Thousands of Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran and other cities on Thursday night, heeding the call of the country’s exiled crown prince to make their voices heard in the most serious challenge to the Islamic Republic’s hardline rulers in years.
The protests spread across the country for 12 daysAbout 40 people were killed and more than 2,000 arrested by security forces, but despite the arrests and a nationwide blackout of internet and phone services, unrest escalated dramatically on Thursday night.
It was impossible to get a clear picture of the extent of the unrest, given the limited flow of information, but Iran’s ruler appeared in a brief televised appearance on Friday morning, defying President Trump’s accusations that he had fueled the protests, showing that he remained in power and vowing that his regime would “not back down”.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, 86, called for unity and accused “a bunch of vandals” of “destroying a building that belongs to them to please the US president” in Tehran, where a state television building was on fire.
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As he spoke, an audience in front of him shouted the familiar refrain of “Death to America!”
Given the communications blackout that continued Friday morning According to NetBlocks Internet monitoring organizations, short videos posted online, largely by anti-regime activists, offered the only real window into the chaos across the country.
It increased dramatically after 8pm on Thursday, when exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi called on Iranians to shout and shout against the regime.
“Iranians have demanded their freedom tonight,” said Pahlavi, the son of former president Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah, who fled the country after the 1979 Islamic revolution that brought the current regime to power.
In statements posted online, European leaders called on them to join Mr Trump “in holding the regime accountable”, “to use all technical, financial and diplomatic means to re-establish communication with the Iranian people so that their voice and their will can be heard and seen. Do not let the voices of my brave countrymen be silenced”.
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Pahlavi made his call several days earlier for mass anti-regime chants at 8 p.m., which is noon on the US East Coast, on Thursday and Friday, so the regime may be facing another night of unrest.
In the videos, which are difficult to independently verify, many people could be heard chanting “Death to the dictator!” and “Death to the Islamic Republic”, while others called for the return of the monarchy: “Pahlavi will return!”
“All the huge crowds in my neighborhood are pro-Pahlavi and my sources from various areas say the same thing: the pro-Pahlavi crowd is overwhelming, undeniable,” a source in Tehran told CBS News on Thursday night, calling it “monarchists responding to Reza,” before cutting off his communications.
Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the crown prince’s meeting appeared to have “turned the tide on the protests,” and told the Associated Press that, based on social media posts, “it became clear that Iranians took the call to protest the ouster of the Islamic Republic seriously and are taking it seriously.”
“This is precisely why the Internet was shut down: to prevent the world from seeing the protests. Unfortunately, it probably also provided cover for the security forces to kill the protesters,” said Dagres.
As of Thursday, the US Human Rights Activists News Agency, which relies on a network of contacts inside the country, said at least 42 people had died and more than 2,270 others had been arrested, but that was before a clear picture of the chaos Thursday night and Friday morning emerged.
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Echoing Khamenei, Iran’s state-controlled media on Friday accused US and Israeli “terrorist agents” of instigating the violence. He recognized the dead, but did not give details.
The protests began on December 28 when traders in Tehran closed their shops and took to the streets to express anger at Iran’s economy, which has been hampered by years of global isolation and a raft of sanctions imposed by the US and other nations over its nuclear program and protection of armed proxy groups across the region.
Iran’s autocratic regime has violently quashed several previous waves of unrest, and sources in Tehran told CBS News there was widespread fear that the current protests would lead to a similarly draconian crackdown.
This time, however, the protests are taking place under the threat of direct US intervention by President Trump.
“I’ve let them know that if they start killing people, which they tend to do in their riots – they have a lot of riots – we’re going to hit them very hard,” Mr Trump said in a radio interview on Thursday.
Vice President JD Vance told reporters at the White House that the U.S. stood by anyone participating in peaceful protests in Iran. Asked whether the US would join new attacks on Iran, as it did this summer, Vance urged Tehran to negotiate with Washington on its nuclear program, but said he would “let the president talk about what we do in the future.”