Iran Discussion

Antigovernment protests erupted in cities across Iran on Monday in response to a young woman’s death in the custody of the country’s morality police, with security forces firing on crowds in the northwest and killing four men, according to three Iran-focused human rights organizations.

The demonstrations, led mostly by women, broke out in more than a dozen cities and on university campuses in Tehran. They were prompted by the death on Friday of Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been arrested three days earlier in Tehran for allegedly violating Iran’s hijab law, which requires women to cover their hair and wear loosefitting robes.

Women protesting on Monday took their head scarves off and waved them in defiance. In Tehran, men and women chanted “we will fight and take our country back,” including students on campuses where fear of arrests, which can lead to a lifetime ban from higher education, has kept a lid on dissent for at least a year.

Security forces in the capital fired gunshots and water cannons, chased protesters and beat them with batons, according to videos shared on social media by Iranian journalists.

In Ms. Amini’s home province in the northwest, Kurdistan, where protests have been brewing since her funeral on Saturday, four men in three cities were shot and killed, said the Kurdistan Human Rights Group, which posted their names and photos online. Eighty-five other people were injured, including three children, and 200 were arrested, according to the rights group.

In at least a dozen cities in Kurdistan Province, most shops closed after opposition Kurdish political groups issued a joint call for strikes, rights groups said.

“We are witnessing a nationwide reaction, really like a George Floyd moment for the national conscience that can no longer bear the violence and the logic of the ruling class in killing ordinary citizens,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based advocacy group.

Like previous waves of nationwide protests in Iran, the demonstrations were set off by a specific event — Ms. Amini’s death — but quickly broadened to take up a long litany of grievances, with crowds calling for an end to the Islamic Republic, according to videos shared by Iranian journalists.

The protests reflected the built-up frustration of many Iranians struggling under oppressive rules and economic hardship, with little hope of meaningful change. In the past, such widespread antigovernment unrest has been crushed, with large deployments of security forces killing, injuring and arresting protesters.

Ms. Amini’s death sparked outrage across social, religious and political factions. Even senior clerics and other supporters of the government called for the abolition of the morality police and condemned the government for deploying violence as a means of enforcing religious rules.

The morality police have said that Ms. Amini died from a heart attack, denying accusations that she had suffered blows to the head while being taken to a detention facility in a van.

Ms. Amini’s family members have told news outlets that she was perfectly healthy; that security officials had not shared her autopsy report with them; and that officials had pressured the family to bury her in the middle of the night and to stay quiet about her death.

TEHRAN—Iran shelled militant opposition groups in the semiautonomous Kurdistan region of northern Iraq on Saturday, according to state media, an attack that comes during nationwide protests over the death of a young Kurdish woman in police custody.

The Revolutionary Guard, Iran’s security force, launched the artillery attacks against “anti-Iran terrorist groups” in the Iraqi Kurdistan region Saturday, the Revolutionary Guard said in a statement carried by the state news agency, IRNA.

Iran in recent years has regularly carried out such attacks targeting what it has said are Iranian Kurdish separatist groups hiding across the northwestern border in Iraq’s mountainous Kurdish region. Iranian authorities said the dissidents were involved in protests that erupted in Iran’s Kurdish region following the funeral of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on Sept. 17 in her hometown in the area.

As the unrest grew, Iranian security forces have cracked down on the demonstrators, using tear gas and live rounds to disperse the crowds. Some protesters have violently clashed with the security forces. Authorities have heavily disrupted access to the internet in an attempt to block the social-media networks on which the protesters have relied to express dissent and rally support.

On Saturday in Tehran, riot police were out in force in areas where protests have taken place in recent days. Their presence didn’t stop motorists from sounding their horns near where the security forces were deployed to express their anger.

Several women walked past the security forces without wearing the obligatory head covering, or hijab, in apparent support of Ms. Amini. The outrage over her death highlights how restrictions on women have galvanized opposition to the ultraconservative regime.

At least 41 people have died so far during the protests, according to state media, which didn’t say how many were civilians. The death toll has reached at least 30 people, the human-rights group Amnesty International said.

Some officials have blamed foreigners for what is presenting the year-old government under President Ebrahim Raisi with one of its biggest challenges.

The protests in northwestern Iran could prove especially thorny, with the death of Ms. Amini, who hailed from the largely Kurdish region, possibly becoming a rallying point for opposition to the regime.

The Kurds are one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without an independent state, numbering more than 30 million people across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Iran’s Kurds are largely Sunni, which has long placed them at odds with the country’s ruling Shiite political establishment. They seek an end to government discrimination and neglect and more autonomy for their region, where a majority of Iran’s roughly 10 million Kurds live.

Numerous armed Kurdish separatist groups operate in Iran, many of whom have moved their base to the Iraqi side of the border to shelter from Iranian attacks.

Saturday’s Revolutionary Guard strikes hit three training bases and gathering points for Kurdish groups, seriously damaging the targets, the semiofficial Tasnim news agency reported. The attacks followed the movement of armed teams and a high volume of weapons, said Tasnim.

The government of Iraq and that of the Kurdistan region didn’t immediately comment on the latest Iranian attack on their soil. A local Iraqi Kurdish official confirmed an Iranian artillery attack along the mountainous border.

On Saturday, scores of Iraqi Kurds demonstrated outside the United Nations office in Erbil, the region’s capital, in support of the Iranian protests, according to local media.

BAGHDAD — Iran carried out deadly cross-border attacks Wednesday in northern Iraq, targeting the headquarters of three Iranian Kurdish opposition parties who support the ongoing demonstrations inside Iran.

The missile and drone strikes killed at least 13 people and wounded 58, including civilians and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Saman Barzanji, the health minister, said ambulances have struggled to reach some of the affected sites, which are in remote, mountainous areas, and the death toll is expected to rise.

The strikes targeted the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran in the Koysanjak district in Irbil, the Kurdish Komala Party in the village of Zarkwezela, in Sulaymaniyah province, and the Kurdistan Freedom Party in Kirkuk province.

The Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran confirmed the deaths of two of its members, while the leader of the Kurdistan Freedom Party, Hussein Yazdanpanah, told Kurdish media his group had endured “heavy losses.”

One of the strikes hit a civilian area, close to an elementary school. Footage circulating on social media showed children screaming and running for shelter behind rocky outcroppings.

“It was a quiet morning until the sound of bombing shook our house,” said Salar Ali, a 47-year-old farmer from Koysanjak. He immediately rushed to the school, where he was reunited with his 10-year-old son.

“We are a quiet, peaceful village and we don’t deserve what is happening to us,” he said.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, claimed responsibility for the attacks against what it called “bases operated by separatist terrorists,” and vowed to continue targeting Kurdish groups. The Iranian military, meanwhile, carried out artillery attacks for a fifth day on several areas bordering Irbil province. Those attacks have not resulted in any casualties.

But the strikes underscore the unease in the Iranian government over the protests that have rocked the country for nearly two weeks. They began after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, fell into a coma and died after being detained by the country’s “morality police.” Dozens of protesters have been killed and hundreds injured in the ensuing crackdown, according to rights groups.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, in an interview aired on state television Wednesday, addressed the protests but portrayed them as largely violent and instigated by Western powers.

“Who are the ones who are spreading chaos? They want to create chaos and jeopardize security in this country,” he said, referring to the United States.

Raisi vowed to “follow up” on the inquiry into Amini’s death and said that a forensic examination was underway.

But at the same time, Raisi, a hard-line cleric and former judiciary chief, pledged to put some demonstrators on trial.

“They must be dealt with,” he said of those he accused of “causing trouble and chaos.”

The protests began in Iran’s predominantly Kurdish west, where Amini was from, and which shares a border with Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region. Iran’s exiled Kurdish parties have long based themselves in Iraq, and while they have voiced support for the protests in Iran, there is no indication they are directly connected to the unrest.

But analysts said the attacks were an attempt at deflection by Tehran, an effort to blame outside forces for a homegrown uprising. “What the Iranians want to say is that the unrest inside Iran is instigated by the political opposition parties [in Iraq],” said Hiwa Osman, a Kurdish political analyst based in Irbil. “But in reality it’s public dissent by the Iranians, inside Iran, against the Iranian regime.”

Iraq’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ahmed Al-Sahaf, said he would summon the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad to protest the violence, while the Kurdistan Regional Government condemned the attacks as “an incorrect behavior, a distortion of the course of events, and a source of astonishment.”

It was the first Iranian attack inside Iraq since March, when the Revolutionary Guard claimed a missile strike on an empty villa in Irbil owned by a Kurdish oil tycoon, who was reportedly targeted for being involved in energy talks with Israel.

“The constant Iranian message in all of these attacks, starting from last year’s … is we can harm you, and America cannot protect you,” said Osman. “And the Kurdish authorities are only left with condemnation.”