Trump warns U.S. ‘armada’ heading to Iran; death toll in protest crackdown tops 5,000, activists say
President Donald Trump declared a U.S. “armada” headed toward Iran, as the death toll from the regime’s crackdown on nationwide unrest surpassed at least 5,000, activists said.
Tehran on Friday rejected Trump’s repeated suggestion that its threats had stopped the planned executions of more than 800 protesters, calling them “completely false.” Trump said such killings would be a trigger for military action.
“I said, ‘If you hang these people, you’re going to get hit harder than ever,'” he told reporters on Air Force One upon returning from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And an hour before this horrible” event, they canceled it, he said. “That was a good sign.”
Trump added that “we have an armada heading in that direction and maybe we won’t need to use it.” The United States has “a large force heading toward Iran. I would prefer if nothing happened,” he added, but “we have a lot of ships heading in that direction, just in case.”
The United States has sent a carrier strike group to the Middle East, as well as additional aircraft and ground-based air defense systems, a U.S. official said last week.
Iran says it has restored order following nationwide protests that began spreading late last year over the collapse of the country’s currency and soaring prices.
Experts monitoring the country, however, say the eruption remains an existential crisis for the Islamic Republic, whose latest crackdown is the deadliest since its creation following the 1979 revolution, a United Nations fact-finding mission said Friday.
On Thursday, the US Human Rights Activists News Agency said the confirmed death toll now stood at 5,002, including dozens under the age of 18.
The dead included around 200 members of the security forces and others close to the government, HRANA said.
The human rights group has been precise over the years about the details of protests and unrest in Iran, relying on a network of activists inside the country who confirm all reported deaths.
Other groups have offered similarly high figures, although activists fear the true toll is much higher because the weeks-long internet outage makes it difficult to verify information from inside the country.
On Thursday, Iranian officials presented the first official death toll.
State television quoted the Interior Ministry as saying 3,117 people had been killed. Officials have previously said most of the dead were killed by “terrorists,” while accusing the United States and Israel of fomenting the unrest.
A United Nations fact-finding mission said that despite the internet outage, it had managed to collect victim testimonies and other evidence regarding allegations of “gross human rights violations”. The repression resulted in “arbitrary killings and serious injuries, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, arbitrary arrests and detentions, as well as forced confessions,” the statement said.
Trump has suggested he would use military force against Iran if it shoots protesters or pursues what human rights groups have called planned executions of some demonstrators.
However, he has not yet taken military action, congratulating himself on having put an end to these massacres. He reiterated it this Thursday.
“I arrested 837 hangings on Thursday, all of them reportedly dead, mostly young men,” he said on Air Force One.
This was strongly denied by the Iranian Attorney General.
“The judiciary is an independent institution and does not accept foreign orders” and “the US president’s claim that 800 executions in Iran are false,” said Mohammad Movahediv, quoted by Iranian public television channel IRIB.
Movahediv called Trump “irrational and arrogant,” while calling his claims “completely false.” He added: “Such a figure does not exist and the judiciary has never made such a decision.”
The president indicated Thursday that Tehran nonetheless remained open to negotiations, something he has also touted in the past.
“Iran wants to talk, and we will talk,” Trump said.
