A fresh round of protests reportedly broke out in Iran on Saturday and continued into Sunday as student demonstrators clashed with the regime’s thuggish Basij militia on at least seven university campuses.
They were the first sizable protests held since the terror masters of Tehran crushed last month’s uprising by slaughtering thousands of their own citizens.
The protests reportedly grew out of efforts to honor the victims of last month’s deadly crackdown, during which at least 7,000 people were killed, according to the latest estimate from the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). The Iranian government counted only 3,117 deaths on January 21 and has not updated its estimate since then.
Some human rights activists believe the full death toll was several times higher than HRANA’s conservative estimate. On Friday, President Donald Trump claimed at least 32,000 fatalities, but did not provide a source for that death toll.
The students who assembled to commemorate the dead on Saturday began chanting slogans against the regime, including the “Women, Life, Freedom” anthem from the uprising in 2022 and “Death to Khamenei,” a reference to “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The demonstrators reportedly got into scuffles with pro-regime “students,” many of whom were also members of Basij paramilitary groups.
Security forces charged at students outside Ferdowsi University in the northeastern holy city of Massad, which was a center of protest activity during the January uprising. At the University of Tehran, administrators warned students to be “very careful” and said they would not help their own students if the regime decides to use violence against them.
Al Jazeera News reported that Iranian state media largely ignored the anti-regime demonstrations, instead filling their coverage with pro-regime counter-demonstrators proclaiming their loyalty to Khamenei and burning American flags. The few acknowledgements of anti-regime protesters dismissed them as “fake students.”
State media outlets also claimed the memorial events on Saturday were intended to honor “victims of recent foreign-backed riots,” rather than the protesters who were slaughtered by the regime. The regime has claimed last weekend’s demonstrators were celebrating killings they supposedly committed during the uprising, rather than remembering their own dead.
Omid Memarian, a senior fellow at the Washington-based human rights group DAWN, told the leftist newspaper New York Times (NYT) on Sunday that students were emboldened to launch fresh protests over the weekend because the regime appears vulnerable in the face of threatened military action by the United States.
“Students see the contradiction clearly: While the authorities project strength abroad and engage in brinkmanship with Washington, they are domestically weaker than at any point in recent years,” Memarian said.
“The government cannot indefinitely invoke the possibility of war to justify silencing dissent,” he judged.
The dissident National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said on Sunday that protests in the city of Abdanan forced the government to release Yaghoub Mohammadi, a teacher arrested by regime intelligence agents on Saturday.
According to NCRI, protesters broke through a security blockade to fill the streets of Abdanan, shouting “Yaghoub, we love you!” and “Honorable, honorable!” Prosecutors agreed to release Mohammadi on the condition that demonstrators did not give him a hero’s welcome, a requirement they completely ignored.
Protests continued for a third consecutive day on Monday on at least six university campuses, including the University of Tehran. Students have reportedly been attempting to get past the regime’s information gatekeepers by posting videos of their demonstrations to social media.
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