PARIS —
At least 92 people have been killed as Iran has cracked down on women-led
protests sparked by the death of
Mahsa Amini after her arrest by the notorious
morality police, the group Iran Human Rights (IHR) said Sunday.
اضافة اعلان
As protests
stretch into a third week, President Ebrahim Raisi on Sunday said that the
“enemies” of Iran had “failed in their conspiracy”.
Kurdish Iranian
Amini, 22, was pronounced dead on September 16 after she was detained for
allegedly breaching rules requiring women to wear hijab headscarves and modest
clothes, sparking Iran’s biggest wave of popular unrest in almost three years.
An additional 41
people died in clashes Friday in Iran’s far southeast, an area bordering
Afghanistan and
Pakistan, Oslo-based IHR also said, citing local sources. Those
protests were sparked by accusations a police chief in the region had raped a
teenage girl of the Baluch minority, it said.
Solidarity
rallies with Iranian women — who have defiantly burnt the hijabs they have been
obliged to wear since the 1979 Islamic revolution — have been held worldwide,
with demonstrations in more than 150 cities on Saturday.
In Iran itself,
clashes between Iranian protesters and security forces have rocked cities
nationwide for 16 nights in a row after they first flared in western regions
home to Iran’s Kurdish minority, where Amini hailed from.
“Rioters” and
“thugs”, some hurling Molotov cocktails, attacked the Tehran headquarters of
Iran’s leading ultraconservative daily Kayhan on Saturday, said the newspaper,
whose director is appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
IHR director
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam urged the international community to take urgent steps
against the Islamic republic to stop the killing of Iranian protesters, saying
they amount to “crimes against humanity”.
‘Teenage girl raped’
At least 92 protesters in the Mahsa Amini rallies have been killed so
far, said IHR, which has been working to assess the death toll despite internet
outages and blocks on WhatsApp, Instagram and other online services.
London-based
Amnesty International said earlier it had confirmed 53 deaths, after Iran’s
semi-official Fars news agency said last week that “around 60” people had died.
Tehran has also
battled unrest in the country’s southeast, and it said five Revolutionary
Guards members were killed in clashes Friday in Zahedan, the capital of
Sistan-Baluchestan province.
The
poverty-stricken region has often seen clashes with Baluchi minority rebels,
Sunni Muslim extremist groups and drug smuggling gangs.
IHR accused the
security forces of the mainly Shiite country of “bloodily repressing” the
Zahedan protest that erupted after Friday prayers over accusations a police
chief in the province’s port city of Chabahar had raped a 15-year-old girl from
the Sunni Baluch minority.
A Sunni Muslim
preacher, Molavi Abdol Hamid, had on Wednesday warned the community was
“inflamed” after the alleged rape of a teenage girl by a police officer in the
province.
US-Iranian released
Iran has accused outside forces of stoking the nationwide protests,
especially its arch enemy the United States and
Washington’s allies, and on
Friday the intelligence ministry said nine foreign nationals — including from
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland — had been arrested.
The unrest comes
as Iran seeks to revive its 2015 nuclear deal with the US and other major
powers to end sanctions that have throttled its oil-rich economy and seen South
Korea, China, and Japan freeze billions of dollars in Iranian funds.
The landmark
Vienna deal — which had promised sanctions relief in return for strict nuclear
controls — has been in tatters since then US president Donald Trump withdrew from
it in 2018 and Iran later backed away from its own commitments.
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