Iran has a long history of violent suppression, but this time may be different

Iran has a dark history of crushing dissent, but the latest crackdown dwarfs anything seen during the repressive Islamic theocracy’s 47 years in power, evidence from Iran suggests.

Human rights activists say at least 2,500 people have been killed since protesters took to the streets last month, initially to show anger over rising prices and a faltering economy.

“This repression is all the more intense as the scale of the protests is broader, taking place both in major cities but also in remote areas of central and western Iran,” said Clement Therme, a non-resident researcher at the International Institute for Iranian Studies, a non-governmental organization based in Saudi Arabia, Iran’s main geopolitical rival in the region.

Since the widespread protests of 2022, the regime’s goal “has been to dispel fear,” both by killing protesters and executing prisoners, he said.

Even the partial picture of what is happening in Iran suggests something on a different level than past repression. The Human Rights Activists News Agency, a Virginia-based nonpartisan organization that relies on supporters in Iran to track protests and monitor deaths, says protests have spread to all 31 provinces across the country.

The bloody reprisals against protesters are the culmination of decades in which the regime’s “propensity and capacity to use violence” has only increased, said Rouzbeh Parsi, a lecturer at Lund University in Sweden. The reason is the dual fear of the convergence of “external pressures” and “internal hatred”, he explained.

Some 19,000 people have been arrested, according to HRANA, which says its data comes from field sources and is subject to multiple internal controls. Iran’s top judge has suggested that speedy trials and executions are needed to restore order.

Eyewitness accounts are rare and those who report on the situation generally do so anonymously for fear of reprisals.

A geotagged video by NBC News was posted online last weekend showing dozens of bodies piled up outside a makeshift morgue near Tehran. The scene is punctuated by screams and groans as people converge on the site in search of their missing loved ones, amid the chaos of the protests. Another video verified by NBC News appears to show security forces firing automatic weapons at protesters, with the shots echoing through the streets.

Although the internet has been down for more than a week, Iranians have been able to make international calls. In phone calls to The Associated Press earlier this week, Iranians described a heavy security presence on the streets and light foot traffic despite stores reopening.

Diaspora media outlet Tehran Bureau, founded by journalist Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, who was born in Iran and studied at university in the United States, said witnesses described “war-like conditions in several neighborhoods,” with “active battlefields” including “guns, military weapons and sustained clashes.”

This surveillance matches what Samira Mohyeddin, an Iranian-Canadian journalist, said the daughter of a friend in the southern province of Mazandaran told her.

Posting a video of the conversation in Persian on X, Mohyeddin said there was “blood in the streets”, with drones and riot police maintaining order, and shops forced to close at 4 p.m. She said there had been no clashes in the past two days.

The Iranian regime has decades of precedent for using violence to suppress its opponents, dating back to its founding.

In 1979, a popular revolution involving students and oil workers overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, an autocratic leader backed by a CIA-backed coup in 1953 and whose SAVAK secret police imprisoned and tortured his opponents.

But in this vacuum appeared not a democratic government, but a hardline Shiite theocracy led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Throughout the 1980s, Khomeini’s regime began what is now known as a reign of terror against its opponents. In 1988, at least 5,000 political prisoners were forcibly disappeared, executed and thrown into mass graves, according to Amnesty International and other human rights groups.

Then, in 2009, the “Green Movement” saw millions of people take to the streets to protest the apparently rigged re-election of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hard-liner. At least 72 people were killed and hundreds more injured, according to opposition figures.

Street protests resumed in 2017, 2018 and 2019, the latter of which saw 321 people killed by security forces after demonstrating against rising oil prices, according to Amnesty.

Another high point came in 2022 after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, died in a hospital following her arrest three days earlier by the country’s morality police. She was accused of failing to comply with mandatory government rules regarding the wearing of headscarves for women and clothing restrictions.

Thousands of protesters have been arrested and more than 500 are believed to have died, according to the United Nations. Some were hanged.

This strategy was seen in Syria in 2011, when Iran helped then-President Bashar al-Assad kill peaceful protesters and stay in power.

“They are basically repeating what they advised Bashar Assad to do in Syria during the first six months of the uprising there, which was peaceful and in the streets,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based advocacy group.

“These guys have experience suppressing large nationwide protests in Syria, and they show they have no qualms about instigating massive massacres. »