11 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have commemorated this Saturday the 44th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution starting with a military parade in Tehran, led by the deployment of ballistic missiles and domestically-made drones.
The streets of the capital have become the scene of the Emad missile and the Shahed-136 unmanned tactical aircraft, the same model that Ukraine and its Western allies denounce is being used by Russia during the war.
The commemoration has spread to 3,400 cities and 3,800 towns in the country, amid enormous tension over protests against the death last September of a young Iranian Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, while in custody for allegedly wearing the Islamic headscarf incorrectly. .
In this regard, and during the opening of the commemoration, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, participated in a meeting with a group of commanders and officers of the Iranian Air Force and Air Defense, where he reiterated the existence of an “evil plot” against the country against which it is necessary to maintain “a unity strategy”, reports the semi-official ISNA news agency.
The Iranian authorities have blamed most of the riots on “rioters” paid by foreign powers while NGOs estimate that between 400 and 500 protesters have died due to the repression by the security forces. The Government has tried to appease the situation by declaring its usual amnesty for thousands of prisoners, among them detainees for the demonstrations.
The Islamic Revolution, which put an end to the monarchy and raised Ayatollah Ruholá Khomeini to power, was a political earthquake that reconfigured the region and whose consequences are still valid at the political and social level today, marked by the growing opposition to the authorities and the regional projection of Tehran, which has provoked the reaction of rivals in the area.
Khomeini’s return to the country came at a time when the Pahlavi dynasty, one of the United States’ main allies in the region, was on the brink of collapse due to the economic and social crisis and growing opposition to the regime due to the repression of the protests of the previous years.
The final blow to the regime came on February 11, when the Supreme Military Council declared itself “neutral” after guerrilla fighting broke out in the streets, ruling out the possibility of a pro-shah military uprising.
