Tehran Hearing a New Chant From the Rooftops

Five times a day it's normal to hear the Muslim call to prayer echoing from the rooftops in Tehran. Today there's something new:

TEHRAN, Iran -- Protesters battled police and shouted their opposition from the rooftops Sunday, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed the unrest as little more than "passions after a soccer match" and brought huge crowds to a rally to defend his landslide re-election.

Just after sundown, cries of "death to the dictator" echoed through Tehran as thousands of backers for Ahmadinejad's rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, heeded a call to bellow from the roofs and balconies. The deeply symbolic act recalled the shouts of "Allahu Akbar," or God is Great, to show opposition to the Western-backed monarchy before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The scenes summed up the showdown over the disputed elections: an outwardly confident Ahmadinejad exerted control, while Mousavi showed no sign of backing down and could be staking out a new role as powerful opposition voice.

His charges that Friday's vote was riddled by fraud brought sympathetic statements from Vice President Joe Biden and other leaders. Mousavi made a direct appeal with Iran's ruling clerics to annul the result, but the chances were considered remote.

With his wide network of young and middle-class backers, Mousavi could emerge as a leader for Iran's liberal ranks and bring internal pressure on Ahmadinejad and Iran's theocracy to take less confrontational policies toward the West.

But the struggle Sunday was on the streets in the worst unrest in Tehran since student-led protests 10 years ago.

Demonstrators were back on the streets with the same tactics: torching bank facades and trash bins, smashing store windows and hurling rocks at anti-riots squads in Tehran. Police responded with baton-wielding sweeps _ sometimes targeting bystanders _ and the regime shut down text messaging systems and pro-reform Internet sites.

There was no official word on casualties.

I've seen various reports suggesting more than 100 deaths in the rioting and unrest that has followed the election. Major social networking sites, like Facebook, have been disabled, along with cell phones and some web services. One news bureau is getting a "denial of service" attack generated by the government. The technologies used most by the government's opposition are being attacked and shut down to try and stop the spread of the protests.

I don't think it's gonna work.

CNN, which largely ignored the protests until their failure to do their job became so obvious that #CNNFail hashtags were creating conversation on Twitter, has some correspondents in the field. Many protesters had come up to one reporter and told him "if Obama accepts the election results, we're finished". Probably true.

Joe Biden has indicated that he has "questions" about the results, but so far nobody in the adminstration has come out and called it fraud. We'll see what they do.