Iran says police officer killed in unrest amid water protest

 

An Iranian police officer was killed during unrest in the country’s restive southwest amid ongoing demonstrations over water shortages, state media reported Wednesday, raising the death toll in the unrest to at least two people.

Gunfire killed the officer in the city of Mahshar and another suffered a gunshot wound to his leg, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.

The report blamed “rioters” for the killing, without elaborating. The protests already saw another man killed, according to Iranian media reports. Iran in the past has blamed demonstrators for deaths occurring amid heavy-handed crackdowns by security forces.

There have been six days of continuous protests in Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province, home to ethnic Arabs who complain of discrimination by Iran’s Shiite theocracy.

Water worries in the past have sent angry demonstrators into the streets in Iran. The country has faced rolling blackouts for weeks now, in part over what authorities describe as a severe drought. Precipitation had decreased by almost 50 percent in the last year, leaving dams with dwindling water supplies.

“As nearly five million Iranians in Khuzestan are lacking access to clean drinking water, Iran is failing to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to water, which is inextricably linked to the right to the highest attainable standard of health,” the group Human Rights Activists in Iran said.

The protests in Khuzestan come as Iran struggles through repeated waves of infections in the CoronaVirus pandemic and as thousands of workers in its oil industry have launched strikes for better wages and conditions.

Iran's economy also has struggled under US sanctions since then-President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to unilaterally withdraw America from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers, crashing the value of the Islamic Republic’s currency, the rial.