Thousands of Iranians in the nation’s south took to the streets Saturday with renewed protests against the Iranian government over water shortages and “chaotic” distribution of the little available, shortly before Iran defended its investments in proxy wars over supporting its own struggling population.
According to Radio Farda, the protests took place in Borazjan, the center of Dashtestan County in Bushehr province. “Either the Governor steps in, or we are going to raise Hell!” the protesters reportedly said while the Governor’s deputy and the city’s Friday Prayer Leader mid-ranking cleric, Hassan Mosleh, tried to deliver a speech. Both men reportedly fled the scene.
“Our enemy is right here, it is not America as they [the Islamic Republic’s authorities] falsely say,” the furious protesters chanted, according to Radio Farda.
In the past, some Iranian clerics had suggested the droughts and water shortages in Iran were divine revenge against improperly dressed women.
According to the Fikr-e Shahr (city’s thoughts) website, “It is more than ten days that residents of several districts in Borazjan have not seen even a drop of water in the city’s pipes, while they are suffering from over fifty Celsius degree (122 Fahrenheit) heat.”
Further, the website conducted an interview with the representative of Dashtestan to the Islamic Republic parliament, Mohammad Baqir Sa’adat who said, “The main reasons behind the water shortage are more than thirty powerful pumps installed by the owners of several orchards in neighboring city of Kazeroon on the local river for illegal irrigation of their properties during dark hours of the night.”
Sa’adat reportedly accused Iran’s leadership of incompetence, lack of action and said, “People’s anger is justified. They are even entitled to insult the authorities. … The governor of Kazeroon, originally from the city’s suburbs, has so far ignored an official verdict for dismantling the powerful pumps.”
Protests against the Iranian regime have also called for the Islamic Republic to quit its adventurism abroad and spending billions of dollars funding the bloody civil war to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power, while their own people continue to languish at home.
Iran has reportedly spent over $16 billion to defend Assad and its other proxies in Syria Iraq and Yemen so far.
However, on Sunday, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, head of Iran’s Islamic Propagation Coordination Council, defended Iran’s recent deployment of Iranian military advisers to Syria and Iraq, saying their presence there is in line with efforts to defend Iran’s security and interests against enemies, including the Islamic State.
“If we were not present in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon today, the disfigured Daesh militants, who cannot be called humans, would come our borders and inflict the same suffering on us that they did to the Syrian people,” Jannati said, according to Iran’s state-run Tasnim News Agency.
He suggested, “It is because of our presence in Syria and Iraq that our lives, properties and honor are safe today.”
Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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