![Pinterest](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https://uknews.evprotec.com/watch-young-iranians-knock-turbans-off-clerics-in-fresh-regime-protests/&media=https://uknews.evprotec.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/maxresdefault-9.jpg&description=Iranian security forces fired at protesters Zahedan on Friday, rights groups said, a month after a 'Bloody Friday' crackdown by security forces in the southeastern city which killed an estimated 66 people – the deadliest day of the recent protests so far – with several dozen more dying in the following days. A Sunni-majority city, Zahedean is the regional capital of Sistan-Baluchestan, Iran's poorest province, where the predominant Baluch minority complain of neglect and discrimination by the state. Anger there has been fueled by the reported rape of a teenage girl by a local police commander. In a bid to quell outrage, authorities announced the dismissal of Zahedan's police chief and the head of a police station on Friday. The Sistan-Baluchistan security council said it had concluded an investigation into the unrest at the request of President Ebrahim Raisi, conceding "negligence" by officers and the deaths of "innocent" civilians. It said the "Bloody Friday" violence had been started by an attack on a police station by a group of people hurling stones and firing weapons. "Armed militants exploited this atmosphere to attack civilians" and vandalised public property, which required intervention by security forces. "A number of armed individuals were killed and six members of the security forces were martyred" as a result, it said, including a Revolutionary Guards commander. US sanctions group behind Salman Rushdie bounty The United States on Friday imposed sanctions on the Iran-based foundation that issued a multi-million-dollar bounty on the life of acclaimed "Satanic Verses" author Salman Rushdie, who was brutally attacked in August. The sanctions are aimed at the "15 Khordad Foundation", which the US Treasury Department says is affiliated with deceased Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who originally issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death in 1989. The foundation "maintains a multi-million dollar bounty on Rushdie", the Treasury Department said, addi){kind=link}
Young people are displaying brazen contempt for the country’s religious establishment
Young Iranians are filming themselves knocking the turbans from the heads of clerics, in brazen displays of contempt for the country’s religious establishment.
In one video from Mashhad, home to the Shiite pilgrimage site of the shrine of Imam Reza, a cleric waiting at a bus stop has his turban flicked casually off his head by a passing young man.
Amid nationwide protests over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini following her arrest by morality police in Tehran last month, the clerics who have run the country as a hardline theocracy since the 1979 revolution have become a lightning rod for public frustration.
While such incidents occurred prior to Amini’s death, they would have been seen as an act of unthinkable irreverence.