Protesters in Iran Set Fire to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Home

According to images released on Friday, protesters in Iran set fire to the ancestral home of the Islamic founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

According to images posted on social media and verified by AP, a house in the western Markazi province of Khomein was set on fire late Thursday, with crowds of jubilant protesters marching past.

The Khomeini is said to have been born in the early twentieth century at the house in Khomein, from which his surname derives.

He became a cleric who was harshly critical of the US-backed shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, went into exile, and then triumphantly returned from France in 1979 to lead the Islamic revolution.

Khomeini died in 1989, but the clerical leadership continues to revere him under his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The house was later converted into a museum honouring Khomeini. It was unclear what kind of damage it had sustained.

Inti-regime protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, who the morality police had arrested, pose Iran’s leaders with their most serious street challenge since the 1979 revolution.

They began as a protest against Khomeini’s mandatory headscarf for women but have evolved into a anti-government movement calling for the end of the Islamic leadership itself.

Protesters have occasionally set fire to or defaced images of Khomeini, breaking a taboo against a figure whose death is still commemorated with a mourning holiday each June.

Meanwhile, a large anti-government protest erupted in Iran’s southwestern city of Izeh on Friday at the funeral of a 9*year-old child killed in a shooting that his mother blamed on Islamic security forces. It’s the latest in a series of protests that have erupted across the country in the last two months.

Hundreds of protesters were seen on social media at the funeral of 9-year-old Kian Pirfalak in Izeh.

Protests also broke out in Iran’s eastern city of Zahedan, which has seen the most bloodshed since the nationwide demonstrations began.

Protests erupted after the death of a 22-year-old woman held by the country’s morality police.

They quickly grew into demands for the overthrow of Iran’s ruling clerics and the end of the theocracy established following the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Authorities have severely restricted media access and have shut down the internet on several occasions as they fight to contain the largest challenge to Iran’s leadership in more than a decade.

According to Iranian state media, seven people were killed and others were injured in a shooting in Izeh on Wednesday.

Authorities blamed the attack on “terrorists,” but did not elaborate.

Pirfalak was one of the victims. According to his mother, Zeinab Molaei, security forces stopped the family’s car and told them to drive away for safety due to a nearby protest.

According to the semiofficial Fars news agency, security forces opened fire on the vehicle when they turned around.

State media initially reported the death of a young girl but later changed their reports. According to Fars, 11 people so far have been arrested in regards to the shooting in Izeh.

Around the time of the attack, dozens of protesters gathered in various parts of Izeh, shouting anti-government rants and throwing rocks and rotten fruit at police, who fired tear gas to try to get them to disperse, according to state-run media.

In Izeh Iran, protesters also set fire to a Shiite religious seminary.

As security forces crackdown on dissent, violence has erupted around some of the protests. Several recent attacks in Iran have been blamed on separatists and religious extremists.

According to the semiofficial Tasnim news agency, an intelligence officer from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was shot and killed Friday during a violent demonstration in Sahneh, a Kurdish area in western Iran.

It identified the dead man as Col. Nader Beirami and stated that the assailants had been apprehended.

Iranian officials have attempted to link the attacks to the protests without providing evidence and blame all unrest on hostile foreign actors. The protesters say they are fed up with decades of repression by a corrupt and dictatorial clerical establishment.

Human Rights Activists in Iran, say at least 388 people have been killed, and over 16,000 have been arrested. According to the report, at approximately 53 members of the security forces have also been killed.

Rights groups accuse Iran’s security forces of firing live bullets and bird-shot at demonstrators and beating them with batons, violence captured on video and widely circulated online.