Iranian state TV has said security forces killed what it called “thugs and rioters” during last month’s mass protests against a gas price increase.
Activists have accused the authorities of deliberately covering up the scale of the crackdown on the four days of unrest in more than 100 locations.
Amnesty International has said at least 208 people were killed, but others have put the death toll at close to 1000.
A judiciary spokesman has dismissed such reports as “utter lies”.
The authorities have not yet released any overall casualty figures.
The protests erupted in cities and towns across Iran on 15 November, after the government announced that the price of gasoline would rise by 50% to 15,000 rials a litre ($.45 cents/gallon), and that drivers would be allowed to purchase only 60 litres (16 gallons/month) each month before the price rose to 30,000 rials ($.90 cents /gallon).
The decision was met with widespread anger in a country where the economy is already reeling as a result of US sanctions that were reinstated last year when President Trump abandoned a nuclear deal with Iran.
The authorities’ decision to almost completely shut down access to the internet made it hard to gather information about what was happening on the streets, but the video footage that reached the outside world appeared to show security forces shooting at unarmed demonstrators.
Interior Minister Rahmani Fazli said last week that as many as 200,000 people took part in the protests, and 731 banks, 70 gas stations and 140 government sites were set ablaze. More than 50 security bases were also attacked, he added.
Iran’s state-run IRTV2 channel broadcast a report confirming that there were fatalities during the unrest, but did not give any figures. It categorized those killed as “armed thugs and rioters”, security personnel, passers-by hit by crossfire or victims of “suspicious shootings”.
A correspondent said “rioters” had attacked sensitive or military sites with guns or knives, and taken people hostage, leaving security forces with no choice to “resort to authoritative and tough confrontation” to save lives.
In the south-western city of Mahshahr, the correspondent added, “separatists” armed with machine-guns blocked roads and planned to blow up a petrochemical complex. In an interview, the city’s police chief said “wise” security forces “thwarted” an armed attack by people hiding in a local marsh.
The New York Times cited witnesses and medics in Mahshahr as saying that members of the Revolutionary Guards surrounded, shot and killed 40 to 100 demonstrators in a marsh where they had sought refuge.
IRTV2’s report also mentioned that security forces had confronted rioters in Tehran and the suburb of Shahriar, and in the southern cities of Shiraz and Sirjan.
Amnesty International said on Monday that it had compiled its nationwide death toll of 208 from reports whose credibility it ascertained by interviewing a range of sources, including victims’ relatives, journalists and human rights activists. But it warned that the actual number was likely to be higher.
Other rights groups and sources inside Iran said the death toll was close to 400.
During a visit to London on Tuesday, President Trump said Iran was “killing perhaps thousands and thousands of people right now as we speak.” He added: “It is a terrible thing and the world has to be watching.”
Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili (Golum Hussein Hesmali) told reporters in Tehran that “the numbers and figures that are being given by hostile groups are utter lies, and the official statistics have serious differences with what they announced”.
Mr Esmaili also said that most of those detained “during the riots” had been released.
The judiciary, he added, was evaluating “efficiently and with precision” the cases of those still in custody, including about 300 people in Tehran.
Hossein Hosseini, a member of parliament’s national security committee, said last week that about 7,000 people were arrested during the unrest.
This third outbreak of demonstrations in three years reflects deepening economic woes and a sense of hopelessness for the people of Iran.
The cycle of protest and vicious repression is grimly familiar in the region.
Iran’s five-day internet shutdown helped to ensure that we still know relatively little about this month’s events there.
What we do know makes grim reading. It details police firing on crowds and in some cases shooting protesters as they ran away. The regime itself boasts of having made 1,000 arrests; others suggest four times that many may have been detained.
These were widespread protests, reportedly reaching 70% of provinces.
They appear to have been more in the mould of those seen in 2017 and 2018 – leaderless, economically driven, and drawing in poorer voters – rather than the more middle-class, urban and political “green movement” of 2009.
According to the authorities, around 87,000 people took part, mostly unemployed young men.
As I stated earlier, the spark was the abrupt increase in gas prices, of almost 300%.
The government said it wanted to tackle fuel smuggling and give cash payments to the poorest three-quarters of Iran’s 80 million population.
One problem is that the price hikes arrived first. Another is that, owing to official incompetence and corruption, many do not trust the authorities to deliver what they promise. A third is that in many cases the cash will not offset people’s increased fuel costs.
The broader context is the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and America’s choking of the Iranian economy, already suffering after decades of mismanagement.
Inflation and unemployment have soared. The impact has not only been on the daily struggle of Iranians to get by, but also, perhaps as critically, upon their morale: the US abandonment of the JCPOA dashed many people’s last hope.
The optimism and energy that surged when Hassan Rouhani signed the agreement has vanished.
Iranians are unlikely to see significant improvements in their dire economic conditions unless this international situation changes.
In the absence of progress, there is the real danger that Iran will provoke a regional crisis to draw international attention again.
Tehran was well prepared for these protests, given the unrest of the last two years and its role in Lebanon and Iraq, also dealing with demonstrations.
Yet more unrest will surely come. Accusing the US, Britain and others of stoking unrest, as the regime has done, will do nothing to persuade people that their dissatisfaction is being addressed. Brutal crackdowns fuel their grievances.
The regime has survived uprisings in the past. But now it is starting to kill demonstrators in great numbers.
The deadly drama playing out in Iran shows three things.
Tehran is increasingly in desperate economic straits, in part because of intense U.S. sanctions; Iranian popular discontent with the regime’s economic mismanagement seems to have reached a breaking point; and the regime is more frightened of popular unrest than at any time in recent years.
The demonstrations that began over fuel prices quickly became a sweeping, nationwide protest against the Iranian regime itself, with outbreaks in dozens of cities in every Iranian province, targeting especially government buildings such as police stations and state-owned banks.
The government’s response has been much more brutal than in previous outbreaks of protest, such as in 2017-2018, including a near-total shutdown of the internet and unrestrained use of violence by security forces
The brutal crackdown is both evidence of the regime’s desperation at its own inability to sway popular opinion and a result of watching weeks of similar deadly protests (also directed against Iran) in Iraq and Lebanon.
“Fundamentally, it is an economic protest. But clearly, among some protesters, there is the opportunity to make broader complaints about the government,” said Henry Rome, an Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group.
The fuel price reform was meant to save the government a few hundred million dollars over the course of a year.
The fact that Iran would risk sparking such widespread anger for minimal economic gain underscores the dire condition of the Iranian economy, hammered by U.S. sanctions in its inability to export practically any oil, one of the main sources of revenue for the government.
“They did the reform because they are broke,” said Alireza Nader, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). “People can’t afford a 300 percent increase in gas prices, but the regime didn’t have any other choice.”
Though it was a calculated risk, the fuel price reform was meant as a way to spur consumption among lower-income groups and save gasoline for export, Rome said.
Another problem is that many people simply didn’t believe the government would follow through on the cash transfers. Yet another is that they worried that higher gas prices would just trickle down to higher prices for all sorts of other consumer goods, at a time when annual inflation in Iran is officially at least 40 percent and perhaps as much as five times higher.
Though Iranian officials, including President Hassan Rouhani, have blamed foreign countries and especially the United States for organizing the uprising, the U.S. role is—as far as is publicly known—mostly indirect, rather than actively supporting opposition groups.
Since President Trump reimposed sweeping sanctions on Iran’s economy, including the ban on oil sales, Iran’s economy has been in a free fall.
Because of the increased pinch from sanctions, the International Monetary Fund recently revised downward its expectations for Iran’s economy: It now expects it to shrink by almost 10 percent this year.
Experts question whether the resumption of sanctions will help topple the regime or strengthen it.
But the protests, like those that also swept the country in 2017-2018, are about more than just U.S.-inflicted pain. Many Iranians are irate at rampant corruption and economic mismanagement, constants in the 40 years since Iran’s revolution.
“The underlying grievances were there without the maximum pressure campaign, but it’s the fiscal strain that the government is under which has forced it to take these steps, which has brought those grievances to the forefront,” Rome said. And once people are in the street, narrow protests can snowball.
“Once there is an avenue open for protest, the dam is burst,” he said.
If redoubled U.S. economic pressure is contributing to Iran’s distress, does that mean the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign is working?
If the administration’s goal was to change the thoughts of Iranian leaders regarding the country’s destabilizing activities in the region and its pursuit of nuclear technologies, the answer seems to be a clear no.
As the U.S. economic noose has tightened, Iran has lashed out even more—attacking Saudi oil tankers and allegedly even a major Saudi oil facility, in addition to spending billions of dollars to prop up proxy terrorist groups throughout the region.
At the same time, Iran has steadily reneged on its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal and has resumed enriching uranium at higher levels and installing more advanced centrifuges, which could shorten its path to the bomb.
If the Trump administration’s goal was to destabilize Iran to the point that the regime faces an existential threat from within, the economic pressure may be paying dividends.
Iran’s response to the protests this week has been unprecedented levels of violence and killings. Some Iran observers see that as a sign that the regime feels it is doomed.
“This is a full rebellion, not a fuel protest,” said Nader of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
“The regime wants an internet blackout so they can massacre their way out of this. But there is no way out. Even if this round is crushed, there will be more of this. There is no more oil and increasing isolation. So I don’t see any way for the regime to get out of this.”
Others think that the combination of cash handouts and brutal repression will, as so many times in the past, shore up the regime’s hold on power.
“This is not regime-threatening from an immediate security point of view. They have repressive force and are not afraid of killing their own people,” Rome, an Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group, said.
“They are not going anywhere. These are not the initial tremors of another revolution.”
So, is the United States going to war with Iran? Probably not.
Should the United States go to war with Iran? Probably not.
It is unlikely that we will find ourselves in a war with Iran in the near term because both sides are eager to avoid one.
Although some of President Trump’s advisors may welcome a clash with Tehran, he has consistently made clear that he wants to end American wars in the Middle East, not start new ones.
That has been behind his moves to pull US troops out of Syria and his unwillingness to become further involved in the Yemeni civil war.
On the other side of the Persian Gulf, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader announced that there would be no war.
In case you don’t believe him, the Iranians have typically shown enormous respect for American conventional military power since they were shellacked by it in the late 1980s.
They know full well that in a full-on war, the US would do tremendous damage to Iran’s armed forces and could threaten the regime’s grip on power – which is the very thing they are seeking to avoid.
Of course, just because two countries don’t want a war doesn’t mean that they won’t stumble into one anyway.
Given the current tensions created by the American pressure on Iran and Tehran’s efforts to push back, the deployment of additional American military forces to the region, and the tendency for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to occasionally take unauthorized aggressive actions, no one should rule out an unintended clash.
Even then, however, the most likely scenario would be a limited American retaliatory strike to demonstrate to Iran that Washington won’t be pushed around by a 98-pound weakling and that Tehran needs to keep its problem children under control.
Over the longer term, there are other threats. Because of its conventional military weakness compared to the US (and Israel), Iran has typically preferred to employ terrorism and cyber attacks – more often directed at American allies than at the US itself – to create problems for Washington without creating a pretext for a major US military response.
We’ve already seen that begin with mysterious attacks on Saudi oil tankers off the coast of the UAE, and drone strikes by Iran’s Houthi allies on Saudi oil pipelines.
These attacks have the twin benefits for Iran of hurting (and potentially humiliating) a key American ally while simultaneously jacking up the price of oil.
In the past, the Iranians have also mounted cyber-attacks on the computer network of Saudi Aramco, the company that controls the Saudi oil network.
If Iran continues this pattern of activity, the US and its allies will look for ways to deter and defeat the Iranian attacks.
At some point, the US (or the Israelis, if they get dragged in, as they often are) might decide to respond with a military strike.
And the Iranians might feel compelled to respond in kind, if only to demonstrate that they won’t take a punch without throwing one in return.
Again, there’s good reason to believe that that would be the end of it, but it’s not impossible that it might be the start of something bigger.
We should also remember that on occasion in the past, Iran has overstepped itself, mounting terror attacks that could have (and should have) crossed American red lines.
In 1996, Iran blew up the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 and injuring almost 400 American military personnel.
In 2011, Iran plotted to blow up a restaurant in Washington, D.C. while the Saudi Ambassador was dining there. The attack was foiled before it could be executed, but if it had happened, it could have killed scores of people in America’s capital. These were reckless Iranian moves at times of great tension that could easily have triggered a US military response.
Finally, there is the most important question of all: should the US be looking to pick a fight with Iran?
The best reason not to go to war with Iran is that we will almost certainly win. But in winning, we could easily cause the collapse of the Iranian regime, which would create the same kind of chaos and internal conflict in Iran that our failure to prepare for a full-scale reconstruction of Iraq caused there.
Iran has three times the population, four times the land area, and five times the problems of Iraq. Winning such a war with Iran only to have made the tremendous effort to stabilize and rebuild it probably won’t feel much like winning at all.
Folks, what do you think? Should we step in to this mess in Iran or should we stand on the sidelines and see what happens?