Protesters in Iran have called a three-day strike this week amid conflicting reports that its “moral police” have been shut down and how the US has said the leadership in Tehran has become entangled in a “vicious circle” that has broken it from its own people and the international community.
The call adds pressure on Iranian authorities after the attorney general said this weekend that the morality police – whose detention of a young woman sparked months of protests – has been shut down. There was no confirmation of the closure from the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of morality police, and Iranian state media said Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was not responsible for overseeing the force.
Hundreds of people were killed in unrest that broke out in September after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman who was arrested by morality police for disobeying hijab rules. Montazeri also said Saturday that the government is reviewing the compulsory hijab law, one of the issues that sparked the protests, which have lasted more than 10 weeks.
The activist news agency HRANA said 470 people had been killed as of Saturday, including 64 minors.
Demonstrators who want to keep up their challenge to Iran’s spiritual rulers have called for a three-day economic strike and rally in Tehran’s Azadi Square on Wednesday. Similar calls for strikes and mass mobilizations have led to an escalation of unrest in recent weeks.
Rob Malley, the US special envoy to Iran, told a conference in Rome that the Iranian leadership had become caught in a “vicious circle” in cracking down on the protests and that Washington was more focused on Tehran’s decision to arm Russia in Ukraine , and the suppression of its internal protests than on talks to revive the nuclear deal.
“The more Iran oppresses, the more sanctions there will be; The more sanctions there are, the more isolated Iran feels,” said Rob Malley, the US special envoy to Iran, at a conference in Rome.
“The more isolated they feel, the more they turn to Russia; The more they turn to Russia, the more sanctions there will be, the more the climate worsens, the less likely there will be nuclear diplomacy. So it is true that the vicious circles are all self-reinforcing at the moment.
“Suppression of the protests and Iran’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine is our focus because that’s where things happen and that’s where we want to make a difference,” Malley added.
US Intelligence Director Avril Haynes said over the weekend there were worrying indications that Russia was looking to deepen military cooperation with Iran. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri was in Moscow over the weekend.
A senior European diplomat said Iran is paying a huge price for its decision to become the only country to arm Russia in the war against Ukraine. “It is an unholy alliance and a massive miscalculation by Iran,” the diplomat said.
The next show of US solidarity with the protesters is likely to come when they table a motion to kick Iran out of the UN Committee on the Status of Women in a vote on Dec. 14, Malley said.
Some European diplomats believe an irreversible turning point has been reached from which the Iranian leadership will never recover. The diplomat said: “The situation is actually quite simple. The Islamic Republic – the regime – has finally lost touch with its people after 43 years and that is what this is really about. This is unlike anything that has happened in the past 43 years.
“They are in dialogue with themselves, but the majority of the population sees the reform proposals as largely irrelevant.”
The diplomat also noted tensions within the regime over how to respond to the protests, saying: “There is a lot of internal disharmony around different parts of the respective security apparatus in terms of handing over responsibility for handling the protests.”
The diplomats believe the regime’s apparent loss of internal support is fueling internal Iranian debate over whether to reduce its isolation through a growing alliance with Russia or instead seek to revive the nuclear deal.
Malley’s comments suggest the US believes Iran made a series of fateful decisions that make a full revival of the nuclear deal – in which the West lifted some economic sanctions in exchange for control of Iran’s nuclear program – politically impossible for now, though he said the door to diplomacy was not closed when the Iranian leadership changed course.
The Iranian state broadcaster tried on Sunday to distance itself from its statements on the vice squad. State-run television Al-Alam said foreign media portrayed his comments as “a retreat by the Islamic Republic of its stance on hijab and religious morality in the wake of the protests,” but all that could be understood from his comments was that the vice squad not directly related to the judiciary.
Montazeri was quoted as saying by Iran’s semi-official Labor news agency on Saturday that the morality police had been dismantled. “The same agency that set up these police closed them down,” he was quoted as saying. He said the morality police are not under the authority of the judiciary, which “continues to monitor behavioral acts at the community level.”
Portal contributed to this report