Iran protests surge to dozens of cities

Protests in Iran against the government spread to more than five dozen cities on Friday even as the authorities escalated a crackdown that has reportedly killed dozens of people and brought the arrests of prominent activists and journalists, according to rights groups and news media reports.

Internet access — especially on cellphone apps widely used for communication continued to be disrupted or fully blocked, affecting Iranians’ ability to communicate with one another and the outside world. News from Iran has trickled in with many hours of delay.

In many cities, including Tehran, the capital, security forces opened fire on crowds. On Boulevard Ferdous and at the Shahrak Ekbatan apartment complex in Tehran, the forces fired at windows; in the city of Rasht, they threw tear gas into apartments, according to witnesses and videos on social media.

Iranian state media said Friday that at least 35 people had been killed in the unrest, but human rights groups have said the number is likely to be much higher. A previous death toll of 17 issued by the state media included at least five members of the security services.

The videos posted online and the scale of the response from the authorities are difficult to independently verify, but video and photographs sent by witnesses known to The New York Times were broadly in line with the images being posted widely online.

In Iran’s northwest, the small city of Oshnavieh reportedly fell to protesters when local security forces retreated after days of intense fighting, the editor of a Kurdish news site said.

“I can confirm the city is in the control of the people,” the editor, Ammar Golie, an Iranian Kurd based in Germany who edits the news site NNS Roj, said in a telephone interview. He added, “The security forces that remain have retreated into an old fort located in the center of the city.”

Mr. Golie said he had been in regular contact with residents of Oshnavieh, which is in West Azerbaijan Province and has a population of 40,000 ethnic Kurds. He said the residents had set up roadblocks at the gateway to the city’s only two roads.

Videos posted on social media show large crowds marching in the streets of Oshnavieh, many wearing traditional Kurdish garb, and chanting, “Freedom.” Another video shows intense gunfights over control of the city’s Police Headquarters.

Credit: The New York Times