Tehran repels fuel protests

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Iran has successfully pushed back its enemies in the military, political, and security warfare being waged against the nation.

"We have pushed back the enemy in the military arena. We have pushed back the enemy in the political war," Khamenei said in a speech aired on state television late Tuesday.

"We have repelled the enemy in the arena of security warfare... in recent days," he said, adding that the unrest had not been the result of a popular movement.

Demonstrations broke out in the Islamic republic on Friday after it was announced the price of petrol would be immediately raised by as much as 200%.

They began with motorists blocking major roads in the capital Tehran and elsewhere but have spread rapidly to at least 40 cities and towns, with petrol pumps torched, police stations attacked and shops looted.

London-based rights group Amnesty International said that more than 100 demonstrators were believed to have been killed. Amnesty said "at least 106 protesters in 21 cities have been killed, according to credible reports". It added that "the real death toll may be much higher, with some reports suggesting as many as 200 have been killed".

A senior research fellow of the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Irina Fedorova, speaking with the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that fuel protests may resume. "Of course, they can be stopped for a while, because the rallies were suppressed. But we must not forget that the parliamentary elections will be held in 2020, and a year later - the presidential ones. It seems to me that the current protests are a kind of prelude to those events that will unfold against the background of Iran's election campaigns," she stressed.

As for the influence of foreign states on the protests, it is rather difficult to assess it. "The Iranian special services work very well. The presence of any agents of influence in the republic under the current regime, contacts with the opposition and youth from the West is not an easy thing," the senior research fellow of the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences said in the first place.

"Of course, one cannot completely exclude the option of Western influence. If we look at the situation in the Middle East more broadly, then there are weak anti-Iranian sentiments in Lebanon, while anti-Iranian demands in Iraq are very serious. It is possible that the Iranian protests were somehow provoked by the turbulent events taking place in neighboring countries," Irina Fedorova noted.