[indistinct shouting]
-Protests in Iran broke out
after the country's military admitted
it mistakenly shot down a civilian passenger jet.
Social-media videos showed protesters fleeing tear gas.
The sound of gunfire could also be heard in the background.
[indistinct shouting]
[gunfire]
[indistinct shouting]
While Tehran's police denied using live ammunition,
the news showed pools of blood on the ground.
-We've seen seven people shot so far.
It's all blood.
-The demonstrators were calling for accountability
in the downing of the plane.
-They fired tear gas at people. Azadi Square.
Death to the dictator.
-The demonstrations were a contrast
to the public displays of mourning for Qasem Soleimani,
the slain Iranian military commander.
The US drone strike that killed Soleimani
in Baghdad on January 3rd
led to nearly two weeks of heightened tensions
between the United States and Iran.
[conversations in native language]
Iran retaliated by firing
more than a dozen ballistic missiles
against two Iraqi military bases housing US troops
on January 8th.
Around four hours later,
a Ukrainian passenger jet crashed near Tehran,
killing 176 people, including 82 Iranians,
57 Canadians, and 11 Ukrainians.
-The evidence indicates that the plane
was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile.
This may well have been unintentional.
-Iran dismissed claims that a surface-to-air missile
had mistakenly shot down the plane at first.
The state-run news agency accused the United States
of waging a "psychological operation."
But Iranian officials admitted on January 11th
that the military had mistook the Ukrainian airliner
for a hostile aircraft.
-The plane was hit in a low altitude
by a short-range proximity missile.
Since the missile had a small warhead
and was a proximity missile,
the plane had the chance to continue flying for a while,
was not fragmented in the air,
and broke into pieces after hitting the ground.
-So, you know, this is all civilian set.
Have just ended up at the wrong --
the wrong place at the wrong time
and were really, unfortunately, part of this whole cycle.
-The Iranian strikes on Iraqi bases
resulted in no casualties,
and appeared to de-escalate tension
between the United States and Iran.
-Iran appears to be standing down,
which is a good thing for all parties concerned
and a very good thing for the world.
No American or Iraqi lives were lost,
because of the precautions taken,
the dispersal of forces,
and an early-warning system that worked very well.
-US officials said they knew hours ahead of time
that Iran intended to strike at American targets in Iraq.
But military personnel on one of the bases that night
told The Post they only had minutes' notice
before the blasts began.
-So, what we're seeing in the satellite images
are incredibly precise hits
against certain parts of the facility --
buildings that seem to be used for storage,
hangars that might be used to grow something.
We're still checking.
And what's really remarkable about the pictures
is the accuracy of impact.
So it looks a lot like the Iranians
were exactly knowing what to hit,
and they hit it very precisely.
I guess we would be coming in view right now,
because I would argue
that these missiles are so powerful
and their effect is so difficult to control,
that Iran took quite a risk
and they actually accepted the risk of casualty.
-An Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander later said
Iran did not intend to kill anyone,
but, rather, target the American "military machine."
-As previously announced by the president,
we are announcing... -On January 10th,
the Trump administration placed more sanctions on Iran
in the first concrete response
to the attacks on US forces in Iraq.
[imam chants]
-In the aftermath of Soleimani's death,
Iran state television broadcast video
showing hundreds of thousands of Iranians
taking to the streets for his funeral procession.
-Over the past few weeks,
it had been quite effective in changing the conversation
from what was going on in November and December in Iran --
the protests, which were in response
to corruption, mismanagement, the state of the economy --
all of those things -- to now just kind of
foreign adversary -- i.e., the United States.
So you had this moment of unity
that allowed the regime to kind of present a united front
to the international community, to the United States,
and really domestically shift the conversation
from what was not a very good place for the regime
to a much better place
in the aftermath of Soleimani's death.
-But the downing of the plane
saw the return of anti-government protests.
The Washington Post obtained a video
that allegedly shows
the moment the airliner is struck in midair.
The video was first published by The New York Times.
-I think this is a tragedy
that probably had several components.
The heightened alert
on the part of the Iranian air defenders
and the Iranian military, broadly,
that's probably what made them
a little trigger-happy and twitchy, frankly.
And it could also be a combination
of bad training and limitations of their hardware.
It's hard to kind of prevent this kind of a tragedy,
but it's understandable at the same time.
[crowd chanting]
-I think it throws a bit of a wrench
in this whole situation, where Iran has been
very calculated, very deliberate, very careful
in all of the actions it's taken,
not just since Soleimani's death but since the beginning
of President Trump's maximum-pressure campaign.
And this, obviously, betrays a lot of incompetence.
[crowd chanting]