Protesters ignored threats of severe punishment from Iran’s leaders and warnings from rights groups about undocumented killings as they poured out onto the streets of cities across the country late Friday.
The fresh protests came as President Donald Trump again warned the regime that he would intervene if demonstrators were killed. “I tell the Iranian leaders: You better not start shooting, because we’ll start shooting, too,” he said at a meeting with oil executives.
Iran’s Prosecutor-General Mohammad Movahedi Azad said Saturday that protesters would be considered an “enemy of God,” a death-penalty charge in Iran, in remarks reported by Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news agency.
The news agency also reported that 100 people had been arrested in Tehran province for “disrupting public order” and leading riots.
The demonstrations, which started almost two weeks ago with economic grievances as the currency crashed and inflation soared, have now morphed into one of the biggest challenges the Islamic Republic has faced in its 47-year history, with thousands of people hitting the streets in large and small cities across the country to demand the ouster of the ruling clergy.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the highest authority in the country, drew a hard line in a fiery speech on Friday and said that the Islamic Republic would not back down in the face of internal protests or external pressure, a position that will likely drive the security forces to lash out even more violently against demonstrators, analysts say.
“Right now, we are very concerned that after the internet shutdown, the brutality will increase,” Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based group Iran Human Rights, told NBC News in a telephone interview.
In a report issued Friday, the organization noted at least 51 people killed, including eight children, spread out across 11 provinces during the two weeks of protests.
Amnesty International issued an equally stark warning Friday in a post on X.
“The Iranian authorities have once again deliberately blocked internet access inside Iran to hide the true extent of the grave human rights violations and crimes under international law they are carrying out to crush nationwide protests,” the group said.
Videos that trickled out on Friday and were geolocated by NBC News showed huge crowds in Mashhad and Tehran chanting slogans against Khamenei.
One X post showing protesters in the Saadat Abad neighborhood of Tehran notes that the video clip was sent via Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, which could be one way that protesters are bypassing the internet blackout. Starlink terminals are known to have been smuggled into Iran during the last large round of protests in 2022 and 2023.
The videos that were posted on social media since Thursday also indicate that security forces likely unleashed a fierce and bloody crackdown across the country and that some protesters attacked government buildings.
Amiry-Moghaddam said that his organization had heard of the “massive use of violence” in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran.
One video posted online that says it is from Fardis, a city between Karaj and Tehran, and was circulated on Friday shows several bodies splayed across a blood-streaked floor as the man filming says, “They shot with war bullets and killed the people!”
NBC News did not independently verify the content of the video.
A separate video geolocated by NBC News shows the municipality building in the city of Karaj in flames.
Violence also broke out in the city of Zahedan in southeast Iran after Friday prayers. Security forces opened fire on crowds of protesters, according to the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, a Norwegian-registered Kurdish watchdog group that monitors rights violations across Iran.
Zahedan, home to a large community of Iran’s ethnic Baluch minority, was also a hotbed of protests in 2022 where several protesters were shot by security forces after Friday prayers in what came to be known as “bloody Friday.”
Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s late shah, posted on X early Saturday to call for protesters to prepare to seize city centers across Iran.
He also called for a “nationwide strike” targeting the transportation, oil, gas and energy industries to destabilize the regime.
The violence in Iran comes as Trump again issued a warning to the country’s leaders on Friday not to kill protesters.
“I’ve made the statement very strongly that if they start killing people like they have in the past, we will get involved,” he said at a meeting with oil executives that was attended by journalists. “We’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts. And that doesn’t mean boots on the ground, but it means hitting them very, very hard where it hurts.”
Trump later added, “I tell the Iranian leaders: You better not start shooting, because we’ll start shooting, too.”
“The United States supports the brave people of Iran,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on X late Friday.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz issued a joint statement on Friday urging Iranian authorities to “exercise restraint.”
“We are deeply concerned about reports of violence by Iranian security forces, and strongly condemn the killing of protestors,” the statement said. “The Iranian authorities have the responsibility to protect their own population and must allow for the freedom of expression and peaceful assembly without fear of reprisal.”
As the Iranian government ramps up violence, it is unlikely that the protests will stop anytime soon, analysts say.
“In every round of protests over the past decade, the initial trigger is subsumed into wider discontent against the system writ large,” Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said in a text message response to questions. “That’s one of the key challenges facing the state: It can repress the discontent, but fails to address the underlying political, social and economic grievances.”
