Senior Iranian cleric calls for protester executions in defiance of Trump claims

A senior Iranian cleric has demanded the execution of protesters after a brutal crackdown raised the death toll in Iran and quelled the nationwide protest movement.In a sermon on Friday, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami railed against demonstrators, saying “armed hypocrites should be put to death”. He described protesters as “butlers” and “soldiers” of Israel and the US, vowing that neither country should “expect peace”.Khatami, a member of the Guardian Council and a senior member of the Assembly of Experts, which appoints the supreme leader, is a hardline, influential cleric in Iran.The speech was in striking contrast to statements from the US president, Donald Trump this week, who appeared to postpone a military strike in Iran, telling reporters that Iranian authorities had agreed to halt the executions of protesters.On Friday night, Trump thanked Iran for stopping the execution of what he said was 800 protesters, though it was unclear where he was drawing those figures from.Despite the apparent gratitude, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, called Trump a “criminal” on Saturday for his “personal” involvement in protests, and vowed further punishment for protesters.“By God’s grace, the Iranian nation must break the back of the seditionists just as it broke the back of the sedition,” Khamenei said.Rights groups have said the repression of protesters is continuing, with more than 3,090 people killed in the unrest and nearly 4,000 more cases still waiting to be reviewed, according to the Human Rights Activists news agency. More than 22,100 people have been arrested in protests, leading to fears of mistreatment of detainees.Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran and a prominent opposition voice, at a press conference in Washington DC this week. Photograph: Ali Khaligh/Zuma Press Wire/ShutterstockThe two-and-a-half weeks of protests started on 28 December when traders took to the streets in Tehran in response to a sudden dip in the value of the rial. Protests spread and demands expanded to include calls for an end to the country’s government, creating the most serious, and deadliest unrest the country has seen since the 1979 revolution.The brutal quashing of demonstrations by authorities, which Human Rights Watch said on Friday included the “mass killings of protesters”, has largely driven people off the streets.With the immediate unrest addressed, authorities were making a public show of punishing those involved in the action, which they had styled as a foreign-backed plot to destabilise the country.Khatami, in his Friday sermon, claimed 350 mosques, 126 prayer halls and 20 other places of worship had been damaged by protesters. He also said 400 hospitals, 106 ambulances, 71 fire trucks and 50 other emergency vehicles had been damaged.It was unclear what the fallout of the protest movement will be, or if it will reignite in the coming days. Iran continues to be cut off from the rest of the world, as authorities maintain the more than week-long internet shutdown.Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran who had become a prominent opposition voice during the protests, continued to call for the overthrow of the government on Friday and urged Trump to intervene.“I believe the president is a man of his word,” Pahlavi said, adding that “regardless of whether action is taken or not, we as Iranians have no choice to carry on the fight”.