Hezbollah Leader Blames Civil Unrest on a “Plot” to Weaken Iran

Inde­pen­dent Iran­ian media is report­ing that the leader of Hezbol­lah is try­ing to cast doubt on the death of a young woman in police cus­tody that trig­gered the recent mas­sive protests in Iran. Accord­ing to the Iran Inter­na­tion­al report, Has­san Nas­ral­lah alleged that an uniden­ti­fied “plot” to weak­en Iran was to blame:

Octo­ber 6, 2022 Iran­ian offi­cials have been try­ing to ques­tion whether Mah­sa Ami­ni was killed in police cus­tody and this attempt has reached Hezbol­lah leader Has­san Nas­ral­lah. Nas­ral­lah, whose mil­i­tant move­ment was cre­at­ed by Iran in ear­ly 1980s and has been receiv­ing mon­ey and weapons from Iran ever since, told media in Lebanon that Amini’s death was a “vague inci­dent”, and it was a plot to weak­en the Islam­ic Repub­lic and cre­ate region­al ten­sions. “The Iran­ian state is a tar­get and so any inci­dent is exploit­ed to incite peo­ple against this state,” Nas­ral­lah claimed. The nation­wide protests and a wave of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence that fol­lowed Amini’s death has led to a seri­ous chal­lenge for the Islam­ic Repub­lic. Secu­ri­ty forces have killed more than 150 pro­test­ers and inno­cent onlook­ers in the streets, which could fuel more unrest in the com­ing weeks. Any weak­en­ing of the Iran­ian regime would be dan­ger­ous to its prox­ies, such as the Hezbol­lah that almost ful­ly depend on Tehran’s sup­port. Iran­ian offi­cials first tried to argue that the 22-year-old woman arrest­ed by the hijab police had an exist­ing ill­ness, which they said caused her to go into a coma in a police sta­tion. After Iran Inter­na­tion­al pub­lished her hos­pi­tal CT scan show­ing a bro­ken skull, this ver­sion could not be sup­port­ed any longer.

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Hezbol­lah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist polit­i­cal par­ty and mil­i­tant group tra­di­tion­al­ly aligned with Iran. Iran’s supreme leader Aya­tol­lah Ali Khamenei blamed the US and Israel for the anti-gov­ern­ment protests, say­ing “riots” had been “engi­neered” by Iran’s arch-ene­mies and their allies, and alleged that Qurans had been burned.