DUBAI: President Ebrahim Raisi stated on Saturday that Iran must take decisive action to address the protests that have erupted across the nation in response to the death in detention of a lady held by the morality police of the Islamic Republic.
35 people have died during the weeklong protests, which have now expanded to the majority of the nation’s 31 provinces. In response to the anti-government protests, state-sponsored rallies were held on Friday in a number of Iranian cities, and the army vowed to deal with “the enemies” who were causing the turmoil.
Iran must “act severely with those who oppose the country’s security and quiet,” Raisi was cited as saying on Saturday. Raisi was on the phone with the family of a Basij volunteer who had died while taking part in the suppression of protests in Mashhad, a city in Iran’s northeast.
The incidents were referred to as a riot by the president, who “emphasized the imperative to distinguish between protest and upsetting public order and security.”At the funeral of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died after going into a coma after being detained by morality police enforcing hijab laws on women’s clothing, protests erupted in northwest Iran a week ago.
Her passing has sparked further outrage over concerns like personal freedom constraints in Iran, stringent dress regulations for women, and a faltering economy as a result of sanctions. Landlines were down and contact connections with the northwest town of Oshnavieh have been shut off, according to the activist Twitter account 1500tasvir, which has 125,000 followers.
The majority of Iran’s 10 million Kurds reside in the northwest of the country, and Oshnavieh was one of several communities there that observed a strike on Friday. On Friday, the Kurdish rights organization Hengaw produced a video that it said showed demonstrators in possession of some of the town.
