Hundreds of Iranians took to the streets on Monday to protest the plummeting value of the Iranian currency rial and the inflation that comes with it. This is reported by the AP news agency. The demonstrations, which are taking place in other Iranian cities in addition to the capital Tehran, are the largest since the wave of protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, according to AP.
Monday’s demonstrations are led by shop owners and market traders, who have closed their shops and taken to the streets. The protests in Tehran center around a downtown shopping street and the area surrounding the city’s Grand Bazaar. Police used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators.
The demonstrations follow the plummeting value of the rial and the departure of the director of Iran’s central bank. Due to the decline in value, the prices of food and gasoline in Iran are rising rapidly. On Monday, one US dollar is worth about 1.4 million rials, AP writes. When the central bank director took office in 2022, one dollar could be exchanged for about 430,000 rials. The price of food is 72 percent higher in December than a year earlier.
Demonstrations in Iran are rare due to the heavy repression of the Iranian regime. The last time Iranians took to the streets en masse was in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman who died at the age of 22 after being harshly treated during her arrest by the Iranian moral police for allegedly wearing her headscarf incorrectly. The case received a lot of attention and the Iranian protest movement received support from women’s rights organizations worldwide. Amini became a symbol of resistance against Iran’s strict Islamic regime.
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