Iran Hijab Protest: Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said on Thursday that Israel and Western intelligence agencies are trying to foment a civil war in the Islamic Republic amid a spate of recent attacks attributed to separatists and religious extremists and ongoing anti-regime protests.
“Multiple security services, Israel and some western politicians who have made plans for civil war, destruction and disintegration of Iran should know that Iran is not Libya or Sudan,” tweeted Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
“Today, the enemies have targeted Iran’s integrity and Iranian identity. The wisdom of the people failed the enemy,” he said.
Iranian officials have blamed the unrest on hostile foreign actors without providing evidence. Demonstrators in the protests, initially led by women, say they are fed up with decades of repression by a clerical establishment they see as corrupt and authoritarian.
At least 362 people have been killed and 16,033 arrested in the latest wave of protests, according to Activists for Human Rights in Iran, a group monitoring the months-long unrest.
Human rights groups have accused security forces of firing live ammunition and birdshot at protesters and beating them with batons.
Amir-Abdollahian’s statement came a day after state media said gunmen opened fire in a bazaar in Iran’s southwestern city of Izeh, killing at least five people, including a young girl, and wounding civilians and security forces.
However, according to The Guardian, protesters said Basij paramilitaries “went berserk” and killed a number of people, including a nine-year-old boy who was riding in a car with his father.
In a separate incident, gunmen shot dead two Basij members in the central city of Isfahan, according to state news agency IRNA.
State television said groups of several dozen protesters gathered in various parts of Izeh late Wednesday, chanting anti-government slogans and throwing stones at police, who dispersed them with tear gas. State-linked media also reported that someone set fire to a Shiite religious seminary.
Violence broke out around some of the protests as security forces cracked down on dissent.
The demonstrations were sparked by the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was detained by the country’s morality police, and quickly escalated into calls for the overthrow of Iran’s ruling clerics and an end to the theocracy established after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Authorities have severely restricted access to the media and regularly shut down the internet, making it difficult to confirm details of the unrest in different parts of the country.
The violence in Izeh occurred on the second day of a three-day general strike called by protesters.
The strike is a reminder of an earlier round of nationwide protests in 2019 in which hundreds of protesters were killed.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Revolutionary Court, which handles security cases, issued a preliminary verdict on Wednesday sentencing three protesters to death. This brings the number of death sentences to four since the start of the latest protests. None has yet been publicly announced as having taken place.
Mizan, a news website linked to Iran’s judiciary, did not identify the accused but said one of them allegedly drove a car into police, killing one and injuring another. It said another was accused of attacking security forces with a knife and setting a government building on fire. A third person was charged with blocking the street and leading a violent demonstration. Mizan argued that the verdicts could be appealed.