Iran protests rage overnight and death toll rises as Trump renews warning of possible US intervention

Protests have taken place Iran Violence broke out on Friday night in the Islamic Republic, internet videos are said to be showing, despite threats from the country’s government to crack down on protesters after shutting down the internet and disconnecting international phone calls. I the protesters he appeared to be encouraged by repeated declarations of support from the Trump administration, as well as the country’s exiled prince, who called on them on Saturday to try to overwhelm the security forces and seize towns and cities.

An outside rights group that relies on information from contacts inside Iran says at least 65 people have been killed in the protests, which started in Tehran in late December such as anger over Iran’s ailing economy, but it spread quickly and became the government’s most important challenge in years.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused President Trump of having his hands “stained with the blood of the Iranian people” in remarks broadcast Friday on Iranian state television, as his supporters gathered before him chanting “Death to America!”

Protesters are “destroying their streets … to please the president of the United States,” Khamenei, 86, told a crowd at his base in Tehran. “Because he said he would help them, he must pay attention to the state of his country.”

State media later called the protesters “terrorists,” setting the stage for an outbreak of violence — how Iran has responded to other major protests in recent years, despite Mr.

Trump issues new warnings to Iran’s leaders

Trump has repeatedly pledged that he will attack Iran if protesters are killed, something that has become more important after the US military attack that captured the former President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. The president suggested that on Friday any US strike “will not mean boots on the ground but that means hitting them hard, hard where it hurts.”

“Iran is in deep trouble,” Trump said. “It looks like people are taking over some cities that no one thought was possible a few weeks ago.”

He added: “I tell the leaders of Iran that you better not start shooting because we will start shooting too.”

In a brief social media post published early Saturday morning in Washington, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “The United States stands with the brave people of Iran.”

Iranian government warns protesters will be punished “without legal reprieve”

Iran’s chief justice Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei separately vowed that the punishment of the protesters “will be final, at the highest level and without legal reprieve.”

According to the Washington DC-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, founded by anti-government activists, since Friday, the 13th day of unrest in Iran, at least 65 people have died, including at least 14 members of the security forces. More than 2,300 people have been arrested, and protests were recorded in at least 180 cities.

Iranian authorities shut down the Internet on Thursday night as protests intensified, apparently heeding the exiled crown prince’s call for Iranians to speak out against the regime.

According to an update posted online Saturday morning by the monitoring organization NetBlocks, “metrics show that the nationwide internet shutdown is still in effect for 36 hours, which has greatly reduced the ability of Iranians to check the safety of friends and loved ones.”

That communications blackout made it extremely difficult to get a clear picture of the overall scale of the protests — and the Iranian authorities’ response to them. Some reports put the death toll from the unrest much higher, with TIME citing a doctor in Tehran as saying at least 217 people have died, for example.

Iranian authorities have acknowledged a few deaths, but mostly only those in security forces.

Asked by CBS News how much he believes Iran’s extremist rulers are heeding the warnings from Mr. Trump that they are not killing the protesters, Maziar Bahari, the editor of the IranWire news website, said that he is sure that “they have really threatened many Iranian officials, and it may have affected their actions in terms of how to deal with the protesters.”

“But at the same time … it has encouraged many protesters to come out, because they know that the leader of the world’s most powerful country supports them,” said Bahari, who spent months in Iranian prisons after being arrested in the last round of major unrest in 2009.

“A lot of people have called what’s happening in Iran right now a revolution,” Bahari told CBS News’ Haley Ott. “And we can see different signs of revolution in Iran in the army. But a revolution usually needs a revolutionary leader. But we don’t have that leader.”

But while decades of tight control over the media and the deliberate marginalization of dissenting voices in the country have deprived Iran of a clear opposition figure within the country’s borders, many in the Iranian diaspora hope the ousted royal family can bounce back.

Head of Iran’s exiled royal family predicts return ‘very close’

Iran’s exiled Prince, Reza Pahlavi, has been seen by many analysts as the driving force behind the protests. On Saturday, he called on Iranians not only to take to the streets, but to try to take cities and towns from the authorities by suppressing them..

“Our goal is no longer just to enter the streets. The goal is to prepare to seize and hold the city’s centers,” said Pahlavi in ​​his latest video message posted on social media, calling for more protests on Saturday and Sunday.

Speaking in a hopeful tone, Pahlavi announced that he was “preparing to return to our country,” suggesting a day when he would be able to do so, “very soon.”

But Pahlavi has been in exile for almost 50 years, and although he has long wanted to position himself as a leader-in-waiting, it is not clear how much real support he has inside the country.

His father, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, was widely despised in Iran when he fled self-imposed exile amid street protests in 1979, as the Islamic Revolution ushered in the current regime.