Tens of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets on Friday night in a second night of mass, nationwide antigovernment protests despite a total internet blackout and threats of a severe crackdown from the senior Iranian leadership.
Videos posted on BBC Persian Television showed thousands of people on the march in the capital, Tehran, drawing supporters from what residents said in interviews was a demographically diverse cross-section of working-class, middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods.
A resident of Saada’t Abad, an upscale neighborhood in northern Tehran, described crowds setting ablaze a mosque and parading the traditional, royalist flag flown by the government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, which was toppled in the 1979 Islamic revolution. The resident, Ladan, 60, who asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of official reprisals, said she was protesting for the second night in a row.
As in the previous night, the protests were widespread, erupting in the cities of Mashhad, Tabriz, Urumiyeh, Isfahan, Karaj and Yazd, among others, according to witness interviews and videos either verified by The New York Times or appearing on BBC Persian. In each instance the videos showed large groups defiantly chanting for an end to the nearly 50 years of the Islamic Republic’s rule, with the scenes lit by bonfires and blazing trash cans.
People chanted, “Death to the dictator” and “Long live the shah” in the videos. In a reference to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they said, “This is the year of blood, Seyed Ali will be toppled.” In a speech earlier Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei had condemned the protesters as “rioters” doing the bidding of the United States and Israel.
On state television, an anchor warned that protesters could be risking their lives by taking to the streets. “Tonight is the night for parents to stop their children from going out,” he said. “If something happens, if someone is injured, if a bullet is fired and something happens to them, do not complain.”
Amir Reza, 42, an engineer, said in an interview from Tehran that he could hear gunfire and the boom of so-called sound bombs, which make loud noises but are otherwise harmless. He said he decided to go home after swarms of riot police officers and militias in plainclothes began firing in the air and chasing the crowds to disperse them.
The protests broke out late last month in the central bazaar in Tehran, the pulse of Iran’s commerce and economy, after the currency plunged against the U.S. dollar and inflation spiked. But they quickly expanded to broader grievances over the corruption and mismanagement of the economy and of clerical rule generally, which many see as having driven the country into a ditch.
“There are multiple forces coming together that are fueling and facilitating these protests; on the ground there is a huge amount of momentum, and that momentum is being driven by the obvious motivation of deep-seeded anger.,” said Sanam Vakil, the director for Middle East and North Africa of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “People are truly fed up. People are not retreating, and braving the possibility of further repression.”
Elyar Kamrani, director of ANT TV, a channel focused on the region of northwestern Iran near Azerbaijan, said in a telephone interview from Istanbul that more protests were planned in the area for Saturday by a coalition of political groups. He said he had been in contact with activists in the Iranian cities of Tabriz and Urumiyeh who told him the security forces were using a variety of tactics to quell the demonstrations, mixing attacks with expressions of sympathy for the economic troubles and urging people to go home for their own good.
“People are saying we have nothing left to lose,” Mr. Kamrani said. “We can’t let them crush this movement.”
The government shut down virtually all forms of communication on Friday, shuttering the internet, blocking telephone calls from abroad and disrupting domestic cellphone service in an effort to prevent the protesters from organizing and sending news outside the country, said cybersecurity and internet freedom experts who monitor Iran.
Even Iranian news agency websites, like the state-controlled news agency IRNA, went silent. Fars News media and the Mehr News agency, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards Corps, were among the few domestic media outlets posting updates.
On Friday night, Iranians received a text message from the intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guards asking that “suspicious and destructive” people be reported to a hotline, according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times. The message also said Iran’s enemies had “a plan to increase naked violence” and asked parents to prohibit their children from going to the streets.
“Educate your children that the consequences for cooperating with terrorist agents amounts to treason against the country,” the message concluded.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said that the Iranian authorities had used brutal force, including firearms, and arbitrary arrest against protesters and that so far the crackdown since late last month had killed at least 28 protesters, bystanders and children. Other rights groups that track Iran’s human rights violations from abroad have put the number much higher.
A video on Friday verified by The New York Times showed at least seven people lying motionless on the floor of Al-Ghadir Hospital in Tehran and appearing dead. The Times verified the video’s location by matching visual details, such as a mosque’s outer wall and a zebra crossing, with satellite imagery.
A narrator in the video says, “They killed people, they killed people with war bullets.”
Despite the information blackout, videos of protests and witness accounts trickled throughout the evening from those inside Iran who had access to Starlink satellite connections, said Mehdi Yahyanejad, a technology expert and internet freedom activist based in Los Angeles. Mr. Yahyanejad was involved in an effort after the 2022 women-led uprising to buy 300 Starlink satellites and send them to activists and citizen journalists in Iran.
“The number of Starlinks inside are tens of thousands, and a lot of people have bought it for personal use, for businesses and other reasons,” Mr. Yayhanejad said, adding, “The government has been trying to jam GPS in Tehran, because that is how Starlink terminals find their coordinates and connect to the satellite.”
Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization. She also covers Iran and has written about conflict in the Middle East for 15 years.
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