Tensions High In Iran Universities As Students Continue Protests Against "Baby-Killing" Regime

Iranian security forces continue to use violence to crack down on students who are gathering in universities and other educational institutions across the country for the sixth straight week to voice anger against the clerical regime.

At Tehran's Azad University, videos distributed on social media show paramilitary Basij members and plainclothes officers violently attacking student protesters with sticks and teargas guns on Sunday – the 43^rd day of the protest movement.

According to a video sent to Iranwire, special unit agents also attacked students who were locked up at the Sanandaj Technical College.

The Student Union Councils reported that protesters were trapped in the Technical Faculty of Tehran University, and warned that security forces could storm the facility at any moment. Several students have already been arrested and dragged into a van, it said.

Tension was also high at the Tehran University of Science and Technology, where security officers tried to sprinkle water on students who were refusing to observe gender segregation rules. One picture shows a group of students preventing a security guard from hitting a female student.

Similar protest rallies were reported elsewhere in Tehran, as well as Shiraz, Qazvin, Hamadan, Mashhad and other Iranian cities.

Videos shared on social media show students gathered at Tehran University’s Department of Horticulture chanting slogans such as "This is not the time for mourning, this is the time for anger" and "We don't want a baby-killing government."

Students at the Shiraz Pharmaceutical Faculty called for justice after security forces shot and killed protesters in the city of Zahedan. "Death to the shooter, whether Zahedan or Shiraz," they chanted, in reference to the October 26 deadly gun attack on a Shia shrine in Shiraz.

Young men and women, including university students, have been at the forefront of the protest movement sparked by the September 16 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of morality police. The largely peaceful demonstrations have grown to become the biggest challenge to Iran’s regime since the 2009 protest movement.

The unrest triggered a heavy-handed crackdown by security forces that has killed at least 234 people, including 29 children, according to one human rights organization. Several thousand people have been arrested.

"We tell the youth and those who were deceived that today is the last day of the riots," General Hossein Salami, commander of Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned on October 29, in a sign that security forces could intensify their brutal crackdown on unrest.