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Iranian crowds gathered in Tehran to demonstrate anti-Western attitudes by burning American flags on Thursday for the anniversary of the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover, the Associated Press reported.
Thousands of protesters chanted "death to America'' and took to the streets setting American and Israeli flags on fire.
Demonstrators raised a President Joe Biden effigy in the air, featuring Biden wearing a T-shirt with the Star of David on it, and red paint dripping from its mouth. Biden's effigy was similar to Donald Trump's used at the last rally.
Every year on the day that the U.S. Embassy takeover triggered a 444-day hostage crisis, Iranians rally to express their disapproval of relations with the U.S. However, last year the government canceled commemoration activities during the height of the pandemic, but state TV said that 800 cities still staged demonstrations.
General Hossein Salami, chief of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, spoke to aggravated crowds last Thursday, proclaiming "that children of this nation will stand bravely against any power that wants to damage their interests."
Salami highlighted what he had called American aggression in the region, underscoring longtime tensions between the U.S. and Iran.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
Long-simmering tensions between the U.S. and Iran have flared again in recent months after Iran's election of ultraconservative President Ebrahim Raisi, which brought hard-liners to power across every branch of government and stalled Tehran's negotiations with world powers to revive its now-tattered 2015 nuclear deal.
Iran has ramped up nuclear escalations at the same time, enriching small quantities of uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels and interfering with international inspections of its nuclear sites.
After months of delays, the European Union, Iran and the U.S. announced Wednesday that indirect talks to resuscitate the deal would resume on November 29 in Vienna. In comments broadcast Thursday on state TV, Raisi reiterated that Iran wants "result-oriented" nuclear talks and would "stand against excessive demands which could damage our nation's interests."
In 2018, then-President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the landmark accord and imposed crushing sanctions, an escalation that set off a shadow war between Iran and the West that has targeted commercial shipping and roiled crucial Mideast waterways. The seas have witnessed a series of hijackings and explosions, including a fatal drone attack earlier this year that the U.S. blamed on Iran.
On Wednesday, the eve of the 42nd anniversary of the embassy seizure, American officials revealed that Iran had seized a Vietnamese-flagged oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman last month and still holds the vessel in its port.
Iran, meanwhile, offered conflicting accounts of what happened, claiming that Guard commandos had thwarted a U.S. seizure of a tanker carrying Iranian oil in the Gulf of Oman and freed the vessel. It aired dramatic footage on state television but did not further explain the incident.
Gathered Iranians waved flags and raised portraits of General Qassem Soleimani, the powerful commander killed in early January of 2020 in an American drone strike in Baghdad ordered by Trump.
The commemoration marks the dramatic day when hard-line Iranian student demonstrators overran guards and pushed into the embassy compound on November 4, 1979, enraged that President Jimmy Carter had allowed Iran's exiled and fatally ill Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to receive cancer treatment in the United States.
A few embassy staffers fled and hid in the home of the Canadian ambassador to Iran before escaping the country with the help of the CIA, a story recounted in the 2012 film Argo.
The fall of the U.S.-allied shah transfixed America, as nightly images of blindfolded hostages played on television sets across the nation. Ultimately, as Carter left office, all 52 captive American diplomats were freed.
