Iran cuts internet as protests escalate

What happened

Iranians took to the streets across the country Thursday and protested through Friday morning, but the “full scope of the demonstrations couldn’t be immediately determined” due to “Iran’s theocracy cutting off the nation from the internet and international telephone calls,” The Associated Press said. At least 62 people have been killed since protests over Iran’s ailing economy broke out on Dec. 28 and then “morphed into the most significant challenge to the government in several years.”

Who said what

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a brief televised address Friday morning that protesters are “ruining their own streets to make the president of another country happy,” a reference to President Donald Trump. Trump said on Fox News Thursday night that “the enthusiasm to overturn the regime has been incredible” and if Iranian authorities “do anything bad to these people, we’re going to hit them very hard.”

Videos from Iran filmed on Thursday night “showed government buildings on fire across the country, including in Tehran, as protests grew,” The New York Times said. Exiled former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah, called for mass demonstrations at 8 p.m. these past two days, and that “turned the tide of the protests,” said Holly Dagres with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The internet was shut down” to “prevent the world from seeing” that “Iranians had delivered and were taking the call seriously” to “oust the Islamic Republic” through protests.

What next?

Trump claimed in his Fox News interview that Khamenei was “looking to go someplace” because “it’s getting very bad” in Iran. But asked if he would meet with Pahlavi, Trump said he was “not sure that it would be appropriate at this point to do that as president.”