Tehran Explodes as Anti-Government Protests Sweep Iran
Mass protests rock Iran as unrest spreads to 100+ cities. Protesters call for regime change amid economic collapse and nationwide internet blackout.
Videos show large crowds of protesters marching in Iran's capital and other cities, in what is being described as the largest show of force by opponents of the clerical regime in years.
On Thursday evening in Tehran and Mashhad, the country's second-largest city, which were not dispersed by security forces.
Later, a monitoring group reported a nationwide internet shutdown.
The footage shows protesters chanting slogans calling for the removal of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the return of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late former Shah, who had urged his supporters to take to the streets.
According to human rights groups, this was the 12th consecutive day of unrest, which began with anger over the plummeting value of the Iranian currency and has spread to more than 100 cities and towns across all 31 of Iran's provinces.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) has said that at least 34 protesters – five of them children – and eight security personnel have been killed, and 2,270 other protesters have been arrested.
The Norway-based monitor Iran Human Rights (IHR) has said that at least 45 protesters, including eight children, have been killed by security forces.
On Thursday evening, videos posted on social media and verified by Persian showed a large crowd of protesters marching down a main street in Mashhad in the northeast of the country.
Chants of "Long live the Shah" and "This is the last fight! Pahlavi will return" could be heard. And in one instance, several people were seen climbing onto an overpass and removing surveillance cameras mounted on it. Another video posted online showed a large crowd of protesters marching down a main street in eastern Tehran.
In footage sent to Persian from the north of the capital, another large crowd could be heard chanting, "This is the last fight! Pahlavi will return!" Elsewhere in the north, protesters were filmed shouting "Dishonest!" and "Don't be afraid, we are all together" after clashes with security forces. Other videos showed protesters chanting "Death to the dictator" in the central city of Isfahan – a reference to Khamenei; "Long live the Shah" in the northern city of Babol; and "Don't be afraid, we are all together" in the northwestern city of Tabriz.
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These evening protests came shortly after a statement from Reza Pahlavi, whose father was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution and who lives in Washington DC. He had called on Iranians to "take to the streets and raise their demands loudly and united."
Iranian state media downplayed the scale of Thursday's unrest. In some cases, they denied that protests had even taken place, posting videos of empty streets.
Meanwhile, internet watchdog NetBlocks said its metrics showed that Iran was "amidst a nationwide internet blackout."
"This incident follows a series of escalating digital censorship measures targeting protests across the country and obstructs the public's right to communicate at a critical moment," it warned, citing earlier connectivity losses in several cities.
Earlier in the day, footage from Lomar, a small town in the western province of Ilam, showed a crowd chanting "Cannons, tanks, fireworks, the mullahs must go" – a reference to the religious establishment. Another video showed people throwing papers into the air outside a bank that appeared to have been vandalized.
Other videos showed numerous shops closed in Ilam, as well as in several Kurdish-majority cities and towns in Kermanshah and Lorestan provinces.
This followed a call for a general strike by exiled Kurdish opposition groups in response to the deadly crackdown on protests in the region.
According to the Kurdish human rights group Hengaw, at least 17 protesters have been killed by security forces in Ilam, Kermanshah, and Lorestan during the unrest, many of them members of the Kurdish or Lor ethnic minorities.
On Wednesday, violent clashes between protesters and security forces took place in several cities and towns in western Iran, as well as in other regions.
IHR said it was the deadliest day of the unrest, with 13 protesters confirmed killed across the country. The group's director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, said, "Evidence shows that the scope of the crackdown is becoming more violent and widespread every day."
Hengaw reported that two protesters were shot dead by security forces in Khoshk-e Bijar in the northern Gilan province on Wednesday night.
Iran's semi-official Fars news agency, which is close to the Revolutionary Guards, reported that three police officers were also killed on Wednesday.
It said that two were shot dead by armed men among a group of "rioters" in the southwestern city of Lordegan, and a third was stabbed to death in Mallard, west of Tehran, "during attempts to control unrest."
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump reiterated his threat of military intervention if Iranian authorities killed protesters.
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"I've told them that if they start killing people, like they do during their riots—they have a lot of riots over there—if they do that, we're going to hit them very hard," he said in an interview with the Hugh Hewitt Show.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had earlier urged security forces to exercise "maximum restraint" when dealing with peaceful protests. "Any violent or coercive behavior must be avoided," a statement said.
Khamenei—who holds ultimate power in Iran—said on Saturday that authorities should "talk to the protesters" but "show the rioters their place."
The protests began on December 28, when shopkeepers took to the streets of Tehran to express their anger over another sharp drop in the value of the Iranian rial against the US dollar in the open market.
The rial has plummeted to record lows over the past year and inflation has soared to 40% as sanctions imposed over Iran's nuclear program have crippled the economy, which is also weakened by government mismanagement and corruption.
University students soon joined the protests, and they began to spread to other cities, with crowds often heard chanting slogans critical of the clerical regime. In messages sent to the BBC by a UK-based activist, a woman in Tehran said that despair was fueling the protests.
"We are living in uncertainty," she said. "I feel like I'm suspended in mid-air, with neither wings to fly nor any hope of achieving my goals here. Life has become unbearable."
Another woman said she was protesting because her dreams had been "stolen" by the clerical regime and she wanted them to know that "we still have voices to shout with, fists to punch them in the face with." A woman in the western Iranian city of Ilam said she knew young people from families connected to the government who were participating in the protests. "My friend and her three sisters, whose father is a prominent figure in the intelligence service, are participating without their father's knowledge," she said.
These protests are the largest since the uprising in 2022, which began after the death in custody of a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested by the morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly. According to human rights groups, security forces killed more than 550 people and detained 20,000 over several months.
The largest protests since the Islamic Revolution took place in 2009, when millions of Iranians took to the streets of major cities after a disputed presidential election. The subsequent crackdown resulted in the deaths of dozens of opposition supporters and the detention of thousands.
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