Iranian women hack off their hair and burn their hijabs while ten protesters die

More Iranian women are defiantly filming themselves cutting off their hair and burning their hijabs in solidarity with Mahsa Amini who was killed last week for wearing ‘unsuitable attire’.

State-mandated headscarves have been removed by women in the streets and others shared videos of them defying the draconian dress codes in an open challenge to the authoritarian regime.

Ms Amini died at the age of 22 last week, three days after she was arrested by the ‘Basij’, police responsible for enforcing Iran‘s strict Islamic strict dress code. 

Police said she died of a heart attack and did not suffer any mistreatment, despite experts claims she was severely beaten by the ‘morality police’.

Her death has sparked nationwide protests which have seen at least ten people killed as violence grips the republic.

To prevent protests from spreading, Iran’s biggest telecom operator largely shut down mobile internet access again Thursday, said Netblocks, a group that monitors internet access, describing the restrictions as the most severe since 2019.

Reports from Kurdish rights group Hengaw said three protesters were killed on Wednesday, bringing the death toll from the protests to 10. 

An anchor on Iran’s state television suggested the death toll from the mass protests could be as high as 17 on Thursday, but did not say how he reached that figure. 

‘Unfortunately, 17 people and police officers present at the scene of these events lost their lives,’ the anchor said, adding official statistics would be released later.

One pensioner removed her headscarf and chanted ‘death to Khamenei’ while protesters ripped down posters of the Supreme Leader.

In footage from Sari, the capital of northern Mazandaran province, activists teared down posters of the founder of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Khomeini and Supreme Leader Khamenei on a municipality building.   

‘Amin Marafti, 16, Milan Haghigi, 21, and Sadruddin Litani, 27, were at least three Shno residents who were shot dead by government forces during the city’s demonstrations ,’ Hengaw said in a statement. 

‘I’m just looking outside of from flat’s window. It’s a complete chaos down here,’ Ashskan, a resident of Tajrish in the centre of the capital Tehran, told MailOnline. 

‘They [police] fired teargas here, it’s a residential, children are living here. It’s lots of smoke, people are suffocating,’ he said.

‘Most of the protesters are women with no headscarves. They are clashing with the police. Some time police officers run after the people and sometime the other way around,’ he added. 

‘It’s very crowded. They fired teargas into our parking. They are chanting ‘Dictator! dictator’ and also ‘death to the dictator’ I also heard gunshots,’ he continued. 

Iran blocked access to Instagram and WhatsApp and imposed drastic restrictions on internet access Thursday.

‘In accordance with a decision by officials, it has no longer been possible to access Instagram in Iran since Wednesday evening and access to WhatsApp is also disrupted,’ the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

The two apps were the most widely used in Iran after the blocking of other platforms in recent years, including Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, YouTube and Tiktok.

Connections have slowed significantly since protests erupted following the government’s announcement of the death of Mahsa Amini.

Significant internet outages were also reported across the country, with one of the biggest mobile phone operators disrupted, leaving millions offline.

It comes as 13 Iranian lawmakers have suggested to the government to take harsher measures against the protesters.

Officials have denied that security forces have killed protesters, suggesting they may have been shot by armed dissidents but footage shows police officers firing directly at people.  

Meanwhile protesters in Tehran and several other Iranian cities torched police stations and vehicles on Thursday morning.

Unrest triggered by the death of a woman detained by the Islamic Republic’s morality police intensified for a sixth day.

She fell into a coma while in detention. The authorities have said they would launch an investigation into the cause of death.

Amini’s death unleashed huge anger in the population and the worst protests in Iran since 2019. 

Many Iranians, particularly the young, have come to see Amini’s death as part of the Islamic Republic’s heavy-handed policing of dissent and the morality police’s increasingly violent treatment of young women. 

Some women demonstrators have defiantly taken off their hijabs and burned them in bonfires or symbolically cut their hair, video footage spread virally on social media has shown. 

Most of the protests have been concentrated in Iran’s Kurdish-populated northwestern regions but have spread to the capital and at least 50 cities and towns nationwide, with police using force to disperse protesters.

In the northeast, protesters shouted ‘We will die, we will die but we’ll get Iran back’ near a police station which was set on fire, a video showed that was posted on a Twitter account 1500tasvir, which focuses on Iran protests and has around 100,000 followers.

Another police station was set ablaze in the capital Tehran as the unrest spread from Kurdistan, the home province of Amini.

Iran’s rulers fear a revival of the 2019 protests over gasoline price rises, the bloodiest in the Islamic Republic’s history. Reuters reported 1,500 were killed.

Protesters also expressed anger at Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

‘Mojtaba, may you die and not become Supreme Leader,’ a crowd was seen chanting in Tehran, referring to Khamenei’s son, who some believe could succeed his father at the top of Iran’s political establishment.

With no sign of the protests easing, authorities restricted access to the internet, according to residents, and internet shutdown observatory NetBlocks.

Amini’s death has unleashed fury across Iran over issues including freedoms in the Islamic Republic and an economy reeling from sanctions.

Women have played a prominent role in the protests, waving and burning their veils, with some cutting their hair in public.

In northern Iran, crowds armed with batons and rocks attacked two members of the security forces on a motorbike as a crowd cheered, as seen on a video, which Reuters was unable to verify.

WhatsApp’s servers were disrupted on multiple internet providers, hours after Instagram’s services were blocked, London-based NetBlocks said.

The group’s data shows a near-total disruption to internet service in parts of Kurdistan province in western Iran since Monday, while the capital city of Tehran and other parts of the country have also faced disruptions since Friday, when protests first broke out.

Meanwhile a Twitter account linked to the ‘Anonymous’ hacker group claims to have launched cyber attacks against the Iranian government and affiliated websites.

The group shared screenshots showing websites of Iran’s government portal, the office of a government spokesperson, and the central bank taken down after purportedly being hacked. 

In an address to the UN General Assembly, US President Joe Biden said Americans will stand with ‘the brave women of Iran who right now are demonstrating to secure their basic rights’.

He spoke after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi rejected calls from Western powers to respect women’s rights.

Iran’s hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, has deflected criticism of his government’s response to the protests and the subsequent violence.

‘The Islamic Republic of Iran rejects some of the double standards of some governments vis-a-vis human rights,’ he said.

‘Human rights belongs to all, but unfortunately it is trampled upon by many governments,’ he added referring to the discovery of unmarked graves of indigenous people in Canada, the suffering of the Palestinians and images of migrant children held in cages in the United States.

Iran’s Telecommunications Minister Issa Zarepour on Wednesday warned of internet restrictions, citing the ‘security issues of these days.’

Elon Musk said he wants to be exempt from Iranian sanctions so he can provide the country with his Starlink satellite internet.

A social media user going by the handle ‘erfan_kasrale’ tagged Musk in a tweet on Monday, saying: ‘I’m sure you won’t answer it Mr Musk, but is it technically possible to provide Starlink to Iranian people? It could be a game changer for the future.’

Mahsa Amini, 22, from Iran’s Kurdistan province, fell into a coma and died while waiting with other women held by the morality police.

Amini’s father has repeatedly said his daughter had no health problems, adding that she had suffered bruises to her legs. He held the police responsible for her death.

Iranian leaders have vowed to investigate the circumstances of Amini’s death while accusing unnamed foreign countries and exiled opposition groups of seizing on it as a pretext to foment unrest.