Iran cracks down on protests

US PRESIDENT Donald Trump warned Iran that “you better not start shooting” at mass protests spreading across the country, “because we'll start shooting, too.”

- 

SUPPORTERS of the National Council of Resistance of Iran take part in a demonstration in support of the Iranian people's uprising for democracy and freedom in Brussels on Friday.

(I. AFP)

There would be no U.S. “boots on the ground,” Trump said Friday, but “if they start killing people like they have in the past, we'll be hitting them very hard where it hurts.”

Trump’s threats came as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that his government would not back down in the face of the demonstrations, dismissing two weeks of unrest that began when the nation’s currency collapsed as the work of agitators eager to impress the US.

Khamenei, speaking earlier on Friday in a televised address, mocked Trump’s repeated promise to intervene if Iran were to kill protesters, saying that he would do better to pay attention to problems in the US.

“The Islamic Republic will not back down in the face of vandals,” Khamenei said, adding the protesters were only acting to please the US president. “Trump should know that world tyrants were brought down at the peak of their arrogance,” he said. “He, too, will be brought down.”

The indirect exchange came as Iranians were stuck without internet or phone service after authorities imposed a nationwide blackout, according to global internet monitor NetBlocks and the Iran-focused digital rights group Filterbaan. Several major airlines in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar cancelled flights to cities in Iran on Friday.

The communications shutdown limited information coming out of the country, with Iranian news agency sites blocked. But scattered reports indicated that demonstrators returned to the streets again on Friday in large numbers in most major cities, as protests over the country’s ailing economy quickly grew into a more fundamental challenge to the clerical system over which Khamenei presides.