Who Rules Tehran's Streets?

Two weeks after the contested results of Iran's Presidential elections led to widespread street riots and demonstrations across the country, the Islamic Republic pronounced its harshest threat yet to protesters. At the official ceremony for Friday prayers, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a hard-line cleric who often delivers the sermon, said those who agitate on the streets were "waging war against God," a crime that carries the death sentence.

It was the latest example in which government forces have tightened their control over and heightened their rhetoric against opposition supporters of the defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Demonstrations and rallies have ground to a halt as the heavy presence of police, Revolutionary Guards officers, plainclothes intelligence and paramilitary volunteer members in the streets have made it impossible for protesters to congregate. 

The government also began a propaganda campaign aimed at shifting responsibility for the violence meted out by the state onto foreign powers and the protesters themselves. State television aired a program in which witnesses and experts all agreed that Neda Agha-Soltan — the 27-year-old bystander whose death was captured on YouTube, sparking sympathy worldwide and turning Neda into a martyr — was shot by foreign agents in order to intensify people's rage. State television also broadcast another program mourning the purported deaths of eight Basijis killed by bullet wounds.

The Basij, or Basijis — the paramilitary volunteer force developed by the Islamic Republic to protect the "Islamic Revolution" from civil disturbances such as the kind that have occurred these past weeks — have had an overwhelming presence on Tehran's streets, often setting up roadblocks to check cars and detain people they consider suspect. They have also been brought in as reinforcement for the police in dealing with demonstrators. Although they are an official subdivision of the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and decked out with crowd control gear as well as small weapons in some cases, they are barely held accountable for their deeds and freer in meting out violence. The majority of recent deaths of protesters are thought to have been carried out by Basijis.