Iranian Protests Intensify as Opposition Leader Predicts Regime Collapse

As demonstrations against Iran’s theocratic dictatorship entered their fifth day—with over a dozen dead Thursday night—the leader of the nation’s largest anti-regime opposition group came out in favor of the growing group of primarily 20-something insurgents.

“The four-day uprising by merchants, students, and other sectors of society signals the Iranian people’s determination to be free from religious tyranny,” Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said Thursday.

In a statement from her Paris headquarters, Rajavi went on to predict that what she called “this wretched regime” of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “is doomed to be overthrown by the risen populace and rebellious youth.”

Rajavi’s prediction came as clashes between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and demonstrators spread from Tehran, the capital, to cities including Lordegan, Marvdasht, Kermanshah, Delfan, and Arak.

Among targets of the rock-throwing opponents of the regime—who have marched around the clock—were the IRGC news agency, the Martyrs Foundation building, the Friday Prayer Complex, and several banks in Lordegan.

In each clash, demonstrators have chanted “Death to Khamenei!”

Reports indicate that six demonstrators have been killed in various provinces by security forces who fired into crowds. The government information agency reported that one member of Basij, a volunteer paramilitary force often deployed to suppress demonstrations, was killed, and 13 others were killed in the city of Kuhdasht.

In his memoir “How Do We Get Out of Here,” American Spectator founder R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. recalled a 1977 session with Richard Nixon and a group of historians in which the former president was asked why the Shah of Iran had considerable difficulty putting down a demonstration in what is now Martyrs Square in Tehran in September 1978.

Without hesitation, Tyrrell wrote, Nixon said the Shah was “insufficiently brutal.”

It now appears that the Islamic regime was applying a similar strategy in the initial days of the latest protests but has grown increasingly brutal.