Iran protests rage for another night and deaths mount as Trump renews warning of possible U.S. intervention

Protests in Iran raged Friday night in the Islamic Republic, online videos purported to show, despite a threats from the country’s theocracy to crack down on demonstrators after shutting down the internet and cutting telephone lines off to the world. The protesters appeared to be taking encouragement from repeated declarations of support by the Trump administration, and by the country’s exiled crown prince, who called on them Saturday to try and overwhelm security forces and seize towns and cities. 

An external rights groups that relies on information from contacts inside Iran says at least 65 people have been killed in the protests, which began in Tehran in late December as anger over Iran’s ailing economy, but quickly spread and morphed into the most significant challenge to the government in years.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused President Trump of having hands “stained with the blood of Iranians” in remarks aired Friday on Iranian state TV, as supporters gathered before him shouted “Death to America!”

Protesters are “ruining their own streets … in order to please the president of the United States,” the 86-year-old Khamenei said to the crowd at his compound in Tehran. “Because he said that he would come to their aid. He should pay attention to the state of his own country instead.”

State media later called the demonstrators “terrorists,” setting the stage for a possible violent crackdown –how Iran has responded to other major protests in recent years, despite Mr. Trump’s pledge to back peaceful protesters, with force if necessary.

Trump’s issues fresh warnings to Iran’s leaders

Trump has repeatedly pledged to strike Iran if protesters are killed, a threat that has taken on greater significance after the U.S. military raid that seized Venezuela’s former President Nicolás Maduro. The president suggested Friday any possible American strike wouldn’t “mean boots on the ground but that means hitting them very, very hard where it hurts.”

“Iran’s in big trouble,” Trump said. “It looks to me that the people are taking over certain cities that nobody thought were really possible just a few weeks ago.”

He added: “I tell the Iranian leaders you better not start shooting because we’ll start shooting too.”

In a brief social media post published in the very early hours of Saturday morning in Washington, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “the United States supports the brave people of Iran.”

Iranian regime warns protesters will be punished “without any legal leniency”

Iran’s judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei separately vowed that punishment for protesters “will be decisive, maximum and without any legal leniency.”

According to the Washington D.C.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which was founded by anti-regime activists, as of Friday, the 13th day of unrest in Iran, at least 65 people had been killed, including at least 14 members of the security forces. More than 2,300 people had been arrested, and protests recorded in at least 180 cities.

Iranian authorities shut down the internet on Thursday night as protests escalated sharply, seemingly as people heeded a call by the exiled crown prince, a vocal opposition figure, for Iranians to raise their voices against the regime.

According to an update posted online Saturday morning by the monitoring organization NetBlocks, “metrics show the nationwide internet blackout remains in place at 36 hours, severely limiting Iranians’ ability to check on the safety of friends and loved ones.”

That communications blackout has made it incredibly difficult to gain a clear picture of the scale of the protests overall – and the Iranian authorities’ response to it. Some other reports put the death toll from unrest much higher, with TIME citing a doctor in Tehran as saying at least 217 people had been killed, for instance.

Iranian authorities have acknowledged a few deaths, but usually only those of security forces.

Asked by CBS News how seriously he believes Iran’s autocratic rulers are taking the warnings from Mr. Trump not to kill protesters, Maziar Bahari, editor of the IranWire news website, said he was certain it had “really scared many Iranian officials, and may have affected their actions in terms of how to confront the protestors.”

“But at the same time … it has inspired many protesters to come out, because they know that the leader of the world’s main superpower is supporting their cause,” said Bahari, who spent months in Iranian prisons after being arrested during a previous round of massive unrest in 2009.

“Many people have called what is happening in Iran right now a revolution,” Bahari told CBS News’ Haley Ott. “And we can see different signs of revolution in Iran at the movement. But a revolution usually needs a leader for the revolution. But we don’t have that leader.”

But while decades of draconian control over the media and the deliberate sidelining of dissident voices in the country have deprived Iran of a clear opposition figurehead inside the country’s borders, many in the vast Iranian diaspora hope the nation’s ousted royal family could stage a comeback.

Head of Iran’s exiled royal family predicts his return is “very near”

Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has been seen by many analysts as a galvanizing force behind the momentum of this round of protests. On Saturday, he called on Iranians not only to continue coming out into the streets, but to try to seize control of towns and cities from the authorities by overwhelming them.

“Our goal is no longer just to take to the streets. The goal is to prepare to seize and hold city centers,” Pahlavi said in his latest video message posted on social media, calling for more demonstrations on Saturday and Sunday.”

Striking an optimistic tone, Pahlavi declared that he was “preparing to return to my homeland,” suggesting the day on which he would be able to do so, “very near.”

But Pahlavi has lived in exile for nearly 50 years, and while he has long sought to position himself as a leader-in-waiting, it’s far from clear how much real support he has inside the country.

His father, Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was widely despised inside Iran when he fled into exile himself amid street protests in 1979, as the Islamic Revolution that brought the current regime to power took hold.