TEHRAN – A member of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) was killed on Saturday night in the city of Semirom, Isfahan, Iranian media reported.

The deputy commander of the Isfahan provincial branch of the IRGC, General Morteza Amu Mehdi, announced Saturday that the member of the IRGC, named Mohsen Rezaei, was shot dead by gunmen amid unrest in the city, which is located 160 km south of Isfahan.

According to the local general, a number of people illegally gathered in front of the office of the governor-general of Semirom County on Saturday and security forces were deployed in the city. In some cases, they clashed with rioters, General Amu Mehdi said. 

Over the last three months, Iran has been dealing with a wave of unrest that broke out in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini. Iranian officials have said that the unrest was stage managed by the enemies. General Ramezan Sharif, the spokesman for the Islamic Revolution of Guards Corps (IRGC), said last week that the Mahsa Amini unrest was the work of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and European countries.

The recent developments, he said, indicated that the enemies devised a “strange” plot with high costs. “They thought the game was over but the Leader of the Revolution told General Salami several times that ‘no one should be harmed and crackdown should be at its lowest. Anyone killed or martyred in the streets of Tehran and the country during the riots would bring a smile of satisfaction from the enemy. It takes a lot of patience for you to identify and separate thugs affiliated with foreign spy agencies [from others].’ Thank God, today we are close to this stage or at times past it,” General Sharif said.

Western countries bet on a losing horse when they put all their weight behind the recent riots in Iran, but now they have acknowledged their miscalculation about the unrest, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

“The governments that bet on Iran’s internal developments bet on a losing horse. We had warned them not to sacrifice their interests to no avail,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani told a regular news briefing. 

Even though Western governments claim that they were not pursuing regime change in Iran, Tehran will never forget their roles in the protests, Kanaani added.

Amini, from the Kurdish city of Saqez, died on September 16 in the hospital three days after she fainted at a police station. A medical examination revealed that she had died because of a chronic illness, dismissing rumors that she had suffered a blow to her head or other vital bodily organs.