Iran was jolted by resurgent anti-government protests over the weekend, as Washington sought to build pressure on Tehran to accede to its demands ahead of new nuclear talks amid a massive American military buildup.
Iranian state news agencies reported student demonstrations at five universities in the capital and one in the city of Mashhad over the weekend, with fresh protests also reported Monday. Large crowds rallied outside the Amir Kabir University of Technology in Tehran, according to video geolocated by NBC News that circulated on social media Sunday.
The video does not appear to have circulated before Sunday but NBC News has not been able to pinpoint when exactly it was taken.
They are the first known protests to have erupted since the anti-government unrest that swept the country last month and saw thousands of people killed in a brutal crackdown, according to rights groups.
The United States has held the threat of military action over the regime in the wake of those demonstrations, which marked the biggest flare-up of domestic dissent since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. But President Donald Trump has also pursued negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, entertaining diplomacy even as he masses a daunting military force in the Middle East.
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said Saturday that the president was “curious” as to why Iran had not changed course in the face of this buildup.
“He’s curious as to why they haven’t — I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated’ — but why they haven’t capitulated,” Witkoff said in an interview with Fox News’ “My View with Lara Trump.”
“Why under this sort of pressure, with the amount of sea power, naval power that we have over there, why they haven’t come to us and said, ‘We profess that we don’t want a weapon’?” he said.
The USS Gerald R. Ford is en route to become the second American aircraft carrier in the region, where the U.S. has been gathering air defenses, warships and submarines.
Officials signaled in a meeting last week that all U.S. military forces required for possible action would be in place by mid-March, a senior administration official told NBC News, though Trump has threatened possible action sooner than that.
