TEHRAN: President Ebrahim Raisi said on Tuesday Iran would show ‘no mercy’ towards ‘hostile’ opponents of the Islamic republic, gripped by more than 100 days of protests sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death.

“The embrace of the nation is open to everyone, but we will show no mercy to those who are hostile,” said President Raisi at a funeral for unidentified soldiers who perished during its eight-year war with Saddam-led Iraq in the 1980s.

“The embrace of the nation is open to all those who were lured,” he said while addressing a crowd in Tehran, accusing others of being “hypocrites, monarchists and all anti-revolutionary currents”.

Officials say hundreds of people have been killed, including members of the security forces, and thousands have been arrested nationwide in recent months. The ‘riots’, as Tehran generally refers to them, were triggered by the September 16 death in custody of Iranian-Kurdish Amini, 22, after her arrest for an alleged breach of the strict dress code for women.

Iranian officials have accused hostile foreign powers, including the United States and some European countries, of stoking the unrest. They aim “to derail the Islamic society from its high goals” by “spreading rumours and fracturing society”, said Raisi. But foreign countries are ‘wrong’ to think that would achieve their goals, Raisi argued, calling their moves ‘miscalculated’.

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2022