Iran’s supreme leader has insisted he ‘will not yield to the enemy’ and said ‘rioters must be put in their place’ after a week of protests that have shaken the Islamic Republic.
The first comments by 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei come as violence surrounding the demonstrations sparked by Iran’s ailing economy has killed at least 10 people.
They will likely be seen as a greenlight to the security forces to aggressively put down the demonstrations.
Protests show no sign of stopping despite Donald Trump warning Iran on Friday that if Tehran ‘violently kills peaceful protesters’ the United States ‘will come to their rescue’.
While it remains unclear how and if Trump will intervene, his comments sparked an immediate, angry response, with officials within the theocracy threatening to target American troops in the Mideast.
They also take on new importance after Trump said Saturday that the US military captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a longtime ally of Tehran.
The protests, have become the biggest in Iran since 2022, when the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody triggered nationwide demonstrations.
However, the protests have yet to be as widespread and intense as those surrounding the death of Amini, who was detained over not wearing her hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities.
State television aired remarks by Khamenei to an audience in Tehran that sought to separate the concerns of protesting Iranians upset about the rial’s collapse from ‘rioters’.
‘We talk to protesters, the officials must talk to them,’ Khamenei said.
‘But there is no benefit to talking to rioters. Rioters must be put in their place.’
He also reiterated a claim constantly made by officials in Iran that foreign powers like Israel or the United States were pushing the protests, without offering any evidence.
He also blamed ‘the enemy’ for Iran’s collapsing rial.
‘A bunch of people incited or hired by the enemy are getting behind the tradesmen and shopkeepers and chanting slogans against Islam, Iran and the Islamic Republic,’ he said.
‘This is what matters most.’
Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard ranks include the all-volunteer Basij force, whose motorcycling-riding members have violently put down protests like the 2009 Green Movement and the 2022 demonstrations.
The Guard answers only to Khamenei.
Hard-line officials within the country are believed to have been pushing for a more-aggressive response to the demonstrations as President Masoud Pezeshkian has sought talks to address protesters’ demands.
But bloody security crackdowns often follow such protests.
Protests over a gasoline price hike in 2019 reportedly saw over 300 people killed.
A crackdown on the Amini protests of 2022, which lasted for months, killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained.
Two deaths overnight into Saturday involved a new level of violence.
In Qom, home to the country’s major Shiite seminaries, a grenade exploded, killing a man there, the state-owned IRAN newspaper reported.
It quoted security officials alleging the man was carrying the grenade to attack people in the city, some 80 miles south of the capital, Tehran.
Online videos from Qom purportedly showed fires in the street overnight.
The second death happened in the town of Harsin, some 230 miles southwest of Tehran.
There, the newspaper said, a member of the Basij, the all-volunteer arm of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, died in a gun and knife attack in the town in Kermanshah province.
Demonstrations have reached over 100 locations in 22 of Iran’s 31 provinces, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported.
The protests, taking root in economic issues, have heard demonstrators chant against Iran’s theocracy as well.
Tehran has had little luck in propping up its economy in the months since its June war with Israel in which the U.S. also bombed Iranian nuclear sites in Iran.
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