Iran’s Kurdish territories. The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, a Kurdish organization, showed pictures of deserted streets and closed stores on Wednesday, claiming that merchants were on strike. The organization also shared a video that it said was from Saqqez, the city where Amini was born and raised, in which riot police were seen traveling by truckload.
While Amini’s death has been the main focus of the protests, Iran’s economy has been the source of seething resentment for years. The country’s rial currency collapsed as a result of sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear program, wiping away many people’s savings.
How many individuals have been detained or killed as a result of the demonstrations to this point is still unknown.
Iran Human Rights, an organization with headquarters in Oslo, estimated on Wednesday that at least 201 people had died. This includes about 90 individuals who were killed by security personnel in Zahedan, an Iranian city in the east, amid protests against a law enforcement officer who was charged with rape in a different case. Without offering any proof or specifics, Iranian officials have claimed that unnamed separatists were involved in the incident in Zahedan.
There are several videos online showing riot police firing into crowds, some perhaps using live ammunition. Gen. Hossein Ashtari, the head of Iran’s police force, made the unsupported claim on state television on Wednesday that counter revolutionary groups overseas were using police uniforms to shoot into the crowds in response to public demand. He claimed that several of the individuals had been detained by the force.
Yousof Nouri, Iran’s minister of education, provided the first confirmation that youngsters who should have been in school had been detained during the demonstrations. The pro-reform tabloid Shargh claimed that he would not provide an estimate of people imprisoned, simply saying that they had been placed “in a psychiatric center,” not in jail.
