Thanks, Andy. But shouldn’t you be swimming and drinking sweet things with little plastic umbrellas in the glass?
Meanwhile: Tuesday morning. Neither I nor anyone I know has been able to find a Spiegel story about “five thousand Hezbollahis” operating in Iran. So I think the claim on Twitter was probably false, at least so far as the German publication is concerned. Lots of Iranians claim to have encountered Arab speakers, which makes a lot of sense in any case. There are terrorist training camps inside Iran, after all, and those guys can be pressed into service.
Reports on Twitter of Army forces moving into Tehran. I don’t believe it. The Army’s role is border defense, not civil repression. The whole drill a few months ago, designed to combat a “velvet revolution,” was RG, Basij, police, etc. Not Army, as I understand it. Maybe the Basij have been given Army uniforms?
Clearly the regime is trying to crush the insurrection quickly. The prisons are filling up, as the hospital wards. Some of the wounded people in the hospitals get dragged off for interrogation. Ugly.
Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, whose sources inside Iran are as good as anybody’s, says that Ayatollah Montazeri is openly supporting the demonstrators. She says AFP has the story in French.
And two big rallies have been called in downtown Tehran, in the same square: one by Khamenei, to support the regime, at four o’clock local, the other by Montazeri at half past five.
Foreign reporters are reportedly closed in their buildings/apartments. This was obviously going to happen.