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Rabat – Thousands of Iranians gathered outside the old American embassy in Tehran on Monday, November 4, to mark 40 years since Iranian students fought their way into the building and took diplomats hostage.
Protestors expressed anti-American sentiments and carried effigies of President Donald Trump.
Some protesters raised banners with phrases like “Death to America,” according to AFP journalists at the scene. Other demonstrators burned American flags, Euronews reported.
Iranian state media claimed the Tehran demonstration was only one of a thousand rallies across the country on Monday. The Mehr News Agency said “millions of people” came to the protests.
Outside the old embassy, General Abdolrahim Mousavi called the US a “lethal scorpion” as he addressed the rally. “We are ready to crush this scorpion and [it] will also pay the price.”
Mousavi encouraged the protestors that their only option is “to maintain the revolutionary spirit through prudence and obeying the leader.”
The former embassy is now a museum. On Saturday, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard revealed new murals dishonoring the US on the compound’s walls.
The murals included a depiction of the Statue of Liberty falling apart. In one mural, the bald eagle in a reimagined Great Seal of the United States clutched needles and bullets instead of an olive branch and arrows, and a star of David replaces the traditional ring of stars.
One image depicted an emblem of the US sinking into a pool of blood, while an American drone being shot down appears on another wall.
Iran brought down an American drone on June 20 in the latest spike in tension between the two countries.
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The Iranian siege of the embassy came after the US allowed the Iranian shah, in self-imposed exile, to receive medical treatment in New York. For years, the US had supported Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled with an iron fist.
The countries broke diplomatic ties in 1980 during the hostage crisis. Iran released the last of the 62 American hostages in early 1981 after 444 days of captivity. However, the episode remains a tense issue.
In 2018, President Trump pulled the US out of the Iran Nuclear Deal and reimposed heavy economic sanctions on Iran.
Morocco also broke diplomatic ties with Iran in May 2018, saying the Iranian-backed Hezbollah network was supplying Polisario with weapons.
