Anti-regime protesters gathered throughout parts of Iran on Sunday, most concentrated in the capital Tehran, the New York Times reported.The paper said the regime “mounted a stultifying security presence in the capital, with the police making arrests and using tear gas to try to prevent the unrest from escalating.”

Iran Focusof thousands of anti-government protestors rallied on Sunday in various parts of Tehran and other major Iranian cities, despite the deployment of thousands of security forces, plainclothes officers and members of the paramilitary Bassij militia throughout the country.

 Amidst widening rifts within the Iranian regime, the ruling faction has refrained from inviting a leader of rival factions, former mullahs’ President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, to attend the Islamic Unity Conference.The move comes as the ruling faction prepares to pave the way for the removal of Rafsanjani as the head of the regime’s Assembly of Experts.

 For a second time in a week, tens of thousands of Iranian people took to the streets across the nation on Sunday calling for the end of the regime, the Wall Street Journal reported.