Iran plunged into an internet blackout on Thursday, monitoring groups said, as nationwide protests demanding the ouster of the Islamic government spread to multiple cities and grew in size, according to witnesses.
The internet shutdown came a day after the heads of Iran’s judiciary and its security services said they would take tough measures against anyone protesting. But the threats did not deter demonstrators.
In telephone interviews, more than a dozen witnesses said that they saw large crowds forming on Thursday night in neighborhoods across Tehran, the capital, and in cities around Iran, including Mashhad, Bushehr, Shiraz and Isfahan. They said the crowds were diverse, with men and women, young and old. The people interviewed inside Iran asked that their names not be published out of fear of retribution.
One resident of Tehran said that the crowds were chanting, “Death to Khamenei,” referring to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and “freedom, freedom.” The chants could be heard from several blocks away in the affluent neighborhood of Shahrak Gharb in Tehran, which had until now sat out the protests.
Videos filmed on Thursday night showed government buildings on fire across the country, including in Tehran, as protests grew. While the protests were mostly peaceful early in the evening, violence broke out later in the night in Tehran, with demonstrators setting fire to cars, buildings and items in the street. A video verified by The New York Times shows fires in the streets of Kaj Square in the capital, with thousands of protesters flooding the area.
In Karaj, a suburb west of Tehran, a video verified by The Times showed protesters fleeing after gunshots were fired, though it is unclear from the videos whether it was security forces firing. .
As the protests grew, internet connectivity data showed an abrupt and near-total drop in connection levels in Iran on Thursday afternoon, according to NetBlocks, an internet monitoring group, and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Outage Detection and Analysis database. The data indicates that the country is almost completely offline.
Iranian officials did not immediately respond to questions about the cause of the shutdown, but the government has previously enforced internet blackouts during moments of crisis. During the country’s 12-day war with Israel last June, Iran blocked access to the internet, saying that it was a necessary security measure to stop Israeli infiltration. That measure also cut off the flow of information outward to the rest of the world.
“The Iranian government uses internet shutdowns as a tool of repression,” said Omid Memarian, an Iranian human rights expert and senior fellow at DAWN, a Washington-based organization focused on the Middle East. “Whenever protests reach a critical point, authorities sever the country’s connection to the global internet to isolate protesters and limit their communication with the outside world.”
Iranians have been protesting against the authoritarian rule of the Islamic clerics for decades, in wave after wave of protests that have been repeatedly crushed.
The latest round of protests began a week ago. Multiple opposition groups, including Kurdish political groups, the Coordination Council of Azerbaijani Parties and Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, had all called for people inside Iran to take to the streets. Mr. Pahlavi had said in a video message that people opposing the government should come to the streets at 8 p.m. on Thursday.
Pro-democracy activists, such as the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Narges Mohammadi, who is currently in detention, said in a statement with 17 prominent dissidents and film directors last week that the demand for democracy could not be quashed.
A resident in the southern city of Bushehr said the crowd was so large there that the security forces retreated.
A resident of Isfahan said that as a crowd of protesters marched, drivers honked and waved, and people in nearby apartment building whistled in solidarity.
A resident of Sadeghiyeh, a middle-class neighborhood in Tehran, said the crowd was swelling in size by the hour. He said security forces had fired their weapons into the air and fired tear gas canisters, but did not disperse the crowd. He said that some people in the crowd chanted, “Long live the Shah,” a reference to the last monarch in Iran, who was toppled in the 1979 revolution.
Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, said in a post on social media that the “Zionist regime” — referring to Israel — was behind the protests. “The destabilization puzzle has been activated; a puzzle that the Iranian nation will not allow to be completed,” he added.
A senior government official, who did not want to be identified, said in an interview that many officials were privately calling and texting one another, at a loss of how to contain the avalanche of protests. He said the Revolutionary Guards Corps, typically in charge of securing Iran’s borders not internal security, would likely take over.
The slogans chanted by the crowd covered an array of political views but with one united target: the end of the Islamic regime.
Amir Ali, a 32-year-old, businessman in Tehran, said he and a group of friends had joined the protests and chanted, “death to the oppressor, be it king or supreme leader,” and “the street will prevail, the people will win.”
Shima, a 52-year-old from Tehran, said she and her husband, her teenager children and her elderly parents were all on the streets Thursday night protesting for the first time as a family and chanting, “we are together, we are together, don’t be afraid,” and “clerics, get lost, the shah is coming back.”
As the protest movement has spread to cities across the country, the head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, told Iranian media that the protests were plotted by the country’s enemy and the government would show no mercy.
“This time it’s different. This time there are no excuses left,” he said. “The enemy has officially announced its support. I tell the people and the families that this time no one will be spared.”
Amnesty International said in a statement on Thursday that it had documented at least 28 protesters killed in the recent days of protest, including children. Three other groups that document and track human rights — HRANA, based in Washington, Iran Human Rights based in Norway and the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights — put the toll higher, at more than 40.
Amirparsa Neshat, an Iranian influencer and podcaster who supports the protests, was arrested when security forces raided his home in the middle of the night, Kaveh Rad, a lawyer and one of his relatives, announced on his Instagram on Thursday morning.
On Wednesday, a crowd of several hundred men stormed into a Shia seminary that trains clerics in the city of Gonabad, ransacking the building and beating up the clerics with “wood and batons,” said a statement from the cleric who directs the seminary, which was published in Iranian media. “We, too, are protesting the high prices, but protests are different than riots, people must part ways with rioters,” said the statement from the cleric, Hujjat al-Islam Ismaeil Tavakoli.
Merchants and business owners in the traditional bazaars in the cities of Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan, Mashhad and Kerman have closed their shops to protest the dire state of the economy and the plunging value of Iran’s currency, according to interviews with witnesses and Iranian news media reports. These bazaars are at the hear of the country’s commerce and economy, and strikes could paralyze the economy if they continued.
Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting from Belgium and Aric Toler contributed from Kansas City.
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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