British Iranian journalist and political analyst
Following Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s lead, Iranian officials alleged on Tuesday that protests are instigated by foreign enemies while the unrest continues.
President Ebrahim Raisi on Tuesday accused “enemies of the Islamic Republic” of fomenting the protests, echoing what Khamenei said on Monday. Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf in turn vowed the parliament would take action to change the ways of the morality police in a bid to calm the protesters.
Protest rallies in universities continued Tuesday. A video shows students in their white uniforms staging a sit in on the campus of Rasht Medical Sciences University and holding placards silently. A video from Azad University in Najaf Abad, a conservative city in Esfahan Province, shows students clapping and chanting “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom”.
Social media users have also posted more videos of school children, particularly girls, refusing to attend classes and chanting in school yards and outside on Tuesday in various cities and towns including Tehran and Sanandaj. A video shows boys at a gifted students’ high school in Isfahan refusing to attend classes for a second day.
In many schools girls are refusing to wear their headscarves both in and outside the school. Girls and boys are also protesting by chanting, burning headscarves, writing graffiti, tearing down the photos of Khamenei and his predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, burning and trampling on the photos which are displayed in every classroom and government office.
Schoolgirls chanting "Women, Life, Freedom" on Tuesday, October 4
“We can’t study when the lives of our youth are being cut short, our brothers, our sisters,” a boy speaking at a student rally at a boys’ school says in a video posted on Twitter Tuesday.
In Esfahan, Iran's fourth most populous city, businesses went on strike Tuesday on one of the city’s major streets, Taleghani Ave, where most of the electronics shops are located. Several videos on social media show nearly all shops are closed or with shutters half-down.
There were no major late-night protests in Tehran and other cities Monday evening but in some areas of Tehran people continued to chant from their windows and rooftops and honked their horns in protest on busy roads.
“Don’t be mistaken. We’ll be out every night not just tonight!” people chanted Monday evening from their windows In Tehran’s western Ekbatan neighborhood, a massive apartment complex, while a group of youth marched from one apartment block to another chanting slogans such as “Death to Khamenei!”
“This system is being defeated because it has never had a theory about its own defeat. It only theorizes about its victory … You cannot contain this generation and interact with it with the same methods and thoughts as in the past,” Mohsen Renani, a renowned reformist economist and professor at Esfahan University, warned in a statement Monday. “Beware! Beware not to think that you can suppress [the protests] and all will be fine… It will remain like burning ambers under the ashes and reignite,” he added.
The IRGC which has so far not used overwhelming military force against protesters on the streets, continued its mortar and drone attacks on the positions of Kurdish Iranian insurgent groups in Iraqi Kurdistan for the eleventh consecutive day.
