Dozens Of Iranian Kurds Arrested Since Year's Start, Group Says

Iranian authorities have arrested at least 96 ethnic Kurds during the first 15 days of the year, activists say, as the Islamic Republic tries to suppress the anti-government protest movement that has rocked the country for four months.

Hengaw, a Norway-based group that monitors rights violations in Iran's Kurdish regions, says those arrested included 13 children and five women.

Five of the detainees are university students, while four others are teachers, it said.

The demonstrations sparked by the September death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, in the custody of Tehran’s morality police and the state clampdown on the protest movement have been particularly intense in Iran’s western Kurdish areas and the eastern province of Sistan and Baluchistan, home to a Sunni Baluch minority.

The widespread protests represent one of the most serious challenges to the theocracy installed by the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Security forces have killed more than 500 people across the country, including dozens of children, and detained over 18,000 others since the eruption of the demonstrations.

At least 100 protesters are currently at risk of “execution, death penalty charges or sentences,” one rights group said in December.

Two young men were hanged earlier this month amid international outrage, bringing to four the number of people executed in connection with the protests.