Protester arrests continue to roil Iran weeks after protests and government crackdown

Iranian security agents arrived at 2 a.m. and pulled up in half a dozen cars outside the Nakhii family’s home. They woke up the sleeping sisters, Nyusha and Mona, and forced them to give the passwords to their phones. Then they took them both away.

The women were accused of participating in the nationwide protests that shook Iran a week earlier, a friend of the couple told The News, speaking on condition of anonymity for her safety, as she described the Jan. 16 arrests.

These types of arrests have been occurring for weeks after the government repression last month that crushed protests calling for an end to the country’s theocratic rule. Reports of raids on homes and workplaces come from both major cities and rural towns, revealing a raid that has touched Large sectors of Iranian society. University students, doctors, lawyers, professors, actors, businessmen, athletes and filmmakers, as well as reformist figures close to President Masoud Pezeshkian.

They are often held incommunicado for days or weeks and prevented from contacting family members or lawyers, according to activists monitoring the arrests. That has left desperate relatives searching for their loved ones.

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency has put the number of arrests at more than 50,000. The AP has not been able to verify the figure. Monitoring of detainees has been difficult since the Iranian authorities imposed an internet blackoutand the reports are filtered only with difficulty.

Other activist groups outside Iran have also been working to document the raids.

“The authorities continue to identify people and detain them,” said Shiva Nazarahari, an organizer of one of those groups, the Committee for Monitoring the Status of Detained Protesters.

So far, the committee has verified the names of more than 2,200 people who were arrested, using direct reports from families and a network of contacts on the ground. Among those detained are 107 university students, 82 children as young as 13, as well as 19 lawyers and 106 doctors.

Nazarahari said authorities have been reviewing municipal street cameras, store surveillance cameras and drone footage to track people who participated in the protests to their homes or workplaces, where they are arrested.

Held for weeks without contact

The protests began in late December, sparked by anger over spiral pricesand quickly spread throughout the country. They peaked on January 8 and 9, when hundreds of thousands of people in more than 190 cities and towns across the country took to the streets.

Security forces responded by unleashing unprecedented violence. The Human Rights Activists News Agency has so far counted more than 7,000 dead and says the real number is much higher. Iran’s government offered its only death toll on January 21, saying 3,117 people were killed. The theocracy has underreported or underreported deaths from past riots.

Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejehi, a hardline cleric who heads Iran’s judiciary, became the face of the crackdown, calling protesters “terrorists” and calling for accelerated punishments.

Since then, “arrests have been very widespread because it’s like a total suffocation of society,” said a protester contacted by the AP in Gohardasht, a middle-class area on the outskirts of the Iranian capital. He said that two of his relatives and three of his brother’s friends were killed in the first days of the repression, as well as several neighbors. The protester spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being attacked by authorities.

The Nakhii sisters, Nyusha, 37, and Mona, 25, were taken first to Tehran hospital. famous Evin prisonwhere they were allowed to contact their parents, their friend said. Later, she said, they were moved to Qarchak, a women’s prison on the outskirts of Tehran, where human rights groups reported conditions including overcrowding and poor hygiene even before the crackdown.

Other people whose arrests were documented by the detainee committee have disappeared in prisons. Abolfazl Jazbi’s family has not heard from him since his arrest on January 15 at a factory in the southern city of Isfahan. Jazbi suffers from a serious blood disorder that requires medication, according to the committee.

Atila Sultanpour, 45, has not heard from him since he was taken from his home in Tehran on January 29 by security officers who brutally beat him, according to Dadban, a group of Iranian lawyers based abroad who are also documenting the arrests.

Authorities have also taken steps to suspend bank accounts, block SIM cards and confiscate property of relatives of protesters or people who publicly express their support, said Musa Barzin, Dadban’s lawyer, citing reports from families.

In past crackdowns on protests, authorities have sometimes adhered to a veneer of due process and rule of law, but not this time, Barzin said. Authorities increasingly deny detainees access to legal assistance, often holding them for days or weeks before allowing them to make phone calls to their families. According to Dadban, lawyers representing arrested protesters have also faced subpoenas and arrests.

“Law enforcement is in the worst situation it has ever been,” Barzin said.

Signs of challenge continue

Despite the repression, many civic groups continue to issue defiant statements.

The Iranian Writers Association, an independent group with a long tradition of dissent, issued a statement describing the protests as an uprising against “47 years of systemic corruption and discrimination.”

It also announced that two of its members had been arrested, including a member of its secretariat.

A national council representing school teachers urged families to speak out about detained children and students. “Do not fear threats from security forces. Consult an independent lawyer. Make the names of your children public,” he said in a statement.

A council spokesman said Sunday that it has documented the deaths of at least 200 minors during the crackdown. That number is several dozen more than the count a few days earlier.

“Every day we tell ourselves that this is the last list,” Mohammad Habibi wrote in X. “But the next morning new names arrive.”

Bar associations and medical groups have also spoken out, including Iran’s state-sanctioned doctors’ council, which called on authorities to stop harassing medical staff.

The exiles of Iran Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi called for a “global day of action” on Saturday, urging his supporters to take to the streets in Munich, Los Angeles and Toronto to press for “urgent and practical measures in support of the Iranian people.”

“We come together at a time of profound danger to ask: Will the world stand with the people of Iran?” Pahlvai said at a news conference in Munich on Saturday. A annual security conference This weekend a meeting of global security figures and European leaders will be held in the German city. Police told News that some 200,000 people attended a protest in Munich.

Pahlvai, who is the son of Iran’s deposed shah and is trying to position himself as a player in Iran’s future, warned of the likelihood of more deaths in Iran “if democracies stand by and watch.” He added that the continued survival of the Iranian government “sends a clear signal to every bully: kill enough people and you will remain in power.”

Anger over the bloodshed is now adding to bitterness over the economy, which has been hollowed out by decades of sanctions, corruption and mismanagement. The value of the currency has plummeted and inflation has risen to record levels.

The Iranian government has announced gestures such as the launch of a new coupon program for essential goods. Labor and business groups, including a national retiree union, have issued statements condemning the economic and political crisis.

Iran and the United States

President Donald Trump has moved an aircraft carrier and other military assets to the Persian Gulf and suggested that the United States could attack Iran over the murder of peaceful protesters or if Tehran launches mass executions for the protests. TO second american aircraft carrier It is on its way to the Middle East.

Iran’s theocracy has faced US protests and threats in the past, and the crackdown demonstrated the tight control it exercises over the country. This week, authorities organized pro-government demonstrations with hundreds of thousands of people to mark the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Still, Barzin said, he sees the ferocity of the crackdown as a sign that Iran’s leadership “for the first time is afraid of being overthrown.”