Iran Signals Upcoming Crackdown on Protestors as Demonstrations Continue

The Iranian regime signaled it was preparing for a crackdown on protesters on Jan. 9, after earlier shutting off internet and phone access across the country.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei took aim at President Donald Trump in a series of posts on X, accusing him of having Iranian blood on his hands.

“The U.S. President who judges arrogantly about the whole world should know that tyrants & arrogant rulers of the world, such as Pharaoh, Nimrod, Mohammad Reza [Pahlavi] (the former shah) & other such rulers saw their downfall when they were at the peak of their hubris. He too will fall,” Khamenei wrote.

“Last night in Tehran & some other cities, a bunch of people bent on destruction came and destroyed buildings that belong to their own country in order to please the President of the United States and make him happy,” he said in another post.

Khamenei said in yet another post that Trump had taken the side of the “rioters” and that during the 12-day war between the Islamic Republic and Israel, which saw U.S. jets bomb the country last year, “more than a thousand of our country’s citizens were martyred.”

“The US President said he ordered this. So, he confessed that the Iranians’ blood was on his hands. Now he’s saying that he’s on the side of the Iranian nation!” Khamenei went on, saying that the United States was “wrong in its calculations about Iran” and that “their flawed scheming will cause them to fail.”

In addition to Khamenei’s comments, state media have begun to label the demonstrators “terrorists,” and Iran’s judiciary chief, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, vowed that punishment for protesters “will be decisive, maximum and without any legal leniency.”

Trump has previously warned that the United States would intervene in Iran if authorities were to use lethal force on protestors.

“If they start killing people, like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States,” Trump said on Jan. 4.

The current protests, the biggest wave of dissent in three years, began last month in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, where shopkeepers condemned the free fall of the rial, Iran’s currency.

They have not yet reached the scale of the 2022 demonstrations over women’s rights following the death in custody of Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini.

Since commencing, protesters have been urged on by Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the shah who was toppled in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

In a Jan. 7 video post on X, the crown prince said, “My fellow countrymen, today, Jan. 7, your presence across Iran was unprecedented. And this constitutes a declaration of readiness for tomorrow’s plan,” according to an English translation.

“Of course, reports have reached us that the regime is terribly frightened and is attempting, once again, to cut off the internet. Know that our communication will not be severed. Whether through hundreds of thousands of Starlink devices in Iran, or through the Iran International and Manoto television networks.”

Pahlavi said the plan would “drive another nail into the coffin of this regime.”

In a Jan. 9 post on X, he called on Trump to intervene in the country, describing it as “an urgent and immediate call for your attention, support, and action.”

“Ali Khamenei, fearing the end of his criminal regime at the hands of the people and with the help of your powerful promise to support the protesters, has threatened the people on the streets with a brutal crackdown,” he said, claiming that Khamenei wanted to use the internet and phone blackout in the country to “murder these young heroes.”

“Your threat to this criminal regime has also kept the regime’s thugs at bay,” he wrote, addressing Trump. “But time is of the essence. The people will be on the streets again in an hour. I am asking you to help. You have proven and I know you are a man of peace and a man of your word. Please be prepared to intervene to help the people of Iran.”

U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) has put the death toll of the protests at 42, including five under 18s and eight security personnel or officers. The agency says that more than 2,277 people have been arrested as of Jan. 8.