Nearly 100 Starlink internet terminals are active in Iran, SpaceX chief and Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Monday. The tweet came in response to another user’s post showing a video of the “streets of Iran now,” where there is “more freedom for the women to choose whether they cover their hair or not.”
Both Musk’s tweet and the video are in reference to the widespread protests that have been occurring across Iran since September after 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of Iranian moral police who detained her for breaching the strict dress code for women.
Following Musk’s success in sending thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine shortly after the Russian invasion began on 24 February, the Tesla tycoon promised to do the same for Iran in September. This was in response to Iranian authorities clamping down on anti-regime protests and disrupting Internet services in a move that was perceived as a blatant limiting of information flow regarding the protests.
The Iranian authorities have arrested over 18,000 individuals in connection to the protests, and over 500 protestors have died over the course of three months, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran.
Daily Statistics on Iran Protests#Iran#IranProtests
— HRANA English (@HRANA_English) December 26, 2022
For details and more statistics, read HRANA's report:https://t.co/AO1LLop5by pic.twitter.com/eSJccp2IiN
Netblocks, an independent and non-partisan global internet monitor, has analysed, reported, and confirmed that there have been purposeful internet outages and service disruptions across various Iranian regions since the protests began.
⚠️ Confirmed: Metrics indicate that internet connectivity has been disrupted for two days in and around #Sanandaj, Kurdistan Province, #Iran, corroborating user reports of curfew-style cuts during strikes over the death of #MahsaAmini
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) December 20, 2022
📰 Background: https://t.co/8cCHIJA2Oi pic.twitter.com/xrW0PGubT8
Moreover, Iranian authorities have been taking several measures to suppress any sort of dissent. For instance, on Monday, security agents forced a Dubai-bound plane to land on Kish Island to prevent Iranian football legend Ali Daei’s family from leaving the country. Reportedly, Daei’s wife had been barred from leaving the country “because of inviting people to go on nationwide strikes, but she had managed to revoke the ban through an unlawful way.”
In a press conference on Sunday, Iran’s Prosecutor-General, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, reiterated the official stance that observing hijab is legally mandatory, and women unveiling themselves in public would be deemed an act “planned and promoted by enemies” of Iran. “Enemies” in the regime’s discourse refers to the West in general and the US, UK, Israel, and Saudi Arabia in particular. Montazeri went on to dismiss the subjective nature of the issue by saying, “When the law mandates the observance of hijab for women in public places within the borders of the Islamic Republic, we cannot say that [the issue] is personal.”
Nonetheless, what initially began as protests demanding an end to mandatory hijab laws have gradually morphed into a nationwide movement calling for the end of the theocracy in Iran. Protests have spread rapidly across the nation and galvanised school and university students, including girls, labour unions, and prisoners.
Protests have continued for 14 consecutive weeks in Zahedan (southeast Iran), despite having suffered hundreds of casualties. Their slogans denounced executions and @khamenei_ir and called for the release of political prisoners. pic.twitter.com/3hj73fZS4K
— Karim Sadjadpour (@ksadjadpour) December 23, 2022
Moreover, after Iran carried out the first execution of an anti-regime protestor earlier this month, there have been multiple tit-for-tat sanctions between Iran and the UK and EU, and suspension of normalisation talks with Saudi Arabia for supporting the anti-regime protests. Additionally, the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) voted to remove Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) for the remainder of its 2022-2026 term.