Vice-President Es’haq Jahangiri has acknowledged that the November 2019 protests in Iran’s southern city of Mahshahr, where scores of protesters were killed by security forces, were the outcome of widespread poverty and discrimination. Jahangiri was visiting the city on Saturday [January 30], possibly in a show of solidarity ahead of the 2021 presidential election due in June.

The protests in Mahshahr, in the oil-rich Khuzestan province and a center of the petrochemical industry, were part of a nationwide protest that raged across Iran in November 2019 following an increase in gasoline prices.

Jahangiri said during his visit to the city that “the protesters had no problem with the Islamic Republic political regime and that their only problems were poverty and discrimination.”

The 2019 protests started with grievances over rising prices, but soon turned into major political demonstrations during which the people chanted slogans against President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. At the time, Iranian officials and state-controlled media accused protesters, particularly those in Mahshahr, of armed rebellion and violent attacks on police.

A local police chief, Heydar Abbaszadeh, told reporters on April 17, 2020 that the police had confiscated 6,000 illegal weapons and arrested scores in Khuzestan during the preceding year. During and after the 2019 protests, officials also blamed foreign plots and what Khamenei called “hooligans.”

The New York Times in December 2019 characterized the November protests as the worst in Iran for 40 years and alleged security forces had killed up to 100 protesters in Mahshahr. Other sources estimated the death toll in Mahshahr as three times higher.

The Times wrote: “Security forces responded by opening fire on unarmed protesters, largely unemployed or low-income young men between the ages of 19 and 26, according to witness accounts and videos. In the southwest city of Mahshahr alone, witnesses and medical personnel said, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps members surrounded, shot and killed 40 to 100 demonstrators — mostly unarmed young men — in a marsh where they had sought refuge."

In June 2020, Gholamreza Shariati, the governor of Khuzestan province, denied that security forces had killed dozens of demonstrators in Mahshahr. He contradicted investigations by international human rights watchdogs that said security forces had used tanks, armored vehicles and machine guns, killing scores of demonstrators in the marshlands near the city. The governor dismissed reports of a massacre and denied there was a marshland in Mahshahr. The governor’s comments enraged the city’s representative to the Iranian parliament.

An Iran International video widely shared on social media in 2019 indicated that heavy machine guns were used by security forces against the protesters. Eyewitnesses told the international media that one of the worst massacres took place near Chamran township where this video was shot.

Reuters put the number of those killed across the country by security forces during the November 2019 unrest at 1,500. A member of parliament in Iran told the press that up to 8,000 protesters had been arrested and jailed.

Mahshahr and the Khuzestan province have a substantial ethnic Arab population, and although it is a hub for the Iranian petrochemical industry, the city has one of the lowest employment rates in Iran.

Jahangiri said on Saturday that while Mahshahr is located next to Imam Khomeini Port, the country's biggest import hub, and is a major route for the export for gas and refinery products, the people of this city lack even the bare minimums of decent living standards.