TEHRAN: Four Iranian police officers and one “terrorist” have been killed in separate incidents in the strife-torn country, state media and the Revolutionary Guards said on Sunday.
Iran has been rocked by more than seven weeks of nationwide protests over the death of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the Tehran morality police.
Amid the wider unrest, clashes have rocked Sistan-Baluchestan province, which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan, sparked by the alleged rape of a local teenage girl by a police chief.
The four police officers were killed in Sistan-Baluchestan, official media said, without saying when, and blaming a personal dispute between police conscripts.
“The incident, at a traffic police station on the Iranshahr-Bampour highway, caused the martyrdom of the police officers,” regional police chief Major Alireza Sayyad told IRNA news agency.
Poverty-stricken Sistan-Baluchestan has long been a flashpoint for clashes with rebels from the Baluch minority, Sunni Muslim extremist groups and drug smuggling gangs.
On Sept 30 in Zahedan, the provincial capital, dozens of protesters and six members of the security forces were killed, according to the authorities.
In a separate incident, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said its forces had killed an “element hostile to the revolution” after an attack on one of their bases in Mahshahr, in the southwestern province of Khuzestan.
“The forces fired on two terrorists on motorbikes in order to protect the headquarters, killing one of them while steps were taken to identify and arrest the second person,” the IRGC said in a statement.
New protests
New protests erupted in Iran on Sunday at universities and in the largely Kurdish northwest, keeping a seven-week anti-regime movement going even in the face of a fierce crackdown.
The protests, triggered in mid-September by the death of Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for allegedly breaching strict dress rules for women, have evolved into the biggest challenge for the clerical leadership since the 1979 revolution.
Unlike demonstrations in November 2019, they have been nationwide, spread across social classes, universities, the streets and even schools, showing no sign of letting up even as the death toll ticks towards 200, according to one rights group.
Another rights group, Norway-based Hengaw, said security forces opened fire on Sunday at a protest in Marivan, a town in Kurdistan province, wounding 35 people.
The latest protest was sparked by the death in Tehran of a Kurdish student from Marivan, Nasrin Ghadri, who according to Hengaw died on Saturday after being beaten over the head by police.
Iranian authorities have not yet commented on the cause of her death.
Hengaw said she was buried at dawn without a funeral ceremony on the insistence of the authorities who feared the event could become a protest flashpoint. Authorities subsequently sent reinforcements to the area, it added.
‘Fundamental changes’
Kurdish-populated regions have been the crucible of protests since the death of Amini, herself a Kurd from the town of Saqez in Kurdistan province.
Universities have also emerged as major protest hotbeds. Iran Human Rights (IHR), a Norway-based organisation, said students at Sharif University in Tehran were staging sit-ins Sunday in support of arrested colleagues.
Students at the university in Babol in northern Iran meanwhile removed gender segregation barriers that by law were erected in their cafeteria, it added.
The protests have been sustained by myriad different tactics, with observers noting a relatively new trend of young people tipping off clerics’ turbans in the streets.
IHR said Saturday that at least 186 people have been killed in the crackdown on the Mahsa Amini protests, up by 10 from Wednesday. It said another 118 people had lost their lives in distinct protests since September 30 in Sistan-Baluchestan, presenting a further major headache for the regime.
IHR said security forces killed at least 16 people with live bullets when protests erupted after prayers on Friday in the town of Khash in Sistan-Baluchestan.
Amnesty International meanwhile said up to 10 people were feared dead in Friday’s violence in Khash, accusing security forces of firing at demonstrators from rooftops.
“Iranians continue taking to the streets and are more determined than ever to bring fundamental changes,” said IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam.
Fierce crackdown
The protests were fanned by fury over the restrictive dress rules for women, over which Amini had been arrested. But they have now become a broad movement against the theocracy that has ruled Iran since the fall of the shah.
Meanwhile Sunnis in Sistan-Baluchestan — where the alleged rape of a girl in police custody was the spark for protests — have long felt discriminated against by the nation’s Shia leadership.
