Protests in Iran continue for a third week despite internet restrictions and a brutal crackdown

Anti-government protests in Iran have continued for a third week, despite severe internet restrictions and a brutal crackdown that rights groups say dozens died.

Videos posted on social networks appeared to show protests in cities across Iran on Friday night and Saturday as students at several universities shouted chants such as “Death to the dictator!”

Other forms of civil disobedience, such as residents chanting from rooftops, drivers honking in unison, and public figures spoke for the demonstrators.

Demonstrations of solidarity were held around the world on Saturday, including in Rome, London, Frankfurt and Seoul.

The reason for the protests was the death on September 16 of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was detained for allegedly not covering her hair properly. She later died in the custody of Iran’s moral police.

Hadi Ghaemi, director Center for Human Rights in IranThe New York-based independent organization said the protests “definitely continue.”

He noted the “bloodbath” on Friday in the southeastern Iranian city of Zahedan, where at least 19 there were people reportedly killed after a confrontation between protesters and the police. He said the protests were directly related to Amini and the rape of a 15-year-old girl by a police commander.

As in the previous days of protests, the latest videos show that there are many demonstrators women.

They led and participated in demonstrations and, in defiance of the Islamic regime’s strict moral laws, cut their hair in public and danced with their bare locks loose.

“We keep getting a lot of videos showing that women are fearless,” said Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and activist who fled Iran in 2009 and now lives in New York. “They are fearlessly going towards the security forces. It seems people have made up their minds this time. Like, enough is enough, we are fed up with the Islamic Republic and we want to get rid of it.”

These days, Alinezhad spends day and night posting images of protests and other acts of defiance on social media. millions of subscribers. The Iranian regime made it a crime for Iranians to send her a video. It also made her a target, even in New York, where she spoke to CBS News from an FBI container. But she said she was not afraid.

“My real leaders are these women and men in Iran,” she said. “I’m not doing anything, just exercising my freedom in the US, echoing their voice.”

In recent years, women in Iran have taken part in other nationwide protests. But this time the spark was the death of a woman, and a journalist – Nilufar Hamedi from the newspaper “Sharh” – spread the story. She was arrested and placed in solitary confinement in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.

Khamedi is one of at least 19 journalists, including seven women, detained across the country since the protests began. Reporters Without Borders. (The Center for Human Rights in Iran cites this figure 25 or higher.)

“This is the first time that women in large numbers, standing shoulder to shoulder with men, are burning their headscarves,” said Alinged, who runs an online campaign called “My hidden freedom,” sharing images of girls and women in Iran breaking hijab-wearing rules.”[The hijab] is the mainstay of the Islamic Republic, so they firmly believe that by burning headscarves, they are actually destabilizing the regime.”

For several decades before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, women on the streets of Iran wore both the hijab and the latest western fashion. But soon after the revolution, the new Islamic regime decreed that women—and girls from a young age—had to cover their hair and bodies in public. Hard-liners have announced that the hijab will protect women’s honor, but for many protesters it is a symbol of oppression.

The women who took part in the demonstrations want to have a choice whether to wear the hijab or not, according to Azadeh Pourzand, co-founder of the American campaign Semak Purzand Foundationpromoting freedom of speech in Iran.

“It’s about basically women feeling humiliated and women feeling forced to do things they can’t do or don’t want to do,” said Pourzand, who is also a women’s activist and PhD student at the University of London. in Iran.

Although Iranian women have been pushing for legal reforms for years, very little has been achieved, she said. Women are present in society, especially in higher education, but family and employment laws remain deeply discriminatory against women, as do norms and practices, she said.

Still, Pourzand noted that the protests united Iranians of different ages, ethnicities and cities. The demonstrators are not only speaking for women’s rights, but also against political repression, corruption, Iran’s broken economy and the climate crisis stemming from bad governance.

Alinejad wants Western countries to cut ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran and “recognize … the Iranian uprising.”

The young Iranians demonstrating in the streets believe that “history will judge those democratic countries that could help us but chose to help our killers,” she said, adding: “They are saying, ‘We are ready to die for the future of Iran, for that it is better to live in the country.”

The teacher, who spoke to CBS News on the condition that her name not be used, said she took her daughter to protests in Tehran twice.

“For 43 years we lived and slept in fear, so much so that we got used to it,” she said. “But now we are no longer afraid.”