Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Iran has faced intense nationwide protests for nearly two weeks, posing the biggest challenge to the ruling regime in years – and forcing President Trump to pledge to intervene on behalf of protesters if they face a violent crackdown.
Initially triggered by IranFaced with a free-falling economy and high inflation, protests have boiled over, with nearly 50 cities facing demonstrations. A monitoring group has reported thousands of arrests and dozens of deaths since the protests began.
Here’s what you need to know:
How the protests in Iran started and what became of them
The current wave of protests began in the capital, Tehran, in late December, as traders went on strike and took to the streets. Iran’s small business owners have long been seen as supportive of the regime, but anger over spiraling inflation and the devaluation of the national currency, which lost more than 40% of its value last year, making everyday goods unaffordable for many people, sparked the protests.
The protests quickly spread, with people joining marches across the country to denounce not only economic hardship, but also to express broader discontent with the country’s intransigent rule.
Kamran/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty 
On Thursday, protests were reported in at least 46 cities in 21 of the country’s 31 provinces, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agencyor HRANA, a US-based monitoring group founded by anti-regime activists.
Protests have also been reported on dozens of college campuses since late December, and strikes and store closures have been reported in markets in more than a dozen cities, HRANA said.
Videos posted on social media almost every evening showed crowds of protesters march through the streets of various Iranian citiessinging anti-government slogans and clashes with the country’s security forces in some cases.
How Iranian authorities reacted
More than 2,200 people have been arrested since the start of the wave of protests, including at least 166 under the age of 18, according to HRANA. Some 42 people were killed, the group said, including 29 protesters, at least five people under the age of 18 and eight members of the security services.
The semi-official Fars news agency of the Islamic Republic claimed Monday that around 250 police officers and 45 members of the feared Basij security forces had been injured during the unrest.
Iranian authorities telephone service and web access cut off Thursday night across the country, according to internet monitoring organization NetBlocks, which said a “nationwide internet outage” continued Friday.
“Even Starlink, which was the main line of communication for some activists in different parts of the country, has been jammed,” Maziar Bahari, editor-in-chief of the independent news site IranWire, told CBS News on Friday, referring to the satellite communications system run by Elon Musk.
CBS News reached out for comment from SpaceX, which manages Starlink, but got no immediate response.
Trump warns he will hit Iran ‘very hard’ if it kills protesters
Mr. Trump threatened On several occasions since the protests began, he could order American intervention if Iranian authorities killed demonstrators.
Speaking at the White House on January 9, Mr. Trump reiterated that he was open to any form of U.S. action, although he said it would not involve a U.S. incursion.
“I made it very clear that if they started killing people like they did in the past, we would get involved,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re going to hit them really hard where it hurts. And that doesn’t mean we have to stay down, but it means hit them really, really hard where it hurts. So we don’t want that to happen.”
In a January 2 article on Social truthhe said: “If Iran [shoots] and violently kills peaceful protesters, as is their habit, the United States of America will come to their rescue. »
“We are locked, loaded and ready to go,” the president said.
Speaking on Fox News on January 8, Mr. Trump said the United States was “prepared” to hit Iran hard if protesters were killed, but added that “for the most part, they weren’t.”
The president’s comments come just over six months after he ordered airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilitiesin the middle of a deadly conflict which has lasted for several days between Iran and Israel.
Iran unrest also comes as Mr. Trump adopts a more aggressive posture on the world stage.
US forces captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a night military operation in Caracas on January 3, and Mr. Trump has suggested he is open to military action in Colombia to combat drug trafficking, and even to take control of Greenland.
Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who studies Iran, told CBS News last week that Mr. Trump’s gestures of support could embolden Iranian protesters, saying his comments could be “the only ingredient you need to keep … the street movement alive.”
IranWire’s Bahari said Iranian officials told him they were concerned about the possibility of Mr. Trump’s intervention in Iran even before the protests began.
The recent US attack on Venezuela “really frightened many Iranian officials and may have affected their actions in terms of how they deal with the protesters.” But at the same time, it has inspired many protesters to come out, because they know that the leader of the world’s leading superpower supports their cause.
Iranian leaders acknowledge problems, but blame U.S.
In a speech broadcast on state television on Friday, after an intense night of protests, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised that his regime “would not back down”, called for unity and accused “a gang of vandals” in Tehran of having sowed chaos in the capital “to please the American president”.
In some cases, Iranian officials have attempted to adopt a conciliatory tone, acknowledging economic concerns and insisting that people have the right to demonstrate peacefully. State media reported that President Masoud Pezeshkian had security forces led do not repress peaceful demonstrators.
The government also offered some relief in the form of a $7 per month stipend that can be used at grocery stores to purchase basic necessities.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry has condemned Mr Trump’s threats of US interventionaccusing the United States of “incitement to violence and terrorism.”
Commander of the Iranian Army, Major General Amir Hatami threatened Wednesday to “cut off the hand of every aggressor”.
The history of mass protests in Iran
Protests – and harsh repression – are a recurring theme in Iran.
The last major wave of protests occurred in 2022, sparked by the death in police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, arrested by theocratic government forces for allegedly wearing her headscarf incorrectly. Hundreds of people were killed through months of protests.
Other protest movements emerged 2019 And 2017and Iran was plagued by a large-scale uprising in 2009 following the country’s disputed presidential election.
“From what we’ve seen on social media and also from conversations with different people in Iran, the number of protesters in different parts of the country is not as high as in 2022, but there are more protests – the protests are more widespread in different parts of the country,” Bahari told CBS News. “So even in some small towns where there have never been protests, there are protests these days, and I think people are more desperate than before.”
The current protests appear different from previous ones — and may be harder for the regime to quell by offering concessions — because of their roots in the country’s economic woes, according to Mona Yacoubian, director and senior advisor of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
She noted that in 2022, the regime had managed to appease the protesters by “simply responding to their complaints about women wearing headscarves, etc.” “.
But protesters are now more focused on economic issues and “there’s really nothing that can be done.” [the regime] what we can do” to get Iran’s moribund economy back on track, she said.
“These protests are about the economic situation, but also about dignity,” Bahari told CBS News. “It’s about national pride. And because of that, this protest will be very, very difficult to contain.”
Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi encourages protests
Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, whose father, the former shah, fled just before the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought the mullahs’ regime to power, has applauded the protests from his exile, calling on demonstrators this week to keep the movement “disciplined” and “as large as possible.”
Joël SAGET/AFP via Getty Images 
The crown prince called on Iranians to chant together against the country’s leaders at 8 p.m. local time, or 12 p.m. Eastern time, on Thursday and Friday, and many appeared to respond to his call.
Pahlavi’s call to action “could be a turning point” in the protest movement, Yacoubian told CBS News on Thursday.
“This is a regime that is not afraid to use lethal force,” Yacoubian said. “But the question is to what extent, if they are overwhelmed, if the protests become overwhelming in scale and if there are elements in the security forces, the police, etc., sort of at the local level, who are themselves experiencing the effects of this economic crisis and who are deciding not to shoot people: those are the kinds of questions that I think we need to watch.”
