US Considers Sending Thousands More Troops to Mideast

Speaking at the State Department, Hook said the United States had received and reviewed video of one incident of repression in the city of Mahshahr, in which the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps mowed down at least 100 protesters with machine-gun fire.

He said the video was one of tens of thousands of submissions the United States has received since Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appealed in November for Iranians to submit evidence of atrocities by the authorities in putting down the protests. He said Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces can be seen opening fire on protesters blocking a road and then surrounding those who fled to nearby marshlands, where they were sprayed with bullets.

"In this one incident alone the regime murdered as many as 100 Iranians and possibly more," Hook told reporters at the State Department. He did not display the video but said the actions it depicted corresponded to accounts of a brutal nationwide crackdown on the demonstrations, which started in response to gasoline price increases and rationing.

"We have seen reports of many hundreds more killed in and around Tehran," he said. "And as the truth is trickling out of Iran, it appears the regime could have murdered over 1,000 Iranian citizens since the protests began." The dead include 13- and 14-year-old children, he said.

Speaking at the White House, Trump said Iran had "killed hundreds and hundreds of people in a very short period of time" and called for international pressure to be applied. "They are killing protesters. They turned off their internet system. People aren't hearing what's going on," he told reporters while hosting a lunch for the ambassadors of U.N. Security Council members.

Alireza Miryousefi, a spokesman for Iran's mission at the United Nations, disputed any casualty figures from abroad as "purely speculative and highly inaccurate." However, Iran's government has so far refused to release any of its own.

"Mr. Hook has already said in public that he is very pleased with the suffering of ordinary Iranians, and that the U.S. has had arrangements in the past two years to maximize what occurred with the recent violence and damages in Iran," Miryousefi told The Associated Press.

There was no known public video that supported Hooks’ allegation of a massacre in Mahshahr, although he said the State Department had received more than 32,000 responses to Pompeo’s appeal for videos and other evidence using the encrypted messaging app Telegram, which is popular in Iran.

Nor has there been any widely accepted claim matching Hook's death toll of more than 1,000. Amnesty International believes at least 208 people have been killed and that the number could be much higher. Iran has disputed that figure, but has refused to offer any nationwide statistics of the number of injuries, arrests or deaths from the unrest.

However, Hook's numbers appear to match a figure put out late Wednesday by the Iranian exile group called the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, which has paid Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani for speeches at its events.

The MeK said late Wednesday that more than 1,000 people had been killed. It published a list of 320 people it had identified so far as having been killed, but did not provide proof.

Iran accused MeK supporters and those backing exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the country's late shah, of being behind the unrest, alongside foreign powers. It has not offered evidence to support those allegations.

In addition to the deaths, Hook said more than 7,000 protesters had been detained, with many sent to two prisons. Hook said that Pompeo notified Congress on Thursday that both prisons would be hit with U.S. sanctions for gross human rights abuses. It was not immediately clear when those designations would occur.

Hook's comments come as the United States steps up its "maximum pressure campaign" on Iran that it began after the U.S. withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal last year. That campaign has been highlighted by the imposition of increasingly tough sanctions and an increase in rhetoric critical of Tehran and its leadership.

As part of the pressure campaign, Hook announced that the United States offering a reward of up to $15 million for information leading to the whereabouts of a top Revolutionary Guard commander believed to be supporting rebels in Yemen. He said Abdul Reza Shahalai was responsible for numerous attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and was behind a foiled plot to murder the Saudi ambassador to the United States in a Washington restaurant.

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