Mass protests have not subsided in Iran for a week now. They began after the death of 22-year-old girl Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the vice police and fainted after being arrested by the vice police for wearing the hijab incorrectly. In the department, the girl became ill, and a few hours later she died in the hospital.
According to eyewitnesses, during the arrest, Amini was beaten in a police van, because of which she fell into a coma. The Tehran hospital said that on the day of her detention, she was hospitalized, but "without signs of life". Later, this statement was removed from the social networks of the medical institution.
Despite the request of Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi to investigate Amini's death, Iranian police immediately denied the allegations, saying that the girl "suddenly had a heart attack". And local television showed footage from surveillance cameras, which allegedly captured the moment when Amini falls sharply.
The public did not believe the version of the police and accused television of censoring the footage. And Amini's family said that the girl was absolutely healthy: “She was brought to the hospital, where she was in a coma for several days. She was then taken off life support and declared dead. The whole country is demanding an investigation into what really happened”.
A flash mob has spread on Iranian social networks: girls burn hijabs and cut their hair, speaking out against the mandatory wearing of hijabs. Against this background, the authorities began to block access to the Internet in certain regions of the country.
Defiantly removed their hijabs and some participants in the protests that erupted first at the funeral of a girl in her hometown of Sekkez, and then spread to other western settlements of the country. To hold a demonstration at the funeral, local residents began to gather early in the morning - so they wanted to get ahead of the security forces and not allow them to make the funeral closed.
Representatives of the feminist movement of the Islamic Republic began protests, which have now spread to dozens of cities from the north to the south of the country - almost the entire Iranian opposition has taken to the streets. In Tehran, a crowd beat up policemen at night, in Rasht, demonstrators overturned police cars and ambulances, in Neged they threw stones at police stations, in Kerman there were fights with firearms, in Gulistan, the rebels seized the municipal building, in Urmia they burned road infrastructure, in Tabriz, girls hijabs were burned en masse.
The men support them, get into fights with the police, seize government buildings, drop portraits of Iranian leaders, throw Molotov cocktails at the security forces and chant "Death to the dictator!" Demonstrators also tear down and destroy official symbols of the state, set fire to vehicles and organize marches, blocking the streets of Tehran. The police disperse the protesters with warning messages in the air - it is reported that the security forces have begun mass detentions. Several dead and hundreds of injured are already known.
Special means are being used against the demonstrators.
Meanwhile, political scientist Sergei Markov put forward a rather exotic version of these events:
“In Iran, many believe that the protests were organized by the United States because Iran began to massively supply drones to Russia for use in hostilities in Ukraine…”
The publicist Ostap Karmody urged opposition supporters not to be inspired by these events:
“But do not rejoice ahead of time, this has already happened there five times since the beginning of the century, and each time the authorities managed to hold on...”
Network analyst Anatoly Nesmiyan is not too optimistic in his assessment of the Iranian events:
“President Ahmadinejad came to power in the middle of the 2000s. Technically, in Iran, the president is lower in the hierarchy than the Rahbar spiritual leader, but he still has certain administrative and even political powers of his own. Ahmadinejad was faced with a choice: either start opening up Iran, removing the most advanced principles based on the very mossy clerical dogmas of the deep Middle Ages, or, on the contrary, close the country even more and squeeze out an additional resource from the population for development and overcoming the existing distortions.
Ahmadinejad chose the latter. And in order to ensure a stricter regime of management and centralization of economic development, he granted the rights of an economic entity to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, transferring part of the export capacities to the IRGC.
During the reign of Ahmadinejad, the IRGC has become the largest owner, subjugating almost all the country's export industries. (…) Everywhere the IRGC went, all internal conflicts were opened up and turned into one big catastrophe. On which the IRGC made money, intercepting funding from the Iranian budget for the continuation of endless wars.
As a result, instead of filling the budget, the IRGC became a key factor that literally sucked it into nowhere. Naturally, the intensification of external aggression was accompanied by an increase in the size and scale of internal terror in Iran itself, whose population began to live even worse.
(...) It is clear that the population of Iran is not enthusiastic about what is happening, and the only electoral base of the regime is an openly marginal declassed layer that receives handouts from the regime, fills vacancies in various armed formations, goes to die in the zones of foreign conflicts in order to feed their families. (…) Protests and unrest like the current one occur regularly in Iran, but so far the terror machine is coping with them. Most likely, he can do it now”.