The streets of Tehran dawn with traffic, businesses open and telephone lines gradually reconnecting with the outside after five days in which tension, clashes and protests placed Iran in the face of the biggest unrest and struggle for power in years.
Despite the fact that a sort of tacit curfew is in force in the city by which businesses begin to close as soon as the afternoon hours arrive, the detachments of security forces that have flooded the streets of the Iranian capital since Thursday began to reduce on Monday afternoon.
The intense days of protests and repression by the regime have resulted in at least 2,000 deaths, as a senior official in the country admits to Reuters, while the opposition raises the figure to 12,000 deaths.
Banking entities have been one of the main targets of the protests and had remained closed since Saturday. Their offices are now open, and although in some branches there was repair work due to the damage suffered, they operated with less public but normally.
According to Iranian media, the authorities have closed businesses that they announced last Thursday that they would close in solidarity with the protests, among them, the cafe of former international soccer player Voria Ghafuri.
Demonstrations throughout the country from the 28th
The protests that began on the 28th reached their peak on Thursday with an explosion of demonstrations throughout practically the entire country, resulting in acts of vandalism against public organizations, banks that were razed, and the burning of 53 mosques throughout the country, according to official sources.
These sources have been the only things Iranians have been able to consult for the last five days, as the government-controlled intranet has continued to function amid the internet blackout that authorities resorted to to try to break up the protests. The population’s disconnection from the internet has been the longest so far. Even during the war with Israel last year, the network signal outage was shorter.
Witnesses have reported in Tehran of authentic “war zones” and “pitched battles” in various parts of the city, where strong clashes have occurred between protesters and the Police, especially on the nights of Thursday and Friday.
Despite this, the authorities have tried to maintain a sense of normality. Points where EFE witnessed vehicles destroyed during the protests in the afternoon, appeared clean and without trace of the destruction in the morning. Every day, at 8:00 p.m., the shouts with slogans against the regime have been repeated, a routine that Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah (Mohamed Reza Pahlavi), encouraged to repeat at 6:00 p.m. as well, with little success in the streets of the capital.
The violent nights of Thursday and Friday, days in which at 4:00 p.m. all businesses were already closed and activities suspended, began to subside on Saturday. The military presence on the streets has been reducing since Sunday, after police and military detachments were deployed in large numbers since Thursday.
On Monday, thousands of regime supporters took to the streets in support of the authorities, something that Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, celebrated as “a warning to American politicians.” “These large gatherings, brimming with determination, have thwarted the plot of foreign enemies, which was to be carried out by national mercenaries,” Khamenei said in a message to the nation.
So far, the death toll comes from sources outside the Persian nation. The NGO Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) raised the number of protesters killed during the protests to 648, one of several unofficial tolls, and warned that some of the almost 10,000 detainees are in danger of being executed by the authorities. The organization has been able to verify directly or through at least two sources the deaths of 648 people in 14 of the country’s 31 provinces, among whom there are believed to be nine minors, whose ages are still being verified, according to a statement from IHRNGO.
