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.

The violence bagan Saturday afternoon, as the first protestors trickled into central Tehran, gathering around the Interior Ministry, where votes were being counted. They soon clashed with riot police, and spread out into Vali Asr, a broad, leafy street where many Mousavi supporters had been dancing and chanting slogans just days before. As the riot police and plainclothesmen chased protestors down the street, shop owners opened up their doors to give the fleeing Mousavi supporters refuge. It was a strange sight: people were seemingly going about their business on the busy street as riot police beat protestors.

At the same time, one of Mousavi's campaign headquarters, only a couple of blocks away from the Interior Ministry, was under siege. Basijis on motorcycles drove by every half an hour or so swinging batons at people standing in front of the building. Occasionally, a handful of Basijis would force their way into the lobby and pepper-spray anyone within reach. Many campaign workers fled to the fourth floor of the building; in one room, a handful of injured Mousavi supporters huddled, lighting cigarettes to dissipate the burning fumes. There was a TV cameraman with red, watering eyes, a bewildered actress who had come to show her solidarity and Ali Reza, a 32-year-old campaign worker with a torn-up knee, who had been kicked down by a Basiji on a motorcycle. Two medics were in the room patching up Ali Reza's knee. When they finished, they offered to sneak anyone out of the melee in their ambulance. "Is this democracy?" one of the campaign workers asked snidely.

The situation became even more chaotic later in the afternoon: dozens of protestors stopped three buses on Motahari Avenue, asked the passengers and driver to get out, and then torched the vehicles. The smoke could be seen for miles. Further north, near Mohseni Square, two buildings were burned. Bank windows were broken around the city as the protests continued late into the night. Around 2 in the morning, dozens of families and young men and women were still clustered around a handful of intersections in the middle-class neighborhood of Saadatabad. They held up Mousavi posters and chanted "Death to dictator" in the light of burning trash bins. Many had their cameras or cameraphones out, recording the scene. "Every Iranian has become a photographer or a cameraman," says Issa Saharkhiz, a political analyst.

Although Mousavi hasn't been seen in public, he issued a statement Sunday asking for a peaceful rally to challenge the election results tomorrow. Ahmadinejad, for his part, has moved on. At Sunday's press conference, he emphasized that he had left the path open for anyone who was ready to build the country to join him. And anyone who wanted to break the law to get their point across would be dealt with. "Everyone is equal in the eyes of the law," he said. Switching to a familiar mode, he challenged President Obama to a debate at the U.N. but said Iran's nuclear program was not up for discussion. "The nuclear issue belongs to the past," he said. "We call for a global consensus on nuclear disarmament."

Later Sunday afternoon, Ahmadinejad appeared in central Tehran's Vali Asr Square, where thousands of his supporters had gathered for an official celebration. Some of those in the crowd had been bused in, and were given snacks of juice and cupcakes in plastic containers on the periphery of the rally. Shortly after the celebration ended, Zahra, a 22-year-old from south Tehran, zipped away on the back of a motorcycle with her husband. "Ahmadinejad defends justice," she said, as the wind whipped her black chador. "There was a clean election and the others have to accept it."