DUBAI, Nov 5 (Reuters) – President Ebrahim Raisi said Iran’s cities were “safe and sound” after what he called a failed attempt by the United States to repeat the 2011 Arab uprisings in the Islamic Republic, media reported on Saturday. Iranian media outlets, as the protests continued for the fiftieth day.

Iran’s clerical leadership has struggled to suppress demonstrations that erupted in September following the death of young Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, who had been detained by morality police for disobeying strict laws on women’s dress.

Hundreds of people, mostly protesters, have been killed, according to activists, in one of the worst waves of unrest in the country since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which toppled the US-backed Shah.

As Iranian authorities this week marked the anniversary of the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran by radical students, President Joe Biden backed the protesters, saying, “We are going to liberate Iran. They are going to liberate very soon.” early”.

Students and women have led many of the current protests, with women removing and burning veils in defiance of strict dress codes and students chanting for officials on college campuses, according to unverified video footage.

“The Americans and other enemies tried to destabilize Iran by applying the same plans as in Libya and Syria, but they failed,” Raisi told a group of students on Friday, according to Iranian news agencies.

A popular uprising in Libya led to a NATO intervention in 2011 and the ouster and assassination of the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, at the hands of rebel fighters. In Syria, mass demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Iran, were met with force and the country was plunged into a conflict that continues 11 years later.

On the contrary, Iranian cities are now “safe and sound”, Raisi said, promising punishment for the unrest in the country.

INSTRUCTIONS, REPRESSION

The activist news agency HRANA said that as of Friday, 314 protesters had been killed in the unrest, including 47 minors. Some 38 members of the security forces had also been killed.

At least 14,170 people have been detained, including 392 students, in the protests held in 136 cities and towns, and at 134 universities, according to the agency.

Some of the worst bloodshed has been in the southeastern Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan, where much of the country’s Sunni minority, largely Shia Muslim, lives.

Senior Sunni cleric Molavi Abdolhamid said the response to Friday’s protests in the southeastern city of Khash had been harsher than in other parts of the country.

“Should live ammunition be the answer to slogans and stone-throwing? One wonders (…) why are protesters in this province mercilessly massacred?” the cleric asked in a statement published online. your website.

Amnesty International said up to 10 people may have been killed after security forces opened fire on stone-throwing protesters who reportedly attacked a government building.

Students from a dozen universities in Tehran and Karaj, west of the capital, the northern city of Rasht, and Mashhad, in the northeast, protested on Saturday chanting slogans such as “Woman, life, freedom”, according to the videos. published by HRANA.

Human rights group Hengaw released a video it says comes from Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan province, of protesters setting fires to block a main street late on Saturday. There were also protests in the northwestern cities of Bukan, Saqez and Marivan.

A video on social media, purportedly from the southwestern city of Ahvaz, showed a young man setting fire to a statue of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, killed in a 2020 US strike in Iraq.

Reuters was unable to verify the videos.

The crisis has dragged the Iranian currency to new lows. The US dollar was trading at 362,100 riyals on the unofficial market on Saturday, having lost almost 12% of its value since the demonstrations began, according to currency website Bonbast.com.

In an apparent effort to stem the currency’s slide, the government on Saturday authorized online sales by forex dealers to make it easier to buy hard currency.

The Intelligence Ministry said it has blocked the bank accounts of 2,300 people accused of participating in the foreign exchange black market and that they could face legal action, state media reported.

(Dubai Writing Report; Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing in Spanish by Ricardo Figueroa)