By Sean Rayment
The US President has said Iran wanted to make a deal as an American “armada”, including the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and guided missile destroyers, arrived in the Middle East.
Previous threats of a US strike were said to have been called off after Iran said it would no longer execute dissidents.
President Donald Trump told the Axios news site on Monday that the “armada next to Iran” was bigger than the force sent to waters near Venezuela before the abduction of Nicolás Maduro. “They want to make a deal,” he said, referring to the Iranians. “I know so. They called on numerous occasions. They want to talk.”
According to Axios, Trump refused to discuss the options for intervention presented to him by his national security team. It said the “deal” was likely to include removing Iran’s nuclear capabilities, capping its stockpile of long-range missiles and changing its policy of supporting militarised proxies across the Middle East.
The protests have been largely quashed since a bloody crackdown. Many injured young people avoided hospitals, fearing arrest by undercover guards searching for those with gunshot wounds and identifying them as dissidents.
According to doctors and surgeons, the protests, initially quelled using pellet guns, escalated to live fire. Injuries ranged from close-range gunshot wounds to the head, eyes, chest and genitals.
Some doctors based outside Iran place the death toll at 33,000 or more. Iran’s government has given an official toll of 3,117. It said 2,427 were civilians and security forces, and that the rest were “terrorists”. The regime has blamed foreign intervention for the protests.
Witnesses and testimonies from hospitals, morgues and graveyards paint a bleak picture of authorities attempting to conceal deaths. Bodies were said to have disappeared or been transported to different cities, families forced to sign forged death certificates with altered dates and causes of death, and rows of unidentified and uncounted corpses observed.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said it had confirmed the deaths of at least 5,777 protesters, 214 government-affiliated forces, 86 children and 49 uninvolved civilians, as well as more than 41,800 arrests.
The death toll is difficult to verify because of the continued internet shutdown. It is not known whether any of the deaths occurred after Mr Trump’s assertion that the killings had stopped.
The regime is allowing people to use the internet for 20 minutes a day, according to reports. It has been almost totally blocked since the protests peaked earlier this month.
Those opposed to the regime say they are unable to share information or coordinate further protests abroad because of continued arrests, threats of execution, phone checks and raids.
“They came to the house, took everyone’s passports, went through their phones, removed their home cameras and froze all their bank accounts,” said one testimony shared with The Times via Telegram. “We can’t work, we can’t buy food. It’s like North Korea.”
The country is effectively under martial law, according to an account from Bushehr in the south.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been “going to people’s homes, carrying out arrests and threatening families with execution in an effort to silence them,” a text read. “It’s created widespread fear and a lack of safety.”
The source added that security forces had gone from “business to business” deleting CCTV footage that may have documented the bloodshed.
