Iranian security use dragnet spanning the entire country to arrest protesters
CAIRO (AP) — Iran security agents At 2 a.m., half a dozen cars pulled up in front of the Nakhii family home. They woke up the sleeping sisters Nyusha and Mona and forced them to give the passwords to their phones. Then they took the two of them away.
Women were accused of participating in the protest protests across the country A friend of the duo told The Associated Press that this situation shook Iran a week ago and asked to remain anonymous for his safety when describing the arrests on January 16.
Such arrests have been continuing for weeks government raid Incident last month that quelled protests calling for an end to the protests theocratic rule of the country. Reports of raids on homes and businesses are coming from both major cities and rural towns, revealing a distress affecting a wide segment of Iranian society. In addition to university students, doctors, lawyers, teachers, actors, business owners, athletes and filmmakers, close reformist figures were also caught in this trap. President Masoud Pezeshkian.
These people are often held incommunicado for days or weeks and are prevented from contacting family members or lawyers, according to activists who monitor the arrests. This situation caused desperate relatives to search for their loved ones.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency announced that the number of people arrested was more than 50,000. The AP could not confirm the figure. Tracking detainees has become difficult due to Iranian authorities imposed an internet outageand reports are barely leaking out.
Other activist groups outside Iran are also working to document the screenings.
“Authorities continue to identify and detain people,” said Shiva Nazarahari, an organizer of one of these groups, the Committee to Monitor the Situation of Detained Protesters.
The committee has confirmed the names of more than 2,200 people arrested so far using direct reports from families and its network of contacts in the field. Among those arrested are 107 university students, 82 13-year-old children, 19 lawyers and 106 doctors.
Nazarahari said authorities were reviewing city street cameras, store security cameras and drone footage to track people participating in the protests back to their homes or workplaces, where they were arrested.
He was kept out of contact for weeks
The protests began in late December, triggered by anger over price increases, and quickly spread across the country. It peaked on January 8 and 9, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in more than 190 cities and towns across the country.
Security forces responded with unprecedented violence. Human Rights Activists News Agency has so far listed: More than 7,000 dead He says the real number is much higher. The Iranian government announced its only death toll on January 21, saying 3,117 people were killed. The theocracy has undercounted or not reported deaths from past unrest.
Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejehi, the hardline cleric who heads Iran’s judiciary, has become the face of the crackdown, labeling protesters “terrorists” and calling for accelerated sentences.
Since then, “detentions have become so common because it’s like a complete suffocation of society,” said one protester contacted by the AP in Gohardasht, a middle-class district outside the Iranian capital. He said two of his relatives and three of his brother’s friends, as well as several neighbors, were killed in the early days of the crackdown. The protesters spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted by authorities.
The Nakhii sisters, 37-year-old Nyusha and 25-year-old Mona, were first taken to Tehran. the notorious Evin prisonTheir friends said they were allowed to contact their parents. They were later transferred to Qarchak, a women’s prison on the outskirts of Tehran where rights groups are based, he said. reported conditions These included overcrowding and lack of hygiene even before the intervention.
Other people whose arrests were documented by the detainees committee also disappeared in prisons. Abolfazl Jazbi’s family has not heard from him since his arrest at a factory in the southern city of Isfahan on January 15. According to the committee, Jazbi suffers from a serious blood disease that requires medication.
According to Dadban, a group of Iranian lawyers based abroad who documented the detentions, 45-year-old Atila Sultanpour has not been heard from since he was severely beaten by security guards at his home in Tehran on January 29.
Dadban’s lawyer, Musa Barzin, said that based on reports from the families, authorities also took action to suspend bank accounts, block SIM cards and seize the property of relatives of the protesters or people who openly supported them.
Barzin said that in past crackdowns on protests, authorities have sometimes adhered to the guise of due process and the rule of law, but not this time. Authorities increasingly deny detainees access to legal counsel and often detain them for days or weeks before allowing any phone calls to their families. Lawyers representing the arrested protesters were also subpoenaed and detained, according to Dadban.
“Law compliance is at its worst ever,” Barzin said.
Challenge signs continue
Despite the pressure, many civil groups continue to make defiant statements.
The Iranian Writers Association, an independent group with a long tradition of dissent, issued a statement describing the protests as an uprising against “47 years of systemic corruption and discrimination.”
It also announced that two of its members, including a member of its secretariat, had been detained.
The national council representing school teachers has called on parents to speak out about children and students in detention. The statement said, “Do not be afraid of the threats of the security forces. Consult an independent lawyer. Reveal the names of your children.”
The deaths of at least 200 young children killed in the crackdown have been documented, a council spokesman said on Sunday. This figure is several dozen more than the count a few days ago.
“Every day we tell ourselves this is the final list,” Muhammad Habibi wrote to X. “But the next morning new names come again.”
Bar associations and medical groups also spoke out, including Iran’s state-certified doctors’ council, which called on authorities to stop harassing medical staff.
Anger at the bloodshed is fueling anger at an economy gutted by decades of sanctions, corruption and mismanagement. The value of the currency collapsed and inflation rose to record levels.
The Iranian government has announced gestures such as launching a new coupon program for essential goods. Labor and trade groups, including the national retirees union, issued statements condemning the economic and political crisis.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump moved an aircraft carrier and other military assets He went to the Persian Gulf and suggested that the US might attack Iran on the killing of peaceful demonstrators or if Tehran launches mass executions due to protests. A. second American aircraft carrier He’s heading to the Middle East.
The Iranian theocracy has faced protests and US threats in the past, and this crackdown has demonstrated Iran’s firm grip on the country. This week authorities held pro-government rallies attended by hundreds of thousands of people to mark the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Still, Barzin said he saw the severity of the crackdown as a sign that Iran’s leadership was “afraid of being overthrown for the first time.”
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Associated Press Writer Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut contributed to this report.
