DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — People in Iran’s capital shouted from their homes and rallied in the street Thursday night after a call by the country’s exiled crown prince for a mass demonstration, witnesses said, a new escalation in the protests that have spread nationwide across the Islamic Republic. Internet access and telephone lines in Iran cut out immediately after the protests began.
The protest represented the first test of whether the Iranian public could be swayed by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, whose fatally ill father fled Iran just before the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Demonstrations have included cries in support of the shah, something that could bring a death sentence in the past but now underlines the anger fueling the protests that began over Iran’s ailing economy.
Thursday saw a continuation of the demonstrations that popped up in cities and rural towns across Iran on Wednesday. More markets and bazaars shut down in support of the protesters. So far, violence around the demonstrations has killed at least 41 people while more than 2,270 others have been detained, said the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.
The growth of the protests increases the pressure on Iran’s civilian government and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. CloudFlare, an internet firm, and the advocacy group NetBlocks reported the internet outage, both attributing it to Iranian government interference. Attempts to dial landlines and mobile phones from Dubai to Iran could not be connected. Such outages have in the past been followed by intense government crackdowns.
Meanwhile, the protests themselves have remained broadly leaderless. It remains unclear how Pahlavi’s call will affect the demonstrations moving forward.
“The lack of a viable alternative has undermined past protests in Iran,” wrote Nate Swanson of the Washington-based Atlantic Council, who studies Iran.
“There may be a thousand Iranian dissident activists who, given a chance, could emerge as respected statesmen, as labor leader Lech Wałęsa did in Poland at the end of the Cold War. But so far, the Iranian security apparatus has arrested, persecuted and exiled all of the country’s potential transformational leaders.”
This presents the same problem as with Venezuela and Syria: sure, they need to change, but if they open up now and let themselves be steered by the trampist US, they’re just going to end up as another experimental ancapistan hellhole, like with russia when guided by Reagan’s “advisors”.
How do you open up and rebuild without letting other, particularly predatory countries like major powers influence and infiltrate you against your own interests and potential?
So uh… I think that exiled prince maybe got a call from orangeboi and struck a deal. I understand the repressive and theocratic nature of the current regime… but I can’t help also being deeply concerned for what that might imply for normal Iranians in the coming years, if that’s what is happening here, and our military and/or the CIA orchestrates (yet another) coup in Iran to put the guy in power.
I’m tired, boss
CIA has been on fire these past couple of years.
Trampled Imran Khan in Pakistan and perma froze the military regime into power
Toppled Assad after Russia went broke
Captured Maduro with some high level bribes
Played with Israel to essentially dismantle Iran’s internal power structure and consistently set back their nuclear program dozens of times.
They got basically everything they’ve wanted on their hitlist since 2000. I’d be genuinely surprised if Iran can survive past this decade.
Is there any credible reason to believe the US had anything to do with toppling Assad?
Or do you simply not believe an Islamic rebel group would be capable of a successful lightning offensive otherwise? Cause that’s pretty demeaning if so…
The reasoning is that HTS was able to secure a reliable supply line from Turkey, immediately absorbed the eastern Kurds, and now they basically follow American and Israeli requirements no questions asked.
Actually out of all the things listed, removing Assad was probably the easiest and cheapest to pull off, and they likely would have succeeded without the supply line. They just made it happen faster and ensured they have leverage in Syria for the foreseeable future.
Crown PrinceUS puppet Reza Pahlavi
