US President Donald Trump warned Iran yesterday that it would get “hit very hard” by the US if more protesters die during demonstrations that have entered a second week.
“We’re watching it very closely. If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
New deadly clashes between protesters and security forces erupted in Iran, rights groups and local media said yesterday, as demonstrations first sparked by anger over the rising cost of living entered a second week.
At least 12 people, including members of the security forces, have been killed since the protests kicked off with a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran on December 28, according to a toll based on official reports.
Overnight, protests featuring slogans criticising the Islamic republic’s clerical authorities were reported in Tehran, Shiraz in the south, and in areas of western Iran where the movement has been concentrated, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) monitor.
The demonstrations are the most significant in Iran since a 2022-2023 movement sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code for women.
The latest protests have been concentrated in parts of the west with large populations of the Kurdish and Lor minorities, and have yet to reach the scale of the 2022-2023 movement, let alone the mass street demonstrations that followed disputed 2009 presidential elections.
But they do present a new challenge for supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — 86, and in power since 1989 — coming on the heels of a 12-day war with Israel in June that saw nuclear infrastructure damaged and key members of the security elite killed.
With the government under pressure to show a response to the economic pain, spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani told state TV on Sunday that citizens would receive a monthly allowance equivalent to $7 for the next four months.
The protests have taken place in 23 out of Iran’s 31 provinces and affected, to varying degrees, at least 40 different cities, most of them small and medium-sized, according to an AFP tally based on official announcements and media reports.
Meanwhile, today, Iran called for the release of Nicholas Maduro, the ousted president of Tehran’s close ally Venezuela who was seized in a US military operation and taken to New York to stand trial.
“The president of a country and his wife were abducted. It’s nothing to be proud of; it’s an illegal act,” foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baqaei said at a weekly press conference. “As the Venezuelan people have emphasised, their president must be released.”
