Iran is cut off from internet as protests calling for regime change intensify

The internet shutdown came a day after the heads of Iran’s judiciary and its security services said they would take tough measures against anyone protesting. But the threats did not deter demonstrators.

In telephone interviews, more than a dozen witnesses said that they saw large crowds forming Thursday night in neighborhoods across Tehran, the capital, and in cities around Iran, including Mashhad, Bushehr, Shiraz and Isfahan. They said the crowds were diverse, with men and women, young and old. The people interviewed inside Iran asked that their names not be published out of fear of retribution.

One resident of Tehran said that the crowds were chanting, “Death to Khamenei,” referring to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and “freedom, freedom.” The chants could be heard from several blocks away in the affluent neighborhood of Shahrak Gharb in Tehran, which had until now sat out the protests.

Videos filmed Thursday night showed government buildings on fire across the country, including in Tehran, as protests grew. While the protests were mostly peaceful early in the evening, violence broke out later in the night in Tehran, with demonstrators setting fire to cars, buildings and items in the street. A video verified by The New York Times shows fires in the streets of Kaj Square in the capital, with thousands of protesters flooding the area.

In Karaj, a suburb west of Tehran, a video verified by the Times showed protesters fleeing after gunshots were fired, though it is unclear from the videos whether it was security forces firing.

As the protests grew, internet connectivity data showed an abrupt and near-total drop in connection levels in Iran on Thursday afternoon, according to NetBlocks, an internet monitoring group, and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Outage Detection and Analysis database. The data indicates that the country is almost completely offline.

Iranian officials did not immediately respond to questions about the cause of the shutdown, but the government has previously enforced internet blackouts during moments of crisis. During the country’s 12-day war with Israel last June, Iran blocked access to the internet, saying that it was a necessary security measure to stop Israeli infiltration. That measure also cut off the flow of information outward to the rest of the world.

Iranians have been protesting against the authoritarian rule of the Islamic clerics for decades, in wave after wave of protests that have been repeatedly crushed.

The latest round of protests began a week ago. Multiple opposition groups, including Kurdish political groups, the Coordination Council of Azerbaijani Parties and Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, had all called for people inside Iran to take to the streets. Pahlavi had said in a video message that people opposing the government should come to the streets at 8 p.m. Thursday.

Pro-democracy activists, such as the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, who is currently in detention, said in a statement with 17 prominent dissidents and film directors last week that the demand for democracy could not be quashed.

A resident in the southern city of Bushehr said the crowd was so large there that the security forces retreated.

A resident of Isfahan said that as a crowd of protesters marched, drivers honked and waved, and people in nearby apartment building whistled in solidarity.

A resident of Sadeghiyeh, a middle-class neighborhood in Tehran, said the crowd was swelling in size by the hour. He said security forces had fired their weapons into the air and fired tear gas canisters, but did not disperse the crowd. He said that some people in the crowd chanted, “Long live the Shah,” a reference to the last monarch in Iran, who was toppled in the 1979 revolution.

Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, said in a post on social media that the “Zionist regime” — referring to Israel — was behind the protests. “The destabilization puzzle has been activated; a puzzle that the Iranian nation will not allow to be completed,” he added.

The slogans chanted by the crowd covered an array of political views but with one united target: the end of the Islamic regime.

Shima, a 52-year-old from Tehran, said she and her husband, her teenager children and her elderly parents were all on the streets Thursday night protesting for the first time as a family and chanting, “we are together, we are together, don’t be afraid,” and “clerics, get lost, the shah is coming back.”

As the protest movement has spread to cities across the country the head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, told Iranian media that the demonstrations were plotted by the country’s enemy and the government would show no mercy.

“This time it’s different. This time there are no excuses left,” he said. “The enemy has officially announced its support. I tell the people and the families that this time no one will be spared.”

Amnesty International said in a statement Thursday that it had documented at least 28 protesters killed in the recent days of protest, including children. Three other groups that document and track human rights — HRANA, based in Washington; Iran Human Rights, based in Norway; and the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights — put the toll higher, at more than 40.

Merchants and business owners in the traditional bazaars in the cities of Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan, Mashhad and Kerman have closed their shops to protest the dire state of the economy and the plunging value of Iran’s currency, according to interviews with witnesses and Iranian news media reports. These bazaars are at the heart of the country’s commerce and economy, and strikes could paralyze the economy if they continue.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.