No Questions

Decked out in his signature blue-collar jacket, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, looked completely at ease as the camera bulbs flashed. "I am the president of all Iranians," he told the gathered reporters Sunday. Dismissing fraud allegations as not important and claiming the elections were free and real, Ahmadinejad likened the ongoing street protests in the Iranian capital to the unrest after a soccer match. "Some people are emotional and get upset if their team didn't win," he said with a quick smile. "Well, your team didn't win."

Half a mile away, at Tehran University, the losing team was having their say. Hundreds of young men and women burned piles of trash and threw rocks at riot police in full gear who had lined up in front of the gates at Tehran University. Plainclothes security forces, some armed, blazed around the campus on motorcycles amidst clouds of tear gas.

"I saw them hit a woman directly in the face with tear gas," shouted Mehdi, 32, shaking an empty tear-gas canister near one of the university's side gates. "They're ruthless!" Moments later, a group of police with helmets drove up on motorcycles and began clubbing pedestrians with batons.

Protesters have been on the streets of Tehran almost around the clock since the first election results were announced early Saturday, burning trash bins and fighting running battles with security forces. The protests are the most widespread unrest in Iran in a decade. They have flared up in the working-class areas south of Tehran, the middle-class neighborhoods in the west and the affluent northern parts of the city. There are also reports of protests in smaller cities like Tabriz and Shiraz. Text-messaging has been cut off for a couple of days and the Web sites for Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have been blocked.

It was clear that there could be trouble ahead on Friday night, shortly after the polls closed. Both Ahmadinejad and his main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, declared themselves winners, and Mousavi was quick to allege fraud when official results showed he had received 33.75 percent of the vote while Ahmadinejad took a whopping 62.63 percent. But any official challenge of the results was quickly squashed when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei weighed in, calling the election a "divine assessment."

In Tehran, the Ahmadinejad government has unleashed an array of security forces to deal with the protestors: there are regular police, intelligence agents, riot police, the paramilitary Basij and, the most feared of all, the black-clad special guard, who wear full armor and blaze down streets on motorcycles with batons in groups of 10 or more. The government has also cracked down in other ways: Mousavi is reportedly under house arrest, though the government has issued a denial, and dozens of prominent reformists were rounded up, including Mohammad Reza Khatami, the brother of the former president. Khatami was released hours later but several others are still in custody.