Region

PARIS — Iranian students protested and shopkeepers went on strike on Saturday despite a widening crackdown, according to reports on social media, as demonstrations that flared over Mahsa Amini's death entered an eighth week.

The clerical state has been gripped by protests that erupted when Amini, 22, died in custody after her arrest for an alleged breach of Iran's strict dress code for women.

As the working week got under way, security forces adopted new measures to halt protests at universities in Tehran, searching students and forcing them to remove facemasks, activists said.

But demonstrators were heard chanting "I am a free woman, you are the pervert" at Islamic Azad University of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, in a video published by BBC Persian.

"A student dies, but doesn't accept humiliation," sang students at Gilan University in the northern city of Rasht, in footage posted online by an activist. AFP was unable to immediately verify the videos.

In the north-western city of Qazvin, dozens chanted similar slogans at a mourning ceremony 40 days after the death of demonstrator Javad Heydari — a custom that has fuelled further protest flashpoints.

The Norway-based Hengaw rights group said people were observing a "widespread strike" in Amini's home town of Saqez, in Kurdistan province, where shops were shuttered.

A video aired later by Manoto, a television channel based abroad and banned in Iran, appeared to show students locked inside Islamic Azad University in north Tehran.

'Massacre' 

Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights said Saturday that at least 186 people have been killed in the protest crackdown, a rise of 10 from Wednesday.

It said another 118 people had lost their lives in separate protests since September 30 in Sistan-Baluchistan, a mainly Sunni Muslim province in the southeast, on the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

An official in Kerman province admitted the authorities were having trouble quelling the protests that erupted after Amini's death on September 16.

“The restrictions on the Internet, the arrest of the leaders of the riots and the presence of the state in the streets always eliminated sedition, but this type of sedition and its audience are different,” Rahman Jalali, political and security deputy for the province, was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency.

In a flare-up in Sistan-Baluchistan, up to 10 people, including children, were killed on Friday by security forces in the city of Khash, Amnesty International said.

Molavi Abdol Hamid, the cleric who leads Friday prayers in Sistan-Baluchistan’s capital Zahedan, condemned the Khash “massacre” that he said had killed 16 people.

Videos verified by AFP show people running for cover as bursts of gunfire are heard in Khash and Zahedan.

Iran has sought to portray the protest movement as a plot hatched by its arch-enemy the United States.

US downplays 

Biden remarks 

Ultra-conservative President Ebrahim Raisi on Friday dismissed a pledge by his US counterpart Joe Biden to “free Iran”, retorting that Iran had already been freed by the overthrow of the Western-backed shah in 1979.

“Our young men and young women are determined and we will never allow you to carry out your satanic desires,” he told a gathering commemorating the November 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran by radical students.

US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby played down the American leader’s remarks.

“The president was expressing our solidarity with the protesters as he’s been doing, quite frankly, from the very outset,” Kirby told reporters.

Asked whether the Biden administration thought Iran’s regime could soon fall, he said: “I don’t believe we have indications of that kind.”

On Friday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform, Binance, acknowledged funds belonging to or intended for Iranians had flowed through its service and may have run afoul of US sanctions.

“Earlier in the week, we discovered that Binance interacted” with “bad actors” using Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges, said Chagri Poyraz, head of sanctions at Binance.

Some of these users “attempted to move crypto through Binance’s exchange”, he wrote on a blog on the company’s website. “As soon as we discovered this, we moved to freeze transfers [and] block accounts.”

No Iranian cryptocurrency platforms are currently under sanctions. But US-imposed restrictions prohibit a US entity or US national from selling goods and services to Iranian residents, businesses or institutions. The ban includes financial services.

BAGHDAD — When a landslide buried part of an Islamic shrine in Iraq this summer, killing eight pilgrims, sorrow quickly turned to anger because the site was run without oversight from state or religious authorities.

The deadly disaster struck in August near Karbala when tonnes of soggy earth and rock collapsed onto the Shiite shrine Qattarat Al Imam Ali, dedicated to the imam’s journey on his way to battle in AD657.

By the time the search-and-rescue effort was over, three trapped children had been brought out alive — but the bodies of two men, five women and one child had also been pulled from the rubble.

The shared grief quickly gave way to public fury when Iraqi government and religious officials said they were not responsible for the site, or for policing its building and safety standards.

The shrine was one of hundreds that are being run privately and are therefore unregulated — many of which, some critics charge, operate with profit rather than piety as the main motive.

Karbala resident Maitham Abbas lashed out at what he called a “fake shrine”, dismissing it as a money making scheme.

Since the tragedy, politicians, clerics and religious officials have acknowledged the need to better enforce building standards in a war-scarred country generally plagued by crumbling infrastructure.

Iraq’s Waqf, the body in charge of managing Shiite mosques, tombs and other places of worship, reports that only 135 out of Iraq’s 664 known sanctuaries are formally registered.

The others are beyond Waqf’s remit and derive their legitimacy from the faith invested in them by flocks of visiting pilgrims, many of whom give what they can in donations.

There are “around 100 shrines dedicated to the daughters of Imam Hassan”, who passed only briefly through Iraq, said Hashem Al Awadi, deputy head of the government department responsible for Shiite shrines.

“Where does all this offspring come from?” he asked incredulously.

Informal 

pilgrimage sites 

Under Saddam, “an informal approach was cultivated by the people, indeed by the Shiite institutions, to avoid being attached to the state”, said Sabrina Mervin, a historian specialising in Shiism.

The post-Saddam years were marred by sectarian violence but also saw a Shiite revival as millions of faithful once more flocked to their holy sites, especially the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala.

Hundreds of smaller shrines opened up — many outside the purview of the religious authorities, which are often reluctant to proactively check building standards for fear of offending believers.

The Shiite revival was driven not by institutions but by “pilgrim practices which evolve from the grassroots, from the religiosity of the faithful”, said Mervin, of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

“If there are pilgrims... there is necessarily a foundation story that makes a place a holy place,” she said.

“The religious authorities have no arguments to prevent pilgrims from showing their attachment and devotion to major Shiite figures, even in places that are unrecognised.”

Registration 

can be tricky 

Most such sites are dedicated to relatives or descendants of Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed and the founder of the Shiite strand of Islam.

One is located on the side of a motorway south of Baghdad, dating back to the 1980s and not registered by the Waqf, where faithful offer chocolate snacks and small cash donations.

Pilgrim Kamel Rahim, 78, was praying to be healed from sickness at the graves of three distant descendants of Imam Ali — Sayyed Ahmed, Sayyed Ali and their father Al Mozher.

Rahim explained that local residents had “discovered stones on which their names were inscribed. They dug and found two graves”.

Awadi, the state official, said more shrines should seek official recognition, which offers them “legal weight and stature” as well as state development funding, and grants their guardians the status of civil servants.

But the process of authenticating and approving a shrine is protracted, he said, as it involves an assessment of its founding story and “a lineage investigation” of the deceased who is revered there.

This, he explained, can be a sensitive subject, especially if the request is denied.

“If you report a fake shrine,” he said, “how many people do you think will believe you, and how many will accuse you of straying from the path of religion?”

JENIN, Palestinian Territories — Israeli forces killed four Palestinians on Thursday, including an alleged attacker and Islamist fighter, medics and security officials said, as violence flared across Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

Two Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli forces in the northern West Bank city of Jenin — named as 14-year-old Mohammed Samer Khalouf and 28-year-old Farouq Salameh — while four others suffered gunshot wounds, the Palestinian health ministry said.

Israel's forces described Salameh as "an operative belonging to the Islamic Jihad organisation", and said he was the target of a raid.

An army statement blamed Salameh for several recent attacks targeting Israeli forces, and said soldiers raided a building in Jenin after receiving intelligence he was inside.

After an initial gun battle, Salameh fled. Soldiers followed him, the army said, adding he "pulled out a gun" before being "neutralised".

Hours earlier, a Palestinian who allegedly stabbed an Israeli officer was shot dead in Jerusalem's Old City.

He "stabbed one of the officers in the upper body" before he was shot dead, a police statement said.

The latest killings came two days after an Israeli general election, and amid what the United Nations says is the deadliest period in years in the West Bank, with near daily army raids and an increase in clashes and attacks on Israeli forces.

The incident in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem happened beside a checkpoint for Muslim worshippers visiting the nearby Al Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site.

Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem said they were treating a man suffering a stab wound to the torso, and another man who was lightly wounded by a gunshot to the leg, likely from shots fired by police.

Another police officer was wounded after being hit by fragments during the incident, Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital said.

Mourners meanwhile gathered in the West Bank village of Beit Duqqu for the funeral of a 42-year-old man, killed in clashes with Israeli forces.

Israeli border police said officers shot dead a suspect “with a firebomb in his hand” in Beit Duqqu, northwest of Jerusalem.

At least 34 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed across occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank since the start of October, according to an AFP tally.

Early on Thursday, the Israeli forces said it had lifted a weeks long closure of the West Bank city of Nablus, which had disrupted travel in and out of the city for more than 200,000 Palestinians.

Just hours after the closure was lifted, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh led a high profile delegation of some 30 foreign diplomats — including the European Union and United States envoys — and Palestinian officials on a march through the Nablus’ Old City.

He said that the three-week “siege” had been a form of “collective punishment”.

PARIS — Iranian authorities on Wednesday ordered an investigation into a video showing officers savagely beating a protester that rights groups said exposed the brutality of the crackdown on demonstrations sparked by Mahsa Amini's death.

The Islamic republic has been rocked by over six weeks of unrest following the death of Amini, 22, who had been arrested by Tehran's morality police, a movement now seen as the biggest challenge to its leaders since the 1979 revolution.

Activists say dozens have been killed and thousands arrested nationwide in a crackdown by the security forces who have been accused of firing on protesters at close range, bludgeoning them with batons and other abuses.

A footage that appeared late Tuesday on social media, shot at night on a mobile phone purportedly in a district of Tehran, showed a squad of around a dozen policemen in an alley kicking and beating a man with their batons, as other officers on motorbikes looked on.

In the footage, the man initially tries to cover his head with his hands, before the sound of a gunshot is heard and he is run over by a police motorbike. His motionless body is then abandoned.

“This shocking video sent from Tehran is another horrific reminder that the cruelty of Iran’s security forces knows no bounds,” Amnesty International said, adding that police appeared to have a “free rein” to use violence.

Iran’s police force announced in a statement that an order had been issued to “investigate the exact time and place of the incident and identify the offenders”.

“The police absolutely do not approve of violent and unconventional behaviour and will deal with the offenders according to the rules,” added the statement published by state news agency IRNA.

‘Terrorise the people’ 

According to an updated death toll issued on Wednesday by the Norway-based group Iran Human Rights, 176 people have been killed in the crackdown on protests sparked by Amini’s death.

Another 101 people have lost their lives in a distinct protest wave in Zahedan in the southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has issued only rare comments on the protests, in a speech to schoolchildren accused the United States of establishing “a plan for Tehran and the country’s large and small cities”.

Thousands have been arrested nationwide, rights activists say, while Iran’s judiciary has said 1,000 people had already been charged over what it describes as “riots”.

The trial of five men charged with offences that can carry the death penalty over the protests opened on Saturday in Tehran.

“The charges and sentences have no legal validity and their sole purpose is to commit more violence and create societal fear,” said IHR Director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, condemning the “show trials”.

Centre for Human Rights in Iran director Hadi Ghaemi warned that courts handing down death sentences would be a “blatant attempt to terrorise the Iranian people into silence”.

Activists condemned as a forced confession extracted under duress a video published by state-run Iranian media of Toomaj Salehi, a prominent rapper arrested at the weekend after backing the protests.

The video shows a tattooed man who, while wearing a blindfold, declares: “I am Toomaj Salehi. I said I made a mistake.”

Freedom of expression group Article 19 wrote on Twitter that it was “extremely disturbed Iran state media are sharing forced confessions of rapper Toomaj Salehi under clear duress”.

‘Regime in a bind’ 

Amini’s death was, according to family members, caused by a blow to the head while in custody. The Iranian authorities contested this explanation and later denied it in an official medical report.

The protests were fuelled by anger over the strict Islamic dress code for women in Iran, which the police who arrested Amini were enforcing.

They have become a rallying point for popular anger against the regime that has ruled Iran since the fall of the shah in 1979.

The challenge for the regime is compounded by the custom in Iran to mark 40 days since a person died, turning every “chehelom” mourning ceremony for the dozens killed in the crackdown into a potential protest flashpoint.

According to IHR, large numbers of mourners Wednesday attended a 40-day ceremony for Hannaneh Kia, 23, who rights group say was shot dead by security forces in the Caspian Sea city of Nowshahr.

They clapped hands in unison and chanted “Death to Khamenei” in a video published by the group.

“Funerals and 40-day commemoration ceremonies for killed protesters are increasingly becoming the impetus for further unrest,” said Kita Fitzpatrick, Iran analyst at the Critical Threats Project of the American Enterprise Institute.

“This places the regime in a bind: they run the risk of inadvertently sustaining the protest movement in attempting to violently suppress it.”

PARIS — Iranians staged new protests on Tuesday to denounce the country's theocratic regime in defiance of a crackdown that has seen prominent figures arrested and some even face the death penalty.

Iran has been rocked by six weeks of protests of a scale and nature unprecedented since the 1979 Islamic revolution, sparked by the death in mid-September of Mahsa Amini who had been arrested by the Tehran morality police.

The authorities have warned protesters it is time to leave the streets but the demonstrations have shown no sign of abating, with people rallying in residential areas, on major avenues and at universities nationwide.

The challenge for the regime is compounded by the custom in Iran to mark 40 days since a person died, turning every "chehelom" mourning ceremony for the dozens killed in the crackdown into a new potential protest flashpoint.

Residents of the Tehran district of Ekbatan late Monday shouted slogans including "Death to the dictator" while security forces used stun grenades against them, according to footage posted on the monitoring site 1500tasvir and other outlets.

Norway-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR) said that students were on Tuesday staging a sit-in protest at Isfahan University while social media footage indicated similar actions at other faculties in Tehran and Isfahan.

IHR said a large number of people on Tuesday attended the 40th day mourning ceremony for protester Siavash Mahmoudi, who it said was shot dead by the security forces, at the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery outside Tehran, also chanting "Death to the dictator".

Students at Beheshti University in Tehran, including some women not wearing headscarves, staged a march shouting "chant for your rights!", according to the New York-based Centre for Human Rights in Iran.

Toll mounts 

Amini's death was, according to family members, caused by a blow to the head while in custody. The Iranian authorities contest this explanation and said they have ordered an investigation.

The protests were fuelled by anger over the strict Islamic dress code for women in Iran — which the police who arrested Amini were enforcing — but have become a rallying point for popular anger against the regime that has ruled Iran since the fall of the shah in 1979.

While there have been outbursts of protests in Iran over the past two decades, the current movement has regularly broken taboos.

Images shared on social media showed murals of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his predecessor Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had been daubed with red paint in the holy city of Qom.

The protests have also seen a myriad of different tactics, with observers noting a new trend of young people tipping off the turbans of clerics in the street.

According to IHR, 160 people have been killed in the crackdown on the protests sparked by Amini’s death and another 93 in a distinct protest wave in Zahedan in the south-eastern Sistan-Baluchistan province.

The Norway-based Kurdish rights group Hengaw said among those buried was Komar Daruftade, a 16-year-old from Piranshahr in north-western Iran who it said had been shot by security forces at a distance of 3 metres (and later died in hospital.

A viral video, which AFP could not immediately verify, showed police in the Tehran district of Naziabad savagely beating a protester, running him over with a motorbike and firing at him.

‘Shocked’ 

Thousands have been arrested nationwide in the crackdown, rights activists say, while Iran’s judiciary has said 1,000 people have already been charged in connection with what it labelled “riots”.

The trial of five men charged with offences that can carry capital punishment over the protests opened Saturday in Tehran.

One of them, Mohammad Ghobadlou, was sentenced to death at the first session, according to a video from his mother posted by the Washington-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Centre. However this has not been confirmed by the judiciary.

The popular Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi has become the latest high profile figure to be arrested, according to the Centre for Human Rights in Iran.

“You are dealing with a mafia that is ready to kill the entire nation... in order to keep its power, money and weapons,” Toomaj had told the Canadian Broadcasting Cooperation last week.

At least 46 journalists have been arrested so far, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. The culture ministry says eight of those arrested have been released so far.

Tehran journalist Marzieh Amiri was the latest to be detained, her sister Samira wrote on Instagram.

Vahid Shamsoddinnezhad, an Iranian national resident in France, was arrested a month ago in Iranian Kurdistan while covering the protests for French-German TV channel Arte, the broadcaster said.

Meanwhile, the prominent freedom of expression campaigner and Wall Street Journal contributor Hossein Ronaghi, who was arrested shortly after the protests began, is on “hunger strike and not well”, his brother Hassan wrote on Twitter.

Both Ronaghi’s legs have been broken while in custody, he wrote, after the activist was granted a meeting with his parents.

BAABDA, Lebanon — Lebanon's outgoing head of state, Michel Aoun, left the presidential palace on Sunday, a day before his mandate expires without a designated successor, deepening the country's political crisis.

His six-year term was marred by mass protests, a painful economic downturn and the August 2020 mega-explosion of ammonium nitrate that killed hundreds and laid waste to swathes of Beirut.

Aoun, a Maronite Christian in his late 80s, said he had signed a final decree formalising the resignation of premier Najib Mikati's caretaker government, exacerbating a months-long power struggle that has paralysed the government.

Mikati, a Sunni Muslim, retorted that Aoun's decision had "no constitutional basis" and that his cabinet would "continue to carry out all its constitutional duties, including its caretaker functions".

Aoun's term formally ends Monday, complicating politics in Lebanon at a time it must meet reform demands from the International Monetary Fund to access billions of dollars in loans.

Thousands of well-wishers came to pay tribute to Aoun, a former army chief and head of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), which is allied with the powerful pro-Iranian Shiite movement Hizbollah.

Aoun's supporters, some of whom had slept in tents outside the presidential palace near Beirut, came brandishing portraits of the man widely referred to as the "general", dating back to his role in the 1975-1990 civil war.

"We have come to escort the president at the end of his mandate, to tell him that we are with him and that we will continue the struggle by his side," said one, teacher Joumana Nahed.

Lebanese lawmakers have tried and failed four times in a month to agree on electing a successor to Aoun.

Neither Hizbollah, the powerful armed movement which dominates political life in Lebanon, nor its opponents have the clear majority needed to impose a candidate to succeed him.

The president’s powers fall to the Council of Ministers if he leaves office without a successor. A Cabinet in a caretaker role cannot, however, take important decisions that might impact the country’s fate, Lahham said.

‘Vacuum and paralysis’ 

Before bowing out, Aoun delivered a final broadside against Mikati.

“This morning, I sent a letter to parliament and signed a decree that considers the government resigned,” he told supporters before leaving the palace in the hills above Beirut.

Experts say the move will likely not impact the work of Mikati’s government, which has remained in a caretaker role since legislative elections in the spring.

But it was part of ongoing political arm-wrestling between Aoun and Mikati, who is also in charge of forming a new government.

Aoun told parliament in a letter that Mikati was “uninterested” in forming a new Cabinet to deal with Lebanon’s myriad problems and called on him to resign.

Constitutional expert Wissam Lahham said that “what Aoun is doing is unprecedented” since Lebanon adopted its constitution in 1926.

Under Lebanese law, a government that has resigned continues in a caretaker role until a new one is formed, Lahham said, describing Aoun’s decree as “meaningless”.

Lawmaker Ghassan Hasbani of the Lebanese Forces, the FPM’s Christian rivals, said that Aoun had dealt an additional blow to the country’s paralysed state institutions by signing the decree.

“The government will now operate only within the narrowest of caretaker scopes,” Hasbani said, while parliament can no longer meet to legislate, only to vote on a new president.

“We are faced with a vacuum at the executive level and paralysis of the legislative body.”