Paris (AFP) - Activists on Sunday expressed alarm that Iran was implementing a major crackdown in a Kurdish-populated town that has seen intense anti-regime protests in the last few days.
Reinforcements of security forces were sent to the city of Mahabad in western Iran, rights groups said, while images and audio of heavy gunfire and screams were posted overnight.
Iran's clerical leadership has been shaken by more than two months of protests sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman of Kurdish origin who had been arrested by Tehran's morality police.
The very first protests took place in Kurdish-populated areas of Iran including at Amini's funeral in her home town of Saqez, before spreading nationwide.
Rights groups had earlier posted footage of defiant protests in Mahabad, including after the funerals of victims of the state's crackdown on the protests, with people staging sit-ins in the streets and setting up barricades.
The Norway-based Hengaw rights group said "armed troops" had been despatched to Mahabad from Urmia, the main city of West Azerbaijan province.
"In Mahabad's residential areas, there is a lot of gunfire," it wrote on Twitter.
The group posted footage of helicopters flying over Mahabad that it said carried members of the Revolutionary Guards sent to quell the protests.
Business owners throughout the area were to observe a strike on Sunday to protest against the violence by security forces, it said.
'Critical situation'
The Iran Human Rights (IHR) group, also Norway-based, posted footage overnight Saturday-Sunday that it said showed gunfire echoing around the city.
Its director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam wrote that authorities "cut electricity and machine gun shooting is heard...Unconfirmed reports of protesters being killed or wounded".
He posted an audio file in which screams are clearly heard amid continuous gunfire.
Kurds make up one of Iran's most important non-Persian ethnic minority groups and generally adhere to Sunni Islam rather than the Shiism dominant in the country.
Iran's Tasnim news agency accused "rioters" of "spreading terror" in the town by setting fire to houses belonging to security and military personnel and blocking streets.
It claimed most of the perpetrators had been arrested, with nobody killed, saying security had returned and denying the reports of a general strike.
Mahabad has particular resonance for Kurds as the main town of the short-lived Republic of Mahabad, an unrecognised Kurdish statelet which sprung up with Soviet support in 1946 in the aftermath of World War II. It existed for less than a year before Iran reasserted control.
Hengaw had on Saturday warned the situation was "critical" in the town of Divandarreh in the western province of Kurdistan, where government forces had shot dead at least three civilians.
It also expressed concern Sunday about the situation in other Kurdish-populated towns, with explosions heard in Bukan and Saqez.
'Not happy'
Hengaw also posted footage it said was from the town of Sanandaj, also in Kurdistan, which it said showed security forces firing at a woman in a riverbed as she tried to escape.
With the protests cutting across social classes and ethnicities, the movement represents the biggest challenge to Iran's clerical leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
IHR says the state crackdown has left at least 378 people dead, among them 47 children.
Protesters have been killed in 25 of Iran's 31 provinces, including 123 in Sistan-Baluchistan, where protests had a distinct origin but have fed into the nationwide anger, it said.
Authorities have also issued death sentences to six people over the demonstrations, while Amnesty International says at least 21 people have been charged with crimes that could result in the death penalty.
A campaign of mass arrests has snared sportspeople, celebrities and journalists.
Prominent actors Hengameh Ghaziani and Katayoun Riahi were arrested after appearing in public without their headscarves, the state-run IRNA news agency said Sunday.
The coach of one of Iran's best-known football teams -- Yahya Golmohammadi, from Persepolis FC -- was among eight celebrities and politicians questioned over comments about the protests, Iranian media reported.
Meanwhile, the head of Iran's boxing federation, Hossein Soori, said he would not return home from a tournament in Spain.
"I could no longer serve my dear country, in a system that so easily sheds the blood of human beings," he said in a video Saturday.
At the football World Cup in Qatar, defender Ehsan Hajsafi said Sunday that Iran's players want to be the "voice" of the people back home.
"The situation in the country is not good and our people are not happy," he said.
