Iranian security forces have killed 72 people, including 56 in Kurdish regions, in the past week of crackdowns on anti-regime protests, the NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR) said on Tuesday.
The total death toll has risen to 416 since the beginning of the protest movement sparked on September 16 by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd arrested by the morality police for having broken the strict dress code requiring women to wear the sailing in public.
Among those dead were 51 children and 21 women, according to Oslo-based IHR.
Over the past seven days, the majority of casualties have been in Kurdish regions of western Iran, where Tehran has sent armed reinforcements as protests mount.
Demonstrations took place in several cities – Mahabad, Javanroud or Piranchahr -, often linked to the funeral ceremonies of people killed by the police.
The Iranian Kurdish rights group Hengaw, also based in Norway, accused the authorities of firing live ammunition at protesters.
According to him, five people were killed on Monday in Javanroud, where several thousand people had gathered to pay tribute to the victims of the weekend.
Hengaw said he had confirmed the death of 42 people in the Kurdish regions in one week, almost all killed by direct fire from live ammunition.
The group posted a video of people trying to remove pellets from a protester’s body with a knife, saying they were afraid to go to hospital for fear of arrest.
“Hardening”
According to IHR data, more than half of those killed in the past two months have been in minority areas.
126 people were thus killed in Sistan-Baluchistan, where the Sunni Baluchis live. 48 people were killed in Kurdistan, 45 in the region of Western Azerbaijan and 23 in Kermanshah, where Kurds are numerous.
“The systematic killings of civilian protesters from the Kurdish and Baloch minorities are crimes against humanity,” said IHR Director Mahmood Amiry Moghaddam.
In Geneva, the head of human rights of the UN, Volker Türk, denounced on Tuesday the “hardening” of the response of the security forces, which “underlines the critical situation in the country”.
For its part, the NGO Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), based in New York, urged the international community on Monday to act to avoid a massacre in the region.
“Unless the authorities decide that the cost of massacring civilians is now too high, they will continue to kill children, women and men in a desperate attempt to regain control,” said its director, Hadi Ghaemi.
NetBlocks, a London-based site that monitors internet blockages around the world, also said internet access was blocked “for three and a half hours” on Monday during the protests, but also during the match. World Cup in which Iranian players did not sing the national anthem.