The violent repression of the police does not stop the protest of Iranian women which is turning into an increasingly radical challenge to the ayatollahs' regime and raises the level of tension between Tehran and many Western countries.
On the tenth night of unrest, after the death in a barracks of 22-year-old Kurdish Mahsa Amini, arrested by the moral police for wearing an inappropriate headscarf,
the arrests reached 1,200 and 76 protesters killed
, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights.
Also detained 18 journalists, denounced the independent American organization Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reporters Without Borders.
Among those arrested, Nilufar Hamedi, who visited the hospital where Mahsa Amini was in a coma and helped alert the world public opinion about her fate, and photojournalist Yalda Moaiery, made famous by an iconic photo of the November 2019 protests. .
"Women, life, freedom" also punctuated the crowd in the squares and streets last night as the women waved their hijabs and burned them in improvised bonfires under the noses of the riot police who fired rubber bullets and live bullets , used the batons and unleashed the water cannons.
The protests, the most violent in the last three years, have grown in intensity after the killing, Sunday, of
Hadith Najafi
, the 'girl with a tail'.
Even if there are rumors about the possibility that that woman with tied hair, who has become a symbol of the demonstrations, is not her.
But the Iranian authorities do not loosen the grip of repression and multiply the attacks against Western countries accused of fomenting the revolt.
"The rioters should know that the security of our country is our red line and the police will safeguard it, by all means", is the warning issued by the police chief Hossein Ashtari.
The head of the Iranian judiciary, the ultra-conservative Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, warned that "the judiciary will deal decisively and forcefully with the 'mercenaries of the enemies'".
And while the Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian has seen fit to affirm that "in Iran there is full democracy" and that the images spread by social networks and international TV portraying agents of the security forces shooting at demonstrators are "
The leaders of the United States and some European countries "have fully supported the rioters who have disturbed the security of our country" and "Western countries and the United States that claim to be advocates of the right of the Iranian people should leave their false slogans and squalid and put an end to their tyrannical and inhuman sanctions against Iran. "
The answers were not long in coming.
The German foreign ministry has summoned the Iranian ambassador and his spokesman anticipated that all policy response options will soon be discussed at the European level.
Following the US, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also announced the imposition of sanctions against the moral police and various officials in Tehran.
To dent the monolithic tortoise formation of the ayatollahs only a small and probably irrelevant crack.
Hossein Nouri Hamedani, one of the greatest supporters of the Supreme Guide Ai Khamene, called for "listening to the demands of the people" and "showing sensitivity to their rights"