Tehran said on Monday it was communicating with the United States, which President Donald Trump said was considering a “strong response” to the deadly crackdown on protests in Iran, which poses one of the most dangerous threats to religious leaders since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Trump said on Sunday that the United States could arrange a meeting with Iranian officials and was in contact with the Iranian opposition while increasing pressure on Iran’s leaders, including threats of possible military action over the deadly crackdown.
While airstrikes are one option, “diplomacy is always the president’s first choice,” White House spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt told reporters on Monday.
“What you’re hearing publicly from the Iranian regime is quite different from the messages that the administration is receiving privately, and I think the president is interested in considering those messages,” she said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Tehran was studying ideas proposed by Washington, even though they were “incompatible” with US threats.
“Communications between Witkoff and me continued before and after the protests and are still ongoing,” he told Al Jazeera television.
The US-based human rights network said it had confirmed the deaths of 572 people, 503 protesters and 69 members of the security forces. Since the protests broke out on December 28 and spread across the country, 10,694 people have been arrested, the group said.
The amount of information coming out of the Islamic Republic has been severely limited by an internet shutdown that began on Thursday.
Despite the mass protests, there has been no sign of a split in the Shiite clerical establishment, the army or the security forces. The protesters lack a clear leadership, and the opposition is fragmented.
Iran has not published official data on the number of dead, but it blames the bloodshed on American interference and, as it says, on terrorists supported by Israel and the USA.
In its reporting, the state media focused on the deaths of members of the security forces.
Speaking to a large group gathered in the square in the center of Tehran, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohamad Bager Kalibaf, said that the Iranians are waging a war on four fronts: “economic war, psychological warfare, war against the US and Israel, and today the war against terrorism.”
