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It has been almost one month since the last protests flared up throughout Iran\u2014it seems they are never ending. The protests hit Isfahan, Shiraz, Karaj, Eshtehard, Qarchak, Arak, Mashhad, Qahderijan, Najaf, and Shahin Shahr, and reached Tehran. On social media, footage showed protesters and military forces clashing. Security was heightened considerably across the country; the police blocked off multiple streets in Karaj’s Gohardasht district and detained those involved in the clashes. No information is available about their names and the place of arrest except of what Jila Baniyaghoob, a women’s rights advocate, tweeted. She said that 50 girls were detained in the Varamin\u2019s Qarchak Prison.
\nThese protests, erupted shortly after the unprecedented wide-scale protests in 2017, adding salt to the injury. The protests expressed anger over the high riyal-dollar exchange rate; the new U.S. sanctions; growing concerns about commodity shortages; and the daily news about corruption. The slogans mounted beyond calls for economic reform, they were not only against the government but also against the whole regime.<\/p>\n
To whom they listen?<\/strong><\/span> \u201cWith a government like this and an idle parliament, people must hit the streets to protest [\u2026] the government and the parliament have not done what they had to do. They shouldn\u2019t have stood still doing nothing. How is it overnight they woke up and found the price of drinking water had doubled?\u201d said Ahmad Alamolhoda. In a string of tweets, the son of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi supported the protest saying \u201cThis is the best chapter in Iran\u2019s liberation history which will set our country free from the grip of misleading groups.\u201d<\/p>\n The Duplicity of Iran\u2019s Interior Ministry<\/strong><\/span> Translated material<\/span><\/span>: Zaytoon site\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It has been almost one month since the last protests flared up throughout Iran\u2014it seems they are never ending. The protests hit Isfahan, Shiraz, Karaj, Eshtehard, Qarchak, Arak, Mashhad, Qahderijan, Najaf, and Shahin Shahr, and reached Tehran. On social media, footage showed protesters and military forces clashing. Security was heightened considerably across the country; the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":5438,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2587,2754,2755,2753,66],"class_list":["post-5435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reports","tag-demands","tag-increase","tag-irans-protests","tag-mount","tag-protests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5439,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5435\/revisions\/5439"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe protester attacked Eshtehard\u2019s hawza (religious seminary) to show that their anger is beyond the severe economic situation. \u201cSome protesters attacked Eshtehard\u2019s hawza Friday evening, but no considerable damage was made as the necessary actions had been taken,\u201d said the Head of Eshtehard\u2019s hawza, Ali Hindyani.
\nA few variant political parties and streams were trying to find ways to ride the wave of the unrest, making it more complicated and multi-pronged. Some of them claim that they are only directing the protests while they are the real inciters \u2014 such as Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and Ahmad Alamolhoda, the Mashhad Friday prayer leader. On the other hand, some social media users, who call themselves \u201cthe ones who will overthrow\u201d the Iranian Republic, claim that their calls for wide-scale protests on social media triggered the recent unrest, and that they shared footage of their protests on social media.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/08\/23.png\")
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\nLater he said that the protests must not follow the desires of \u201cWestern proxies,\u201d and direct the people to stand up against the regime. That made a group of his followers; hawza students and clerics stage a sit-in protest in front of the Reza Mosque against the government and parliament and raised slogans claiming that the high prices were just a pretext for Rouhani government to negotiate with the United States. The cried-out slogans against the parliament, \u201cThe parliament is lazy and inactive.\u201d
\nThe Tehran Friday prayer leader Kazem Siddiqi highlighted that the covert government corruption, now, is \u201ctreason in wartime\u201d and shall be subject to military punishment.
\nIn response to the protests, the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted, \u201cWe are deeply concerned about the reports of the Iranian regimes\u2019 violence against unarmed citizens\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/rasanah-iiis.org\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/08\/24.png\")
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\nThe Minister of Interior tried to undermine the protests saying \u201cOne of the enemy\u2019s strategies with Iran is to stir the pot of society. They [enemies] think this will affect Iran; gathering 50-200 people at one place would destabilize domestic conditions.\u201d His remark contradicts with the fact that the regime is facing difficulties in addressing protests.
\nThe reformists, whose prominent figures faced harsh criticism over the December-2017 protests preferred to keep silent. A few of them recognized the people\u2019s right to cry out against corruption. The reformists seek to negotiate with the regime\u2019s top leaders, therefore; they avoided showing support to those who oppose the government or are involved in assemblies inciting violence. They plan to make gradual changes away from violence. Yet they are concerned about declining grassroot support.
\nThough it is difficult to pinpoint the inciters and powers stirring the protests, the public frustration is quite apparent. Representatives of all social streams hit the streets, expressing frustration. They are creating a power that could ignite the spark of protests, Alamolhoda implicitly pointed to, however; no guarantees that this spark could burn down the whole regime.<\/p>\n