As anti-government unrest entered a seventh week in Iran, the commander of the country’s hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned protesters to go home. 

“Today is the last day of the riots, stop taking to streets,” Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami declared at a funeral ceremony for victims of a terror attack in the city of Shiraz earlier this week.  The shooting claimed by the Islamic State killed 15 people in the midst of the protests that were triggered by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in custody of religious police in mid-September.  

“These plots are old, the IRGC is the same as Daesh,” protesters shouted from multiple locations on Saturday, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, and to dismiss the government’s narrative about the Shiraz attack. The Iranian authorities have been linking the violence to security lapses caused by the protests, while opponents allege that the state intentionally allowed lax security into the site of the attack to exploit it as “propaganda” against the protesters.  

The IRGC commander had already announced an end to the ongoing protests in an Oct. 20 speech, describing them as “a stillborn baby.” Similarly, the chief of the Iranian riot police unit declared last month that the unrest had completely fizzled out, “because our forces do have the expertise to wrap up such issues in a matter of few days.”