Iranian academics clashed with security forces at a primary university in Tehran amid a wave of unrest sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, state media and rights teams said on Monday. Iranian Kurd Amini, 22, was pronounced dead on September 16, days after her arrest for allegedly flouting rules requiring women to wear hijab and modest clothing, triggering the largest wave of protests in Iran in just about 3 years.
Iran’s ideal leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, nevertheless broke his silence on Monday about the chaos in his country, telling an organization of police cadets that the United States and Israel were the “riots” in Iran. Khamenei called Amini’s death a “sad incident” that “broke our hearts,” but condemned the protests as a “planned” foreign plot to destabilize the country.
“This insurrection was planned,” he told the cadets amassed in Tehran. “Obviously I say that those insurrections and insecurities were designed by the United States and the Zionist regime and its employees. . . Such movements are not normal, they are not natural. “
Foreign rights teams say more than 80 people have been killed since Iranian security forces began cracking down on protests, with some members of the forces among the dead.
Concern about violence grew at Sharif University of Technology overnight when, according to local media, police insurrection clashed with many students, tear gas and paintballs and guns firing non-lethal metal balls.
“Woman, life, freedom,” the academics shouted, as “academics prefer death to humiliation,” Iran’s Mehr news firm reported, adding that the country’s science minister arrived later to communicate with academics in an effort to calm the situation.
Oslo-based Iran Human Rights released a video showing Iranian police on motorcycles chasing students running through an underground parking lot and, in another clip, stripping detainees whose heads were covered with plastic bags. black fabric
In the video, which may not be independently verified, gunshots and screams can be heard as a large number of other people run down the street at night.
“Security forces attacked Sharif University in Tehran tonight. Gunshots can be heard,” IHR in a Twitter post on Sunday.
In another music video, a crowd of other people can be heard chanting, “Don’t be afraid!Don’t be afraid!We are all together!” IHR said the video was taken Sunday at the Shariati metro station in the capital, Tehran.
The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran said it is “extremely involved through videos that were posted today at Sharif University and Tehran that look like a violent crackdown on protests through detainees taking their heads absolutely covered with cloth. “
The Mehr news agency said that “Sharif University of Technology announced that due to recent occasions and the desire of students. . . All categories will take positions practically from Monday. “
Since the riots began on September 16, dozens of protesters have been killed and more than a thousand arrested. Among the victims were members of the security forces.
As CBS News correspondent Roxana Saberi reported over the weekend, anti-government protests entered their third week despite serious web restrictions and a brutal crackdown by Iranian security forces aimed at quelling the agitation.
And while Iranian women have participated in other nationwide protests, Saberi said that this time, the spark of the riots was the death of a woman, and a journalist, Niloufar Hamedi of the Shargh newspaper, who broke the story.
Hamedi arrested and held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison for her work. She is one of at least 19 journalists, including seven women, detained across the country since the protests began, according to Reporters Without Borders. The Center for Human Rights in Iran puts the figure at 25 or more.
“This is the first time that a giant number of women, side by side with men, have burned their headscarves,” she told CBS. News Masih Alinejad, Iranian journalist and activist who fled Iran in 2009 and is now in New York.
The veil or hijab “is the main pillar of the Islamic Republic,” said Alinejad, who leads an online crusade called “My Stealth Freedom” that stores photographs of women in Iran flouting hijab rules.
She said Iranian women “firmly that through burning headscarves, they are really shaking the regime. “
In the decades leading up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Saberi said women were commonly seen on the streets of Iran dressed in the hijab and the latest Western fashions. But soon after the revolution, the new Islamic regime decreed that women and women of a young age cover their hair and bodies in public. Hardliners proclaimed that the hijab would protect women’s honor, but for many protesters it remained a strong symbol of oppression.
The women who protested need a choice between wearing the hijab or not, according to Azadeh Pourzand, co-founder of the U. S. Siamak Pourzand Foundation, which promotes free speech in Iran.
“These are women who feel humiliated and women who feel compelled to do anything they might not have to do,” said Pourzand, who is also a PhD student at the University of London and focuses on women’s activism in Iran.
While Iranian women have been pushing for legal reforms for years, very little has been achieved, she said. practices, he said.
Pourzand said the ongoing protests have united Iranians of other ages, ethnicities and cities. The demonstrators are only calling for women’s rights, but they are also protesting the broader political repression as well as mismanagement and corruption that have left Iran globally isolated and its economy. Fighting.